THE WOMAN
§ 1. Women’s Languages. § 2. Tabu. § 3. Competing Languages. § 4.
Sanskrit Drama. § 5. Conservatism. § 6. Phonetics and Grammar. § 7.
Choice of Words. § 8. Vocabulary. § 9. Adverbs. § 10. Periods. § 11.
General Characteristics.
XIII.--§ 1. Women’s Languages.
There are tribes in which men and women are said to speak totally
different languages, or at any rate distinct dialects. It will be
worth our while to look at the classical example of this, which is
mentioned in a great many ethnographical and linguistic works, viz.
the Caribs or Caribbeans of the Small Antilles. The first to mention
their distinct sex dialects was the Dominican Breton, who, in his
_Dictionnaire Caraïbe-français_ (1664), says that the Caribbean chief
had exterminated all the natives except the women, who had retained
part of their ancient language. This is repeated in many subsequent
accounts, the fullest and, as it seems, most reliable of which is that
by Rochefort, who spent a long time among the Caribbeans in the middle
of the seventeenth century: see his _Histoire naturelle et morale des
Iles Antilles_ (2e éd., Rotterdam, 1665, p. 449 ff.). Here he says that
“the men have a great many expressions peculiar to them, which the
women understand but never pronounce themselves. On the other hand, the
women have words and phrases which the men never use, or they would
be laughed to scorn. Thus it happens that in their conversations it
often seems as if the women had another language than the men.... The
savage natives of Dominica say that the reason for this is that when
the Caribs came to occupy the islands these were inhabited by an Arawak
tribe which they exterminated completely, with the exception of the
women, whom they married in order to populate the country. Now, these
women kept their own language and taught it to their daughters.... But
though the boys understand the speech of their mothers and sisters,
they nevertheless follow their fathers and brothers and conform to
their speech from the age of five or six.... It is asserted that there
is some similarity between the speech of the continental Arawaks and
that of the Carib women. But the Carib men and women on the continent
speak the same language, as they have never corrupted their natural
speech by marriage with strange women.”
This evidently is the account which forms the basis of everything that
has since been written on the subject. But it will be noticed that
Rochefort does not really speak of the speech of the two sexes as
totally distinct languages or dialects, as has often been maintained,
but only of certain differences within the same language. If we go
through the comparatively full and evidently careful glossary attached
to his book, in which he denotes the words peculiar to the men by the
letter H and those of the women by F, we shall see that it is only
for about one-tenth of the vocabulary that such special words have
been indicated to him, though the matter evidently interested him very
much, so that he would make all possible efforts to elicit them from
the natives. In his lists, words special to one or the other sex are
found most frequently in the names of the various degrees of kinship;
thus, ‘my father’ in the speech of the men in _youmáan_, in that of
the women _noukóuchili_, though both in addressing him say _bába_;
‘my grandfather’ is _itámoulou_ and _nárgouti_ respectively, and thus
also for maternal uncle, son (elder son, younger son), brother-in-law,
wife, mother, grandmother, daughter, cousin--all of these are different
according as a man or a woman is speaking. It is the same with the
names of some, though far from all, of the different parts of the body,
and with some more or less isolated words, as friend, enemy, joy, work,
war, house, garden, bed, poison, tree, sun, moon, sea, earth. This list
comprises nearly every notion for which Rochefort indicates separate
words, and it will be seen that there are innumerable ideas for which
men and women use the same word. Further, we see that where there are
differences these do not consist in small deviations, such as different
prefixes or suffixes added to the same root, but in totally distinct
roots. Another point is very important to my mind: judging by the
instances in which plural forms are given in the lists, the words of
the two sexes are inflected in exactly the same way; thus the grammar
is common to both, from which we may infer that we have not really to
do with two distinct languages in the proper sense of the word.
