German made queasy

Much as I hate to claim prophetic powers, sometimes the urge becomes irresistible. For every time I write about an outburst of acute madness in public life, said life confirms the diagnosis immediately.

Thus, just a couple of days after I wrote about the catastrophic state of the humanities departments at our institutions of higher learning, the University of Cambridge obligingly illustrated the scale of the catastrophe.

The illustration came from what one would expect to be the least ideological discipline of all humanities: foreign languages, in this case German.

As someone who used to teach languages, I can testify that the task is straightforward, if by no means easy. You teach students the grammatical structure of the language, words that flesh it out and the way to pronounce those words in a manner understandable to the native speakers.

Ideology can make inroads only on the selection of reading material. For example, at my Moscow University we were taught received pronunciation on the kind of taped phonetic texts that would strike any Englishman as odd.

They featured a man named Mr Sanford, a volunteer who sold the communist paper the Daily Worker. Sounding like King Charles in his younger days, he’d engage his neighbours in such dialogues:

“I say, Mr Cavendish, do you receive the Daily Worker at all?” “No, can’t say I do, old boy, can’t say I do.” “Oh dear, rather a shame, that. One learns so much about the working class shedding its shackles in the struggle for liberation.” “Well, I never! Quite behind the times, aren’t I, what? Suppose one has to give it a go…” and so on in the same vein.

We weren’t told that people who sounded like that were unlikely to flog the Daily Worker door to door, although they might well have financed it behind the scenes. However, though Soviet communists played fast and loose with the texts, they left grammar alone. It was what it was, and that was that.

That’s too meek for today’s Cambridge University. It has unilaterally abolished the gendered nature of German nouns as being too offensive to the brittle sensibilities of today’s students. They have been given a carte blanche to escalate the war of linguistic liberation beyond just the pronouns and even beyond their own language.    

Undergraduates have been urged to “to use gender- and non-binary-inclusive language when we address or refer to students and colleagues, both in writing and in speech in English and in German”. That’s a tall task even in English, and one would think such commendable probity is impossible to achieve in German.

The problem is that English stands alone among European languages, at least those I’m familiar with, in that, with minor exceptions, it has divested its nouns of the gender category. In German, French, Russian and so on all nouns have one of two or three genders (unlike the other two I mentioned, French has no neuter).

This creates a chain reaction because the gender of a noun also affects the form of its modifiers, related verbs and pronouns. They all change their suffixes and spelling to agree with the noun’s gender. Where a language has a case system, that too has to follow suit.

Abandoning the gendering of German nouns is like getting rid of the conjugation of the verb ‘to be’ in English. Just imagine someone saying, “I be five when I be at kindergarten, learning what a condom be,” and you’ll begin to see the problem. Except that ditching the category of gender in German would be even worse.

To their credit, Cambridge’s present-day answers to Samuel Johnson and Daniel Jones are aware of the pitfalls. The University acknowledged that: “Gender as a grammatical category is part of native speakers’ language competence, and overlaps only partly with gender as a real-world phenomenon and a lived identity.”

But, as Comrade Lenin taught, there are no fortresses that Bolsheviks can’t storm. Thus the problem ruefully acknowledged by Cambridge notwithstanding, the university still insists that students should use gender-neutral terms if their conscience demands such usage.

Looking at the statement above, my first reaction is that its authors should be publicly drawn and quartered. However, such just desserts being a tad too sanguinary for our progressive times, I’d settle for summary dismissal. But one thing for sure: that blithering idiocy mustn’t be allowed to go unpunished.

Chaps, grammatical gender doesn’t overlap with “gender as a real-world phenomenon” at all, not even “partly”. There’s no existential correlation between a noun and its gender. If there were, every object would be the same gender in all languages. But that isn’t the case. Thus the piece of furniture on which dinner is served is masculine in German, Italian and Russian, but feminine in French and Spanish.

However, to avoid the confusion do what I do: only ever use the word ‘gender’ to describe the grammatical category. Everything else is called ‘sex’, as in “in the past we only had two sexes, three at most, but now we have 72, and all these sexes are equal as far as Cambridge University is concerned”.

No doubt the German language could use some help. But out of tact and good manners, shouldn’t we allow the Teutons to sort themselves out on their own? From what one hears, they are doing a pretty good job of it without our help, specifically in the area of perverting the gender of plural nouns.

Give them a little time, and they’ll befoul their language as much as we’ve befouled ours. The two languages are different, but the ideological urge to debauch them is the same, and that’s all that matters.

I’ll leave you to ponder this radical, but probably unavoidable, step towards sanity: all humanities departments of all British universities are to be closed, effective immediately. The dons made unemployed thereby should be retrained to fill vacancies in the service industry.

Just think of all the pubs going out of business for lack of barmaids and dish washers. My little proposals would keep the boozers open and our universities healthier. That’s hitting two birds with one stone, nicht wahr?