The Shape of (Inanimate) Things

"It's silly to assign a gender to something that can't take off its pants and embarrass itself every once in a while," writes David Sedaris (I'm paraphrasing) He's talking about the French system of assigning genders to inanimate objects.

Apparently, I'm not the only American to have a gender problem. We don't grow up with gendered nouns and verbs, so I think it's hard for our brains to absorb them. Just this week I accidentally referred to one of my bosses as a man (she's a woman). She took it in stride, although in more machismo cricles the opposite error would be a challenge to be answered with knives.

"When will you understand the genders of things?" wailed my cousin Sidd, when last month I once again referred to the capricious weather as a woman, instead of a man. Unlike in Spanish, Hindi nouns don't really have regular endings, so the word itself often contains little clue as to what gender the item is giong to be. So how do Indians do it? Sedaris' essay contains a clue.

"We hear the gender once in childhood and then we remember it forever," one kindly Frenchman explains to Sedaris. Needless to say, this makes Sedaris feel like an even bigger idiot than he already is. I suspect the problem lies in the American social system. Americans are monolingual from birth - one set of nouns, one alphabet, one grammar. After a while, the language part of the brain becomes "fused" and after that it's very difficult to accept a foreign language, with its grammatical peculiarities, as anything other than a logical contradiction.

My sister, who remains monolingual despite years of effort, is convinced that all multilingual people are geniuses, and she's missed the boat. But I doubt this. Much like having a good sense of direction, having a good sense of language is something that (while genetics plays a role) can probably be developed, although its much easier if this development takes place in childhood. Now that I'm learning Hindi, I find it easier to understand Spanish grammar, which is less rigid than that of English.

But nothing helps with the genders. On that, I'm with Sedaris.