Now, some light may probably be thrown on the problem of this women’s
language from a custom mentioned in some of the old books written by
travellers who have visited these islands. Rochefort himself (p. 497)
very briefly says that “the women do not eat till their husbands have
finished their meal,” and Lafitau (1724) says that women never eat in
the company of their husbands and never mention them by name, but must
wait upon them as their slaves; with this Labat agrees.
XIII.--§ 2. Tabu.
The fact that a wife is not allowed to mention the name of her husband
makes one think that we have here simply an instance of a custom found
in various forms and in varying degrees throughout the world--what
is called verbal tabu: under certain circumstances, at certain
times, in certain places, the use of one or more definite words is
interdicted, because it is superstitiously believed to entail certain
evil consequences, such as exasperate demons and the like. In place
of the forbidden words it is therefore necessary to use some kind of
figurative paraphrase, to dig up an otherwise obsolete term, or to
disguise the real word so as to render it more innocent.
Now as a matter of fact we find that verbal tabu was a common practice
with the old Caribs: when they were on the war-path they had a great
number of mysterious words which women were never allowed to learn and
which even the young men might not pronounce before passing certain
tests of bravery and patriotism; these war-words are described as
extraordinarily difficult (“un baragoin fort difficile,” Rochefort,
p. 450). It is easy to see that when once a tribe has acquired the
habit of using a whole set of terms under certain frequently recurring
circumstances, while others are at the same time strictly interdicted,
this may naturally lead to so many words being reserved exclusively for
one of the sexes that an observer may be tempted to speak of separate
‘languages’ for the two sexes. There is thus no occasion to believe
in the story of a wholesale extermination of all male inhabitants by
another tribe, though on the other hand it is easy to understand how
such a myth may arise as an explanation of the linguistic difference
between men and women, when it has become strong enough to attract
attention and therefore has to be accounted for.
In some parts of the world the connexion between a separate women’s
language and tabu is indubitable. Thus among the Bantu people of
Africa. With the Zulus a wife is not allowed to mention the name of
her father-in-law and of his brothers, and if a similar word or even a
similar syllable occurs in the ordinary language, she must substitute
something else of a similar meaning. In the royal family the difficulty
of understanding the women’s language is further increased by the
woman’s being forbidden to mention the names of her husband, his father
and grandfather as well as his brothers. If one of these names means
something like “the son of the bull,” each of these words has to be
avoided, and all kinds of paraphrases have to be used. According to
Kranz the interdiction holds good not only for meaning elements of
the name, but even for certain sounds entering into them; thus, if
the name contains the sound _z_, _amanzi_ ‘water’ has to be altered
into _amandabi_. If a woman were to contravene this rule she would be
indicted for sorcery and put to death. The substitutes thus introduced
tend to be adopted by others and to constitute a real women’s language.
With the Chiquitos in Bolivia the difference between the grammars of
the two sexes is rather curious (see V. Henry, “Sur le parler des
hommes et le parler des femmes dans la langue chiquita,” _Revue de
linguistique_, xii. 305, 1879). Some of Henry’s examples may be thus
summarized: men indicate by the addition of _-tii_ that a male person
is spoken about, while the women do not use this suffix and thus make
no distinction between ‘he’ and ‘she,’ ‘his’ and ‘her.’ Thus in the
men’s speech the following distinctions would be made:
He went to his house: _yebotii ti n-ipoostii_.
He went to her house: _yebotii ti n-ipoos_.
She went to his house: _yebo ti n-ipoostii_.
But to express all these different meanings the women would have only
one form, viz.
_yebo ti n-ipoos_,
which in the men’s speech would mean only ‘She went to her house.’
To many substantives the men prefix a vowel which the women do not
employ, thus _o-petas_ ‘turtle,’ _u-tamokos_ ‘dog,’ _i-pis_ ‘wood.’ For
some very important notions the sexes use distinct words; thus, for
the names of kinship, ‘my father’ is _iyai_ and _išupu_, ‘my mother’
_ipaki_ and _ipapa_, ‘my brother’ _tsaruki_ and _ičibausi_ respectively.
