Linguistics of English vs. Spanish



Deborah Tannen claims that in the English language, “the female [is] declared by grammarians to be the marked case”- how does Spanish compare? (555).  Spanish is similar to English in its sentence structure, conjugations, and many cognates. The French roots of English make it logical to compare it to Spanish because French and Spanish are both Romance languages. It would be fairer to compare English to French or German but alas, I only know Spanish.

As Tannen describes it in her essay, English adds linguistic participles like -ette or -ess to portray women. However, this is only to some professions such as a waitress or a stewardess. In Spanish, all nouns are masculine or feminine in nature. “La flor” will always be a feminine word, “the flower.” “El cuchillo” will always be the masculine word, “the knife.” This is not all: every adjective has to agree in gender also. To say “the beautiful flower” and “the beautiful knife,” it is “la flor hermosa” and “el cuchillo hermoso” respectively. Building on this idea, when describing a man, the adjectives take on the masculine forms and vice versa for women. For example, saying “I’m tall” in Spanish is for men and women is respectively, “soy alto” and “soy alta.”

The third person pronouns differ as well. In English, the third person pronouns are just “they” for plural and “he” and “she” for the singular form. On the other hand, Spanish not only has specific genders for the third person singular but for the plural as well. Taking the singular forms “él” and “ella” for “he” and “she”, the plural forms become “ellos” and “ellas.” When the group being referred to has both genders, the masculine form is used-the femine form is only used to describe a completely female group.

My opinion about Tannen’s linguistic arguments is that it is petty. Language is something that we have been using for thousands of years, used to communicate to others. By critiquing the nature of grammatical English, it is inflating what is just a medium of communication to a societal issue. I’m sure there are feminists in Latin America and Spain; however, they still say “soy alta” because it has no meaning other than to just follow grammatical structure. English is more “unmarked” than Spanish, but it shouldn’t be an argument about genders because they are just languages.

Comments

  1. UnknownFebruary 11, 2018 at 2:56 PM

    I agree with you Wonyoung. I think some of her points are petty. And I like how you compare it to the Spanish language.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Katherine RaykovaFebruary 11, 2018 at 3:07 PM

    I also agree. This point was a bit too much of a stretch. Language is something that is not going to significantly change anytime soon so there is also not much reason for her to be complaining about it, nothing we can do.

    ReplyDelete
  3. dominic.marra8February 11, 2018 at 3:24 PM

    I have to agree as well. The comparison to the Spanish language was something that I thought of too.

    ReplyDelete
  4. EricFebruary 11, 2018 at 3:25 PM

    English has germanic roots and french influence

    I entirely agree with what you said, especially with the ellos ellas part. It’s very petty

    ReplyDelete

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