Talk:Personification

Feminine

The reason for things being personified as goddesses in European culture is pretty obvious:

Indo-European deities' sex matches the gender of their names, which are virtually always masculine or feminine nouns. The only neuter one I can think of is Chaos, and that means “gaping emptiness”, and was barely a god at all but just the void that gave rise to the gods.

The Proto-Indo-European suffix that indicates a mass or collection of stuff was -*eh₂, and as the three-gender system developed (subsequent to the separation from Anatolian), this gave rise to the neuter plurals (e.g. Latin saxa — “rocks”) and many abstract, uncountable or collective nouns (e.g. Latin discordia, aqua, familia — “strife”, “water”, “family”).

There was also a female suffix with the same form (-*eh₂), applied to words for women and clearly female animals (e.g. Latin femina, vacca — “woman/female”, “cow”).

As you can see, these two suffixes, which were probably already the same as far as we can reconstruct, both ended up as a final -a in most descendent Indo-European languages. The progression is -*eh₂ → -*ah₂ → -*a.

Words that continued to be clearly derived from an inanimate nouns referring to a single thing continued to be seen as a form of that word, and were reconstrued as “neuter singular” and “neuter plural”. However, the fact that Ancient Greek always uses a singular verb with such words shows that alleged plural was still felt to be a collective noun, quite different from the specific forms for referring to multiple individuals expressed by animate nouns (eventually reconstrued as “masculine” nouns).

Apart from those, all other abstract, uncountable or collective inanimate nouns with this suffix become conflated with animate nouns with the female suffix, since they were identical. The former thus started to gain animate inflections (largely a matter of distinguishing between the subjects and objects of sentences with ergative and absolutive case endings respectively, whereas inanimates use absolutives for both) and also plural inflections where necessary.

At some point, Graeco-Roman grammarians realised that their languages had nouns that tended to collect into groups with similar endings, and in particular there were three patterns of agreement between nouns and the adjectives or pronouns referring to them. For example, looking at the endings, Greek nouns fell into three “declensions”, whereas Latin ones fell into five. But all Indo-European languages had three patterns of agreement.

In Latin, these were called genera (singular: genus), i.e. “kinds”. This word comes to us via French as “gender” (and also as “genre”, which we use for art).

• Grammarians noted that one kind contained all words for men. This came from Proto-Indo-European animate nouns, often with an -o stem. They called this the genus masculinum, i.e. the “manly kind”, i.e. the masculine gender.
• They noted that another kind contained all words for women. This came from Proto-Indo-European animate nouns that had the female -*eh₂ suffix or which were understood from context to refer to women (e.g. Latin mater — “mother”), and also those abstract, uncountable or collective inanimate nouns (with the “collection of stuff” suffix) that didn't end up considered plurals. They called this the genus femininum, i.e. the “womanly kind”, i.e. the feminine gender.
• They noted that another kind didn't seem to contain any words for people. It seemed to be a default kind for all the words that hadn't ended up in the first two kinds for whatever reason. They called this the genus neutrum, i.e. “neither kind”, i.e. the neuter gender.

No one thought that the three genders of nouns were the same thing as the sexes (Latin: sexus). They just had a kind of vague manly, womanly and neutral vibe to them, due to the clustering of words into these kinds. It's as though there were deemed yin, yang or neither. This vibe was strong enough that whenever you personified a concept, it made sense to imagine Discordia as a woman or goddess, because the grammar of the language forced you to make adjectives and pronouns agree with it (or rather with her) in exactly the same way as if you'd said puella, Græca or Julia — “young girl”, “Greek woman”, “Julia”. The way you'd say “it” in reference to a feminine noun is ea, translatable as “she”. So, if you carve a statue of this deity, are you going to make a male or female figure? Similarly, the Greek Zeus (or Zeu-Pater) and Roman Jove (or Jupiter) are just the word for the sky given animate inflections, and often supplemented with the word for “father”. If you carve a statue of the Sky Father, which uses the same “it“/“he” pronoun as the words for “man”, “boy“ and “bull” even if you don't add the “father” bit, are you going to make a male or female figure?

Occasionally, a word that is usually neuter needs to be personified. Cælum (A different Latin word for “sky” or “heaven”, since the older word had become exclusively used as the name of Zeus/Jupiter) was used as the equivalent of the Greek Uranus, the sky Titan who was the father of Zeus in classical (but not early Indo-European) myth. As an inanimate noun which had become construed as a Latin “neuter singular” noun, it had only absolutive forms, which in Latin were construed as a nominative, an accusative and a vocative form that all happened to be the same. To refer to an animate agent, it needed an ergative form for the subjects of sentences. This resulted in a form Cælus for the nominative singular (still Cælum in the accusative singular), and a general set of inflections now conceived of as a “masculine noun of the second declension”. Any word given animate inflections, if not obviously feminine, will automatically be assigned to the masculine like this. And so, if you carve a humanoid statue of Cælus/Cælum, it'll be a man.

So, the original system based on applying different inflections to words you thought of as animate versus inanimate (mostly a matter of (a) using ergative inflections on the subject of “the man melted the water” because he's doing the action, but absolutive inflections on the subject of “the water melted” because the water isn't doing anything but rather something is happening to it; and (b) different ways of expressing plurals/collections), morphed into a system of nouns all inherently belonging to one of three arbitrary kinds, loosely associated with their endings, with a vague psychological connection to biological sex.

Since most abstract nouns are feminine, they will be personified as goddesses — ultimately because -*eh₂ had a double meaning.

Correctrix (talk) 12:36, 6 January 2021 (UTC)