golbatsforequality:Teaching “nonstandard grammar” with emphasis that it is for talking about nonbina

golbatsforequality:Teaching “nonstandard grammar” with emphasis that it is for talking about nonbinary persons and should be footnoted in composition is far less damaging to language learning than misgendering your students.Especially since, in many cases, a language’s “default pronoun/gender” is a matter of convention, not structure.  If a dead language, especially, uses masculine as default, that is because that language’s convention is the product of the sexist society that spoke it, and if it were anyone’s first language today, some sort of convention change would likely be happening, as has happened with English twice over the course of the last century.And, of course, the highest priority is not misgendering and alienating elementary language students–most of whom would be like 14.–GolbatIn the case of Latin, though, that “default pronoun/gender” pertains to both convention and structure, since Latin’s systems of morphology and concord are coherent only in light of the language’s idiosyncratic ways of handling gender. That structural feature of the language is tangential to the fact that the language’s convention is the product of the sexist society that spoke it. If you wish to teach “nonstandard grammar” in terms of gender, it becomes difficult to maintain the coherency and applicability of number and case because all of those grammatical elements of the language are interrelated.The misgendering charge, when given in response to descriptive explanations of the language’s gender system, is not only unnecessary but also especially damaging to Latin pedagogy and those who teach it because of its failure to consider a few things. “Gender” in Latin and English are incommensurable paradigms, and so while it is simple to see what is meant by “misgendering” in English, that is not so simple in Latin—the Latin word for “human being,” homo, is always masculine in Classical Latin, but since Latin makes a distinction between natural and grammatical gender, the use of a masculine pronoun for non-specified referents is not actually a case of misgendering. Moreover, Latin also has the concept of epicene gender: a noun used for a group of living beings may have one particular grammatical gender, but actually refer to any of the individuals among that group regardless of their sex or gender (in the English senses). And so, Latin already has two ways of handling gender that obviate misgendering. And if Latin were anyone’s first language today, that aforementioned structural feature of the language would still exist even with changes in convention, and yet the problem that comes about from that structural feature can be dealt with by applying Latin’s epicenity to the word homo and to the various pronouns.And, most importantly, before we decide on what exactly it means to alienate elementary language students by misgendering them in Latin, we would benefit from taking into consideration the various meanings of “gender,” and how they actually differ from language to language. -- source link

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