[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. gender
English borrowed the word gender from French, in the
early 14th century. One of the early uses of this word was for the sense
‘grammatical gender’, even though by that time, English words did not have
grammatical gender anymore, but other languages that were present in the
English lands did, such as Latin and French. In contrast to languages such as
French, German or Spanish which have grammatical gender in which asexual
objects, such as books and tables or the sun and the moon are said to be
‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ (or ‘neuter’ in the case of German), English is said
to have natural gender, which is explicitly marked only for some
personal pronouns (he, she, it, etc.).[1]
The exact word that English borrowed from French was usually
spelled gendre in Anglo-Norman—the
dialect of Old French spoken in England after the Norman conquest—as well as in Middle French,
though it was also sometimes spelled genre, which is how the word’s
descendant is spelled in Modern French (see below). As we saw in the preceding
section, this word is first attested in Old French with the meaning ‘kind, sort’
in the early 12th century but by the second half of the 12th century it was
found with the meaning ‘sex, quality of being male or female’. By the early
13th century, it is found with the sense ‘race, people’, as in the Modern
French phrase genre humain ’humankind, the human race’ (cf. Sp. género
humano, a calque). In grammar, of course, it referred to ‘class of nouns and
pronouns distinguished by different inflections’, a sense attested in the early
13th century in French (OED). This word has cognates in the Romance languages,
such as the following (with time of first written attestation): ‘Old Occitan gendre
(1350), Catalan gènere (13th cent. as †genre), Spanish género
(a1400), Portuguese gênero (15th cent.), Italian genere (end
of the 12th cent.)’ (OED), as well as Catalan gens and gènere and
Danish, Duch, German, Finish, and Swedish genus.
The English word gender is now pronounced [ˈʤɛndəɹ] and, as we saw, it was borrowed through the
Anglo-Norman dialect of Old French. When Eng. gender was borrowed in the
early 14th century (c. 1300), its first attested sense was that of ‘kind, sort,
class’. The grammatical sense is attested by the end of the 14th century. The
word came to be used to males and females as early as the 15th century, though
it wasn’t until the 20th century, when the word sex started to be
associated with sexual activity (as opposed to biological categories),
that gender came to be used in the 1960’s as a euphemism for sex and
for the biological and social qualities associated with each sex. We will
return to the different meanings and uses of the word gender in the next
section.
In the preceding section we discussed how it is that Sp.
género has the form it does, with an ‑er‑, given that it descends from Lat.
genus, an explanation that serves equally for Fr. genre. But for Eng. gender
(and Old French gendre), we have to explain, in addition, how it got the
‑d‑ it has, which was not to be found anywhere in the original Latin word.
As we saw, the d in the Old French word was eventually lost in Modern
French, where the word is now genre (see below). That d, which
has been maintained in English, requires some explanation since it is not found
in the Latin word or in any of its descendants in Romance languages, such as
Sp. género, other than in some spellings of the Old French
ancestor. The insertion of the d consonant in gender is hard to
explain phonetically, however. The most likely explanation is that it came by
the influence of a similar, related word in which the insertion is known to
have taken place and whose existence is indeed explainable.
The d insertion that we are referring to took
place in the related French verb gendrer ‘to engender’. Eng. engender
is a loan from a related French word, engendrer, and Spanish has a
semi-learned cognate of this verb, namely engendrar, which also has a d
(DCEH).[2]
These verbs have a d in them which was not present in the original verbs,
which were Lat. gĕnĕrāre ‘to bring to life, etc.’ and Lat. ĭngĕnĕrāre ‘to implant, engender, produce’ (L&S), which were derived from the
regular root gĕnĕr‑ of the noun genus
(ĭn‑gĕnĕr‑āre).[3]
The source of the -d‑
in the Spanish and French
descendants of these verbs is as follows. First these verbs lost the second ĕ,
which was an intertonic vowel, that is, a word-medial vowel next to a stressed
syllable, in this case the ā
of the infinitive ending. The loss of such vowels, which were pronounced with
the least force, was common in Romance. The vowel had to be word internal (not
initial or final) and it had to be next (preceding or following) a stressed
syllable (cf. Part I, Chapter 10). But the loss in this vowel resulted in this
case in a nr consonant sequence or cluster, a cluster that did not exist
in either French or Spanish. What happened in such cases was that an epenthetic
d was inserted between the n and the r, presumably for
ease of pronunciation. Here is how French would have developed gendrer
‘engender’ from Lat. gĕnĕrāre
(note these words have final stress):
|
Latin |
gĕnĕrāre |
|
Loss of final vowel and other vowel change |
generer |
|
Loss of intertonic vowel |
genrer |
|
Addition of
epenthetic consonant |
gendrer |
We see this same change in the verb forms of some
irregular Spanish verbs, such as the future of the verb venir ‘to come’,
e.g., vendré ‘I will come’, which if it had been regular,
it would have been *veniré for when the i was lost, a d was
inserted between the n and the r.
So, it has been suggested that analogy with the
related French verb gendrer is what put the d in Old French gendre
(with initial stress), and hence in Eng. gender, which borrowed the word
from French. The epenthesis could not have happened in the source noun, which
presumably was Old Fr. gener, for the second e would not have
been lost in such a word, since it is in the word’s final syllable and not a
medial (intertonic) one.[4]
|
Latin |
gĕn-us,
gĕnĕr‑is |
|
Loss of final sounds |
gener |
|
Addition of d
by analogy |
gender |
[1] The OED
defines it as follows: ‘English is regarded as possessing natural gender in that
certain pronouns expressing natural contrasts in gender are selected to refer to
nouns according to the meaning of the nouns, the contrasts being either between
masculine (e.g. he, his, etc.) and feminine (e.g. she, her,
etc.) or between personal (e.g. the abovementioned masculine and feminine pronouns
and who, whoever, etc.) and non-personal (e.g. it, its,
which, etc.). In recent times nouns incorporating gender suffixes (esp. those
indicating females and formed on generic nouns, such as authoress, poetess,
etc.) have become much restricted in use’ (OED).
[2] Sp. engendrar
is said to be semi-learned because it did not undergo all the sound changes
expected of such a word, in particular the fact that the g was
maintained before the front vowel e.
[3] Without
the prefix ĭn‑, Latin had the verb gĕnĕrāre ‘bring to life, beget,
etc.’, source of the learned cognate verbs Eng. generate ~ Sp. generar.
[4] The
CNRTL French dictionary says that ‘the Old French form gendre can
probably be explained by the influence of the Old French verb gendrer
(of the generare class), engendrer in Modern French’. (The
original says: ‘La forme a.fr. gendre s’explique probablement par l’influence
du verbe a.fr. gendrer (lat. class. generare «engendrer») «engendrer»‘
https://www.cnrtl.fr/etymologie/genre.)
Note that Old Fr. gendrer has not made it into modern French, though the
derived engendrer [ɑ̃ʒɑ̃ˈdʀe]
has. It means ‘to beget; to father; to generate; etc.’.
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