Heill �skar,

Conflicting statements by you and Haukur indicate
the Norse "feeling" for grammatical gender is
different depending on whether one is using
pronouns or nouns- though I wonder whether this
has not so much to do with "norse" as with
"modern".

Haukr has noted that there is no relationship
between an object's "biological gender" and the
"grammatical gender" of a word which names the
object. He gave some examples, but a prime
example is German "das Weib", das means very
basically "the woman" and is nevertheless
neutral.

Still, you state that when conscious beings use
pronouns to speak in the first or second persons,
then they do, if fact, apply their biological
gender grammatically, regardless of what the
gender is of the term that applies (in the
context they are speaking in at the moment) to
the first or second persons involved.

Can you really be sure this was true in the
Eddas? Perhaps literature shows that people had a
different feeling towards what we call
"grammatical gender" today. I think particulary
of the changing usage of the term "das Maedchen"
in German:

Perhaps the Germans on the list can say more, but
I believe most *modern* texts of, say, a fairy
tale, would introduce a girl in a story bei
saying something like "das Maedchen hiess
Rotkaepchen" ("the girl [neut] was called red
riding hood"). Nevertheless, later in the story
they use feminine pronouns ie "sie ging zu ihrer
Oma" ("she went to her Grandma").

In *older* text, however, the author (Grimm, in
this case), sticks grammatically to the neutral
gender throughout: "es ging zu seiner Oma" ("it
went to its Grandma")

Perhaps the term "gender" is not only misleading,
but genuinely historically incorrect: when did
people start to apply the term "gender" to noun
groupings? Perhaps the concept would have been
*utterly foreign* to real ancient speakers - if
you could go back in time and ask them what
significance it has that their terms for "man"
and "woman" belong to different noun groups,
perhaps they would tell you this is merely a
coincidence, and that they see nothing "feminine"
whatsoever in the noun grouping which we today
call "feminine gender".

However, if this is true, then two iron-age boars
(see your example below) may well have referred
to themselves as "vit tvau". Or rather, to make
the case more realistic, imagine there was some
military term for a specific rank (Dienstgrad),
which just happens to be neutral. If two members
of this rank reported to their superior that they
both had received certain orders, perhaps one of
them would have felt it appropriate to use "vit
tvau" when speaking, because he is in a context
where the term applicable to himself and his
comrad (as opposed to the many other terms with
with "a man" can be referred to of various
gender) is especially clear - they are speaking
to their superior purely in their capacity as
neutrally declined entities, and thus use
neutrally declined pronouns.

I wonder if there are any examples of this in the
Eddas (that is, consistent usage of pronouns that
agree with the earlier reference to the noun they
represent, rather than with the biological gender
of the object they represent).

--- �skar Gu�laugsson <hr_oskar@...>
wrote:

> --- In norse_course@egroups.com, "Tim Elario"
> <telario@...> wrote:
> > Can the phrase "vit tvau" also mean 'we two'
> (both women) as
> opposed to 'we
> > two' (man and woman)? Loki could be saying
> that (since we now
> appear to be
> > women), we two (girls) shall drive to
> J�tunheimar. The joke is
> slightly
> > different, in that they both appear to be
> female, but still paints
> the
> > strong, masculine Thor in drag (i.e.dressed
> as a woman) and
> effeminate.
>
> "Vit tv�r" means (and means only) 'we two'
> (both women); "vit tvau"
> can only mean 'we two' (one man and one woman).
> "Tvau" can refer to
> one man/boy and one woman/girl OR two neuters;
> but two neuters are
> unlikely to ever speak, let alone call
> themselves "vit". Loki's words
> mean 'we two (one of us a woman, the other a
> man)'.
>
> About the neuter gender:
> neuter words for living beings does not make
> those beings neuters;
> neuter "barn" doesn't mean the child is asexual
> (not a shot at Keth's
> speculations :) A child will always identify
> itself sexually. And an
> animal with a neuter name, for instance "sv�n"
> (a neuter word), still
> has a perceived gender, and if speaking or
> spoken to as a person, it
> will identify itself. In a children's story
> with talking animals, two
> male pigs would say "vit tveir", not "vit
> tvau".
>
> The idea is that words have a certain gender
> fixed to them, no matter
> what they actually mean, but the gender of real
> *persons*, whether
> human or carbon-based or whatever, is always
> identified.
>
> �skar
>
>

=====
Kindest Regards,
- DeepStream
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