How to Be a Perfectly Decent Male Chauvinist Pig

Guy Deutscher, the eminent Israeli author of books on linguistics, was asked in an interview published in the Paris Review Daily on November 9, 2010, whether there was any special significance in the fact that in some languages – Hungarian, Finnish and Vietnamese, for instance – there were no feminine and masculine genders.

This was his answer:

“This is something we can only speculate about, as I don’t know that it has been studied empirically. I can only answer anecdotally, by pointing out a difference between English and my mother tongue, Hebrew. In Hebrew, there is no sex-neutral word for friend, as there is in English, and for a host of other designations for people. The grammar requires me to specify each time whether the friend is male or female.

“I know that when I hear the word friend in English, I automatically need to assign it to one of the categories. For me, a friend can never be in a Schrödinger’s cat state of indeterminacy. I know this because it happens quite often that as the conversation continues, my assumption turns out to have been wrong, and then I invariably get a slight shock – and have to replay the conversation and re-adjust all the information I had been given in the light of the new understanding.

“Does this happen to English native speakers in the same way and with the same intensity? Or can they sometimes think of friends in a more indeterminate way? If they can do so, then speakers of Hungarian would simply extend the same indeterminacy principle to more contexts. Having said all this, it’s important to realize that one can be a perfectly decent male chauvinist pig even in languages which don’t have any gender distinctions.”