Among the languages of California, Yana, according to Dixon and Kroeber
(_The American Anthropologist_, n.s. 5. 15), is the only language that
shows a difference in the words used by men and women--apart from
terms of relationship, where a distinction according to the sex of
the speaker is made among many Californian tribes as well as in other
parts of the world, evidently “because the relationship itself is to
them different, as the sex is different.” But in Yana the distinction
is a linguistic one, and curiously enough, the few specimens given all
present a trait found already in the Chiquito forms, namely, that the
forms spoken by women are shorter than those of the men, which appear
as extensions, generally by suffixed _-(n)a_, of the former.
It is surely needless to multiply instances of these customs, which
are found among many wild tribes; the curious reader may be referred
to Lasch, S. pp. 7-13, and H. Ploss and M. Bartels, _Das Weib in der
Natur und Völkerkunde_ (9th ed., Leipzig, 1908). The latter says
that the Suaheli system is not carried through so as to replace the
ordinary language, but the Suaheli have for every object which they
do not care to mention by its real name a symbolic word understood by
everybody concerned. In especial such symbols are used by women in
their mysteries to denote obscene things. The words chosen are either
ordinary names for innocent things or else taken from the old language
or other Bantu languages, mostly Kiziguha, for among the Waziguha
secret rites play an enormous rôle. Bartels finally says that with us,
too, women have separate names for everything connected with sexual
life, and he thinks that it is the same feeling of shame that underlies
this custom and the interdiction of pronouncing the names of male
relatives. This, however, does not explain everything, and, as already
indicated, superstition certainly has a large share in this as in other
forms of verbal tabu. See on this the very full account in the third
volume of Frazer’s _The Golden Bough_.
XIII.--§ 3. Competing Languages.
A difference between the language spoken by men and that spoken by
women is seen in many countries where two languages are straggling
for supremacy in a peaceful way--thus without any question of one
nation exterminating the other or the male part of it. Among German
and Scandinavian immigrants in America the men mix much more with the
English-speaking population, and therefore have better opportunities,
and also more occasion, to learn English than their wives, who remain
more within doors. It is exactly the same among the Basques, where the
school, the military service and daily business relations contribute to
the extinction of Basque in favour of French, and where these factors
operate much more strongly on the male than on the female population:
there are families in which the wife talks Basque, while the husband
does not even understand Basque and does not allow his children to
learn it (Bornecque et Mühlen, _Les Provinces françaises_, 53). Vilhelm
Thomsen informs me that the old Livonian language, which is now nearly
extinct, is kept up with the greatest fidelity by the women, while the
men are abandoning it for Lettish. Albanian women, too, generally know
only Albanian, while the men are more often bilingual.
XIII.--§ 4. Sanskrit Drama.
There are very few traces of real sex dialects in our Aryan languages,
though we have the very curious rule in the old Indian drama that women
talk Prakrit (_prākrta_, the natural or vulgar language) while men have
the privilege of talking Sanskrit (_samskrta_, the adorned language).
The distinction, however, is not one of sex really, but of rank, for
Sanskrit is the language of gods, kings, princes, brahmans, ministers,
chamberlains, dancing-masters and other men in superior positions and
of a very few women of special religious importance, while Prakrit is
spoken by men of an inferior class, like shopkeepers, law officers,
aldermen, bathmen, fishermen and policemen, and by nearly all women.
The difference between the two ‘languages’ is one of degree only: they
are two strata of the same language, one higher, more solemn, stiff and
archaic, and another lower, more natural and familiar, and this easy,
or perhaps we should say slipshod, style is the only one recognized for
ordinary women. The difference may not be greater than that between the
language of a judge and that of a costermonger in a modern novel, or
between Juliet’s and her nurse’s expressions in Shakespeare, and if all
women, even those we should call the ‘heroines’ of the plays, use only
the lower stratum of speech, the reason certainly is that the social
position of women was so inferior that they ranked only with men of the
lower orders and had no share in the higher culture which, with the
refined language, was the privilege of a small class of selected men.
