Gender, language and theorems.

It will have happened to everyone to have studied a theorem and say “this is what researchers use at most, but you will never find a practical example of this stuff”. And then everyone will have had that moment when you say “hey, here he is! Then it was true! ”. Here, I witnessed a discussion on "gender" on a forum in English, suddenly a theorem "was reproached" to me, as they say in Rome.

The theorem is this: Löwenheim-Skolem

In short, I was in this forum. And they were discussing what they imported into Italy (stupidly) as "gender theory". The problem is that in English they didn't have the cardinality that goes into explaining concepts that are trivial in other languages.

In the English language you usually assign a gender only to those things that have a reproductive sex. And you don't even assign it to the word itself, but you assign it to pronouns. The rest is neutral.

This means that the Fork for an Englishman requires "The", just like for everything else, and then you will refer to the fork as "it", because in the end the fork does not have a reproductive sex. And having no sex, it doesn't have a gender.

If we measure the cardinality of a hypothetical set, {sex, gender} (word), in the case of English we will have, for any "word", almost always 1. I say almost always because they exist (usually for poets and in literature) of the exceptions.

If we go to Italian, the problem is the opposite, as EVERYTHING has received a gender and the neutral is absorbed by the masculine. So it happens that there is an assigned linguistic gender.

But this linguistic genre is not "only" linguistic: when we take things like "The Moon", we discover that in saying "The Luno" we feel not only a linguistic annoyance. The moon is also associated with femininity, for any historical or pata-religious reason, and by now this association is part of the very concept of "Moon". Describing the Moon as "the largest natural satellite on Earth" seems to strip the Moon of something. Which is the association between Moon and femininity.

In Italian it is therefore simple, if not trivial, to explain that a society can assign a gender even where there is no reproductive sex. This is because literally everything has a gender. And from this saddled genre derive other characteristics, which are inherited: if a road is large it is more spontaneous to say "a stradone" rather than "a stradona", while the small road is more easily called "a small road" than " a little street ". The building is bigger than a house, and there is a certain correlation between feminine and diminutive, and between diminution and feminine.

It is not therefore a matter of a mere grammatical distinction: feminine and masculine inherit qualities that are in gender, and transform concepts. It is therefore a production that provides context .

Good.

Having clarified therefore that society, with its language and its conventions, can assign a gender, with all the resulting context , we can also make comparisons.

If we take French, which also has neuter, we note that even when it is possible to use neuter, a certain society makes choices "contrary to grammar". The Moon should be neutral, yet even in French the moon is feminine.

This means that the French society has decided to give the Moon a feminine context, regardless of the fact of having a neutral. _I don't give a fuck about legendary speculations on a hypothetical mythical mystical Indo-Iranian protolanguage that seem written for Evola fans, or whatever: French has had plenty of time to adapt and change genres and terms: just as Italian has incorporated the neutral in the masculine and not in the feminine for a choice that society has made at some point.

If it seems like a strong statement, we can use the German Das Mädchen: it is used only to indicate a girl (and not a boy) but it is neutral. This is due to the fact that it derives from the term used to indicate a servant (the root from which also derives "maid" in English). But it dates back to the Middle Ages. So even the French could change sex on the Moon: he had it all the time. If he didn't, he made a choice .

Let's go back to the question again, in fact, noting that genders are not assigned only because the neutral does not exist and has been absorbed: even the languages ​​that have the neutral assign genders, and this happens because a context is associated with the gender.

That said, it is very clear that we can associate the feminine with a transsexual person, and no Italian, German or French linguistic rule prohibits it : if we have assigned the feminine to the moon and the masculine to the sun, while Germanics and Arabs have done the opposite, it's just because we wanted to associate contexts with words. There was no physical or grammatical law that obliged us to do this.

The objection according to which only something biologically feminine can have the feminine is therefore to be rejected, but also its opposite is: biologically feminine things DO NOT always have feminine, as happens in German with Mädchen which is neutral or in Italian "IL sopranO", which can ONLY refer to women. Even worse, when you want to "give her" to someone, you are using the feminine on anyone and anything: "your lordship" can also be a very virile gentleman named Ubaldo, and no one will have anything to say.

And as if that were not enough, it should also be noted how the gender changes with the number: the egg becomes the eggs, the fingers were THE finger when they were alone, and so on. In German this is regular and almost all masculine become feminine in the plural. (I omit the cases because I don't hate you enough).

There will be a million reasons to change the context of our generative syntax, but in the end the point is that the most powerful languages ​​that distinguish between sex and gender have made completely arbitrary choices.

And it is easy to explain these choices to native speakers, because either you tell me about the sex life of cutlery, or you will have a hard time convincing me that the fork is more feminine than the knife just using the association between sex and gender.

But English is less powerful than that. Explaining that sex and gender can be independent is simply impossible, for the simple reason that their language cannot .

I've been seeing several weeks of debate, and they're starting to pity me simply because their language can't explain the difference. It does not have the power, it is an idiom that is mutilated from this point of view. How is it possible to explain that two things that are indistinguishable are instead distinct?

But let's leave the problems to the angles as well: I see that in Italy (and practically only in Italy) they are trying to import the same “pseudo-problem” of gender (as gender theory), using arguments that make sense only in English .

Of course, Italian journalists are cowards, and if a politician says that in Italian gender depends on sex, no journalist will want to contradict him to lick all possible asses. But how much time will pass before someone does not give a nice grammar shampoo to some idiot like Adinolfi or Povia, simply reminding them that Italian grammar allows very well to use the feminine with someone?

The idea of ​​basing transphobia on the misunderstanding sex = gender is clever (but not intelligent) in English, because it effectively puts opponents in a position where they cannot explain their reasons in a language where sex = gender. But doing the same thing in Italian is neither intelligent nor crafty: I had to use the feminine with Vladimir Luxuria (meaning: if I had to talk to him), not having much confidence I should use the "lei" (whatever you think about it ), while Adinolfi screams that in Italian the feminine should not be used in his case.

Now, I know very well that certain individuals are not the best of intelligence, and apparently not even of cunning. So importing into Italy a debate that has value only in English makes no sense, for the simple reason that it is a linguistic question. Outside the English-speaking world, society assigns genders to things, and with gender it also assigns characteristics (gentleness, gentleness, etc.) that are normally associated with sex. Almost all languages ​​assign a gender EVEN regardless of sex, which is much more than the grammatical gender because it carries qualities associated with biological sex.

Anyone who says that society cannot associate a gender in a completely arbitrary way refers to English, but is preparing to receive a humiliating shampoo the first time they meet someone who wants to give Italian lessons to some idiot on duty. .

Moreover, it is often the same idiot who wants to repatriate someone to Africa if he does not speak Italian well, knowing full well that he grew up speaking the dialect and having learned Italian as if it were a foreign language .