Words about sex and gender, part 10: Eng. genus and Eng. genre

[This entry is taken from a chapter of Part II of the open-source textbook Spanish-English Cognates: An Unconventional Introduction to Spanish Linguistics.]

[Go to Part 1 of Words about sex and gender]

Eng. genus and Eng. genre

English has borrowed the Latin word gĕnus two more times since it borrowed it in through French in the form of gender. This happened at different times and from different sources. Once the source was written Latin, from which we get the English word genus, and the other is from Modern French, from which we get the English word genre.

The English word genus, pronounced [ˈʤinəs] or [ˈʤɛnəs], refers first of all to ‘a principal taxonomic category [in biology] that ranks above species and below family, denoted by a capitalized Latin name, e.g., Leo’ (COED). This biological sense dates from around the year 1600. Actually, the word genus was borrowed into English from Latin a few decades earlier with a more general sense, one which the English word still has, namely ‘a class of things which have common characteristics and which can be divided into subordinate kinds’ (COED). This sense was at first used in logic. Though that early sense is not obsolete, it remains a technical term not familiar to most speakers of English, whereas the biological sense is much more widely known, although it is also rather technical. Eng. genus translates into Spanish as género, just like Eng. gender and all descendants of Lat. genus do.

English	Spanish
gender	género
genus
genre

As we saw, in French, the Latin word gĕnus, whose regular stem was gener‑, evolved into the Old French word spelled either genre or gendre, the source of Eng. gender, which in Modern French is spelled just genre, without the d, and is pronounced [ˈʒɑ̃ʀ]. In the mid-17th century, Fr. genre acquired a new sense in the context of literature and literary styles, namely ‘category of works defined by tradition (according to subject, tone, style) - The genre of prose, poetry,…’ (Le Grand Robert).[1] English borrowed this word genre from French in the second half of the 18th century with just this meaning, which it still has. (See more on the word’s meaning below.)

Originally, Eng. genre was pronounced with the initial French sound [ʒ], a voiced palatal fricative sound, which is not found in native English words in word-initial position. It is the sound of the letter j in French and it is found in word-medial position in English words such as measure [ˈmɛʒəɹ] and leisure [ˈliʒəɹ] (Part I, Chapter 7, §7.3.8.4). By the middle of the 19th century, however many speakers had ‘nativized’ this word’s initial sound to the more common sound [ʤ], the affricate version of this a voiced palatal sound, a mixture of stop and fricative, which is found word-initially in English if words like juice [ˈʤus] or gene [ˈʤin]. The word can still be pronounced either way in English, i.e., either [ˈʒɒn.ɹə] or [ˈʤɒn.ɹə]. Note that the word has two syllables in English, since in this language, a word, or syllable, cannot end in the consonants [nɹ], the way it can in French. The OED defines this sense as ‘a particular style or category of works of art; esp. a type of literary work characterized by a particular form, style, or purpose’ (OED).

Spanish borrowed the meaning from French genre too, but it just added it to the meanings of the word género it already had, for the learned people who borrowed it recognized that the two words shared the same origin. That is why Eng. genre translates into Spanish as género.

Since Sp. género is polysemous (has many meanings), in order to express the ‘(literary) genre’ sense, sometimes speakers specify what kind of género they refers to, so one may speak of género literario ‘literary genre’, for example, instead of just género, but in context that is hardly necessary.

Eng. genre is sometimes used for art forms, rather than literary styles, such as in music, and then, English typically specifies the artform too, as in music genre, which would translate into Spanish as género musical. English derived the word subgenre from genre in the early 20th century, which Spanish has calqued as subgénero (literario).

There is yet another sense for Eng. genre that arose in the second half of the 19th century, namely ‘a style of painting in which scenes and subjects of ordinary life are depicted’ (OED). COED gives this as a second sense of the word genre, which is only found when this noun is used as a modifier: ‘[used as modifier] denoting a style of painting depicting scenes from ordinary life’ (COED). Thus, we get expressions such as genre cinema or genre painting, which translate into Spanish as cine de género and pintura de género, which are obvious calques.

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[1] The original says: ‘(1654). Littér. Catégorie d’œuvres définie par la tradition (d’après le sujet, le ton, le style). | Le genre de la prose, de la poésie. | Genres en vers, dans la littérature classique : lyrisme, épopée (cit. 1), drame, poésie didactique, bucolique…’ (Le Grand Robert).