XIII.--§ 5. Conservatism.
As Prakrit is a ‘younger’ and ‘worn-out’ form of Sanskrit, the question
here naturally arises: What is the general attitude of the two sexes
to those changes that are constantly going on in languages? Can they
be ascribed exclusively or predominantly to one of the sexes? Or do
both equally participate in them? An answer that is very often given
is that as a rule women are more conservative than men, and that
they do nothing more than keep to the traditional language which
they have learnt from their parents and hand on to their children,
while innovations are due to the initiative of men. Thus Cicero in an
often-quoted passage says that when he hears his mother-in-law Lælia,
it is to him as if he heard Plautus or Nævius, for it is more natural
for women to keep the old language uncorrupted, as they do not hear
many people’s way of speaking and thus retain what they have first
learnt (_De oratore_, III. 45). This, however, does not hold good in
every respect and in every people. The French engineer, Victor Renault,
who lived for a long time among the Botocudos (in South America) and
compiled vocabularies for two of their tribes, speaks of the ease
with which he could make the savages who accompanied him invent new
words for anything. “One of them called out the word in a loud voice,
as if seized by a sudden idea, and the others would repeat it amid
laughter and excited shouts, and then it was universally adopted. But
the curious thing is that it was nearly always the women who busied
themselves in inventing new words as well as in composing songs,
dirges and rhetorical essays. The word-formations here alluded to are
probably names of objects that the Botocudos had not known previously
... as for horse, _krainejoune_, ‘head-teeth’; for ox, _po-kekri_,
‘foot-cloven’; for donkey, _mgo-jonne-orône_, ‘beast with long ears.’
But well-known objects which have already got a name have often similar
new denominations invented for them, which are then soon accepted by
the family and community and spread more and more” (_v._ Martius,
_Beitr. zur Ethnogr. u. Sprachenkunde Amerikas_, 1867, i. 330).
I may also quote what E. R. Edwards says in his _Étude phonétique de
la langue japonaise_ (Leipzig, 1903, p. 79): “In France and in England
it might be said that women avoid neologisms and are careful not to
go too far away from the written forms: in Southern England the sound
written _wh_ [ʍ] is scarcely ever pronounced except in girls’ schools.
In Japan, on the contrary, women are less conservative than men,
whether in pronunciation or in the selection of words and expressions.
One of the chief reasons is that women have not to the same degree as
men undergone the influence of the written language. As an example of
the liberties which the women take may be mentioned that there is in
the actual pronunciation of Tokyo a strong tendency to get rid of the
sound (_w_), but the women go further in the word _atashi_, which men
pronounce _watashi_ or _watakshi_, ‘I.’ Another tendency noticed in
the language of Japanese women is pretty widely spread among French
and English women, namely, the excessive use of intensive words and
the exaggeration of stress and tone-accent to mark emphasis. Japanese
women also make a much more frequent use than men of the prefixes of
politeness _o-_, _go-_ and _mi-_.”
XIII.--§ 6. Phonetics and Grammar.
In connexion with some of the phonetic changes which have profoundly
modified the English sound system we have express statements by old
grammarians that women had a more advanced pronunciation than men, and
characteristically enough these statements refer to the raising of the
vowels in the direction of [i]; thus in Sir Thomas Smith (1567), who
uses expressions like “mulierculæ quædam delicatiores, et nonnulli qui
volunt isto modo videri loqui urbanius,” and in another place “fœminæ
quædam delicatiores,” further in Mulcaster (1582)[53] and in Milton’s
teacher, Alexander Gill (1621), who speaks about “nostræ Mopsæ, quæ
quidem ita omnia attenuant.”
