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The last time I studied a language, it was high-school French taught by a elderly nun with a Texan accent who promised a class on “erotic cultures” when she meant “exotic.” Duolingo is definitely cooler, and almost as much fun as that snorting, tittering class.
But the Spanish itself is driving me crazy.
I can gag appropriately to rasp a French R, but I cannot roll a Spanish one to save my life. Otherwise, the new pronunciation is blessedly straightforward—except of course for the v sounding like b and the t and d being softened and the j being a huff of air and the h being silent and the x falling silent between vowels, as though intimidated. The rhythms of Spanish, though, are a castanet that lifts my spirits, and the grammar is mainly reasonable. Except for all the gender. Gendered everything. I had forgotten that pesky practice from French. Chairs and tables, houseplants and taxis. To an outsider, dividing the world in this fashion seems archaic and inherently problematic. La persona, a person, is feminine even if referring to a man. El vestido, the dress, is masculine, though la falda, the skirt, is feminine. Why do this to us?
Proto-Indo-European was the papa—or mama—of many South Asian and European languages, and its division had nothing to do with gender. Instead, those first markers were used to separate the animate from the inanimate. That makes sense to me: it helps to know, ahead of time, that something will cry if you whack it. And maybe just feeling themselves alive was a matter of fascination to those early speakers.
Over time, though, the animate category split into masculine and feminine. The inanimate became neuter, but very little in Spanish is neuter. The only guideline now is word endings: usually (but, of course, not always), words that end in -a will be feminine, while words ending in -o will be masculine. In a mess that reminds me of lawyers citing precedents from the 1700s, new words just took their gender from the endings of words that kinda seemed similar. With the original logic lost, the new words were styled in a sort of random imitation.
Thank God English, which has its own tangles, had forgotten its gender system by the fourteenth century. Imagine the culture wars if feminists had to protest their gender being assigned to kitchens, domestic rooms, and problems, while the masculine gender was automatically imposed on mixed groups and all babies, as happens in Spanish.
Linguists defend grammatical gender by saying it helps speakers remember words and “disambiguate” between objects. I am too busy trying to remember a few words’ gender to add more vocabulary, and I hardly feel disambiguated. Nor does all this gendering add, as I had hoped, a touch of eroticism to everyday life. It is only an annoyance. And the use of different pronouns with the same noun is even more confusing. El cólera, masculine, is cholera; la cólera, feminine, is anger. Both can be contagious.
Another defense of gender markers is that they add a subtle layer of meaning, suggesting certain attributes. Cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky reports study results: “To describe a ‘bridge,’ which is feminine in German and masculine in Spanish, the German speakers said ‘beautiful,’ ‘elegant,’ ‘fragile,’ ‘peaceful,’ ‘pretty,’ and ‘slender,’ and the Spanish speakers said ‘big,’ ‘dangerous,’ ‘long,’ ‘strong,’ ‘sturdy,’ ‘and ‘towering.’”
If gender markers add meaning, then, they also add bias. Kids who learn a gendered language recognize their own gender earlier. Do they see the category as more central to identity? A gendered language causes you to group words or ideas of one gender as similar. Asked to give a voice to an object, you will speak in the voice of its gender.
There is nothing inevitable about constructing a language this way. Afrikaans simplified Dutch’s gendered system, erasing all gender distinctions. Many languages, including Persian, Armenian, and Turkic, have no grammatical gender—not even for their pronouns. Certain dialects of Danish have done away with grammatical gender, and Scottish Gaelic is trying. Sweden pulled off a gender-neutral pronoun, “hen,” rather than going plural, as we have done with the singular “they.” But attempting the gender-neutral “Latinx”? That caused a firestorm of resistance.
The Spanish culture is colored by gender and also by a formal hierarchy, with special forms of address and verb tenses to convey respect. Though I rail, there is an old world charm to this. I can memorize and accept, as have roughly 360 million people around the world. What will always plague me is a different challenge buried in the language, an existential one.
Spanish has two verbs of being, ser and estoy. The first, I learn, is meant to suggest permanent states of being, like your name or what country you come from. The second is for temporary states of being, like moods.
That sounds clear but quickly turns complicated. You can be described as fat with ser, meaning that is just who you are, or with estoy, meaning you have gained weight but could lose it again. Your occupation is taken as permanent, no matter how many times you have switched careers, but if you are desempleado, unemployed, that, mercifully, takes the temporary verb. To say you are friends with someone, you use the permanent verb, but to say you are in love, you use the temporary—which does seem prudent. Yet being married, casada, also takes the temporary verb, while being divorciada takes the permanent. Because it is assumed you will not remarry, or just because? And here is a kicker: time, which changes constantly, is permanent, while big old marble buildings that have stood for centuries take the temporary verb when you describe their location.
Eventually, I discover that temporary-versus-permanent is just a Spanish-lessons trick, one that falls apart the more you learn. The real distinction is between an identity or essence and a state or condition. That sounds philosophically astute—until it begins to play out in sentences. Why would being married be only a state of being, while saying two people are spouses is, like being divorced, essential? And does using the essential verb for your religion and political affiliation make you less likely to change them?
I prefer the trick. Dividing temporary from permanent states is useful, reminding us that a bleak mood is a passing thing, as is a crush or a bankruptcy, while being a sociopath is permanent. But making seven o’clock a permanent characteristic while a historic building’s location is only a state of being?
These verbs are killing me.
On the bright side, la meurta, death, takes the temporary verb.
Read more by Jeannette Cooperman here.