In France, about 1700, women were inclined to pronounce _e_ instead
of _a_; thus Alemand (1688) mentions _Barnabé_ as “façon de prononcer
mâle” and _Bernabé_ as the pronunciation of “les gens polis et délicats
... les dames surtout”; and Grimarest (1712) speaks of “ces marchandes
du Palais, qui au lieu de _madame_, _boulevart_, etc., prononcent
_medeme_, _boulevert_” (Thurot i. 12 and 9).
There is one change characteristic of many languages in which it seems
as if women have played an important part even if they are not solely
responsible for it: I refer to the weakening of the old fully trilled
tongue-point _r_. I have elsewhere (_Fonetik_, p. 417 ff.) tried to
show that this weakening, which results in various sounds and sometimes
in a complete omission of the sound in some positions, is in the main
a consequence of, or at any rate favoured by, a change in social life:
the old loud trilled point sound is natural and justified when life is
chiefly carried on out-of-doors, but indoor life prefers, on the whole,
less noisy speech habits, and the more refined this domestic life is,
the more all kinds of noises and even speech sounds will be toned down.
One of the results is that this original _r_ sound, the rubadub in the
orchestra of language, is no longer allowed to bombard the ears, but is
softened down in various ways, as we see chiefly in the great cities
and among the educated classes, while the rustic population in many
countries keeps up the old sound with much greater conservatism. Now
we find that women are not unfrequently mentioned in connexion with
this reduction of the trilled _r_; thus in the sixteenth century in
France there was a tendency to leave off the trilling and even to go
further than to the present English untrilled point _r_ by pronouncing
[z] instead, but some of the old grammarians mention this pronunciation
as characteristic of women and a few men who imitate women (Erasmus:
mulierculæ Parisinæ; Sylvius: mulierculæ ... Parrhisinæ, et earum modo
quidam parum viri; Pillot: Parisinæ mulierculæ ... adeo delicatulæ
sunt, ut pro _pere_ dicant _pese_). In the ordinary language there are
a few remnants of this tendency; thus, when by the side of the original
_chaire_ we now have also the form _chaise_, and it is worthy of note
that the latter form is reserved for the everyday signification (Engl.
chair, seat) as belonging more naturally to the speech of women, while
_chaire_ has the more special signification of ‘pulpit, professorial
chair.’ Now the same tendency to substitute [z]--or after a voiceless
sound [s]--for _r_ is found in our own days among the ladies of
Christiania, who will say _gzuelig_ for _gruelig_ and _fsygtelig_ for
_frygtelig_ (Brekke, _Bidrag til dansknorskens lydlære_, 1881, p. 17;
I have often heard the sound myself). And even in far-off Siberia we
find that the Chuckchi women will say _nídzak_ or _nízak_ for the
male _nírak_ ‘two,’ _zërka_ for _rërka_ ‘walrus,’ etc. (Nordqvist; see
fuller quotations in my _Fonetik_, p. 431).
In present-day English there are said to be a few differences in
pronunciation between the two sexes; thus, according to Daniel
Jones, _soft_ is pronounced with a long vowel [sɔ·ft] by men and
with a short vowel [sɔft] by women; similarly [gɛel] is said to be a
special ladies’ pronunciation of _girl_, which men usually pronounce
[gə·l]; cf. also on _wh_ above, p. 243. So far as I have been able to
ascertain, the pronunciation [tʃuldrən] for [tʃildrən] _children_ is
much more frequent in women than in men. It may also be that women
are more inclined to give to the word _waistcoat_ the full long sound
in both syllables, while men, who have occasion to use the word
more frequently, tend to give it the historical form [weskət] (for
the shortening compare _breakfast_). But even if such observations
were multiplied--as probably they might easily be by an attentive
observer--they would be only more or less isolated instances, without
any deeper significance, and on the whole we must say that from the
phonetic point of view there is scarcely any difference between the
speech of men and that of women: the two sexes speak for all intents
and purposes the same language.
XIII.--§ 7. Choice of Words.
But when from the field of phonetics we come to that of vocabulary and
style, we shall find a much greater number of differences, though they
have received very little attention in linguistic works. A few have
been mentioned by Greenough and Kittredge: “The use of _common_ in
the sense of ‘vulgar’ is distinctly a feminine peculiarity. It would
sound effeminate in the speech of a man. So, in a less degree, with
_person_ for ‘woman,’ in contrast to ‘lady.’ _Nice_ for ‘fine’ must
have originated in the same way” (W, p. 54).
Others have told me that men will generally say ‘It’s very _good_
of you,’ where women will say ‘It’s very _kind_ of you.’ But such
small details can hardly be said to be really characteristic of the
two sexes. There is no doubt, however, that women in all countries
are shy of mentioning certain parts of the human body and certain
natural functions by the direct and often rude denominations which
men, and especially young men, prefer when among themselves. Women
will therefore invent innocent and euphemistic words and paraphrases,
which sometimes may in the long run come to be looked upon as the plain
or blunt names, and therefore in their turn have to be avoided and
replaced by more decent words.
In Pinero’s _The Gay Lord Quex_ (p. 116) a lady discovers some
French novels on the table of another lady, and says: “This is a
little--h’m--isn’t it?”--she does not even dare to say the word
‘indecent,’ and has to express the idea in inarticulate language. The
word ‘naked’ is paraphrased in the following description by a woman of
the work of girls in ammunition works: “They have to take off every
stitch from their bodies in one room, and run _in their innocence and
nothing else_ to another room where the special clothing is” (Bennett,
_The Pretty Lady_, 176).
On the other hand, the old-fashioned prudery which prevented ladies
from using such words as _legs_ and _trousers_ (“those manly garments
which are rarely mentioned by name,” says Dickens, _Dombey_, 335) is
now rightly looked upon as exaggerated and more or less comical (cf. my
GS § 247).
There can be no doubt that women exercise a great and universal
influence on linguistic development through their instinctive shrinking
from coarse and gross expressions and their preference for refined and
(in certain spheres) veiled and indirect expressions. In most cases
that influence will be exercised privately and in the bosom of the
family; but there is one historical instance in which a group of women
worked in that direction publicly and collectively; I refer to those
French ladies who in the seventeenth century gathered in the Hôtel de
Rambouillet and are generally known under the name of _Précieuses_.
They discussed questions of spelling and of purity of pronunciation
and diction, and favoured all kinds of elegant paraphrases by which
coarse and vulgar words might be avoided. In many ways this movement
was the counterpart of the literary wave which about that time was
inundating Europe under various names--Gongorism in Spain, Marinism
in Italy, Euphuism in England; but the Précieuses went further than
their male confrères in desiring to influence everyday language. When,
however, they used such expressions as, for ‘nose,’ ‘the door of the
brain,’ for ‘broom’ ‘the instrument of cleanness,’ and for ‘shirt’ ‘the
constant companion of the dead and the living’ (la compagne perpétuelle
des morts et des vivants), and many others, their affectation called
down on their heads a ripple of laughter, and their endeavours would
now have been forgotten but for the immortal satire of Molière in _Les
Précieuses ridicules_ and _Les Femmes savantes_. But apart from such
exaggerations the feminine point of view is unassailable, and there is
reason to congratulate those nations, the English among them, in which
the social position of women has been high enough to secure greater
purity and freedom from coarseness in language than would have been the
case if men had been the sole arbiters of speech.
Among the things women object to in language must be specially
mentioned anything that smacks of swearing[54]; where a man will say
“He told an infernal lie,” a woman will rather say, “He told a most
dreadful fib.” Such euphemistic substitutes for the simple word ‘hell’
as ‘the other place,’ ‘a very hot’ or ‘a very uncomfortable place’
probably originated with women. They will also use _ever_ to add
emphasis to an interrogative pronoun, as in “Whoever told you that?” or
“Whatever do you mean?” and avoid the stronger ‘who the devil’ or ‘what
the dickens.’ For surprise we have the feminine exclamations ‘Good
gracious,’ ‘Gracious me,’ ‘Goodness gracious,’ ‘Dear me’ by the side of
the more masculine ‘Good heavens,’ ‘Great Scott.’ ‘To be sure’ is said
to be more frequent with women than with men. Such instances might be
multiplied, but these may suffice here. It will easily be seen that we
have here civilized counterparts of what was above mentioned as sexual
tabu; but it is worth noting that the interdiction in these cases is
ordained by the women themselves, or perhaps rather by the older among
them, while the young do not always willingly comply.
Men will certainly with great justice object that there is a danger of
the language becoming languid and insipid if we are always to content
ourselves with women’s expressions, and that vigour and vividness
count for something. Most boys and many men have a dislike to some
words merely because they feel that they are used by everybody and on
every occasion: they want to avoid what is commonplace and banal and
to replace it by new and fresh expressions, whose very newness imparts
to them a flavour of their own. Men thus become the chief renovators
of language, and to them are due those changes by which we sometimes
see one term replace an older one, to give way in turn to a still newer
one, and so on. Thus we see in English that the old verb _weorpan_,
corresponding to G. _werfen_, was felt as too weak and therefore
supplanted by _cast_, which was taken from Scandinavian; after some
centuries _cast_ was replaced by the stronger _throw_, and this now, in
the parlance of boys especially, is giving way to stronger expressions
like _chuck_ and _fling_. The old verbs, or at any rate _cast_, may
be retained in certain applications, more particularly in some fixed
combinations and in figurative significations, but it is now hardly
possible to say, as Shakespeare does, “They cast their caps up.” Many
such innovations on their first appearance are counted as slang, and
some never make their way into received speech; but I am not in this
connexion concerned with the distinction between slang and recognized
language, except in so far as the inclination or disinclination to
invent and to use slang is undoubtedly one of the “human secondary
sexual characters.” This is not invalidated by the fact that quite
recently, with the rise of the feminist movement, many young ladies
have begun to imitate their brothers in that as well as in other
respects.
XIII.--§ 8. Vocabulary.
This trait is indissolubly connected with another: the vocabulary of a
woman as a rule is much less extensive than that of a man. Women move
preferably in the central field of language, avoiding everything that
is out of the way or bizarre, while men will often either coin new
words or expressions or take up old-fashioned ones, if by that means
they are enabled, or think they are enabled, to find a more adequate
or precise expression for their thoughts. Woman as a rule follows the
main road of language, where man is often inclined to turn aside into a
narrow footpath or even to strike out a new path for himself. Most of
those who are in the habit of reading books in foreign languages will
have experienced a much greater average difficulty in books written
by male than by female authors, because they contain many more rare
words, dialect words, technical terms, etc. Those who want to learn a
foreign language will therefore always do well at the first stage to
read many ladies’ novels, because they will there continually meet with
just those everyday words and combinations which the foreigner is above
all in need of, what may be termed the indispensable small-change of a
language.
This may be partly explicable from the education of women, which has
up to quite recent times been less comprehensive and technical than
that of men. But this does not account for everything, and certain
experiments made by the American professor Jastrow would tend to show
that we have here a trait that is independent of education. He asked
twenty-five university students of each sex, belonging to the same
class and thus in possession of the same preliminary training, to write
down as rapidly as possible a hundred words, and to record the time.
Words in sentences were not allowed. There were thus obtained 5,000
words, and of these many were of course the same. But the community of
thought was greater in the women; while the men used 1,375 different
words, their female class-mates used only 1,123. Of 1,266 unique words
used, 29·8 per cent. were male, only 20·8 per cent. female. The group
into which the largest number of the men’s words fell was the animal
kingdom; the group into which the largest number of the women’s words
fell was wearing apparel and fabrics; while the men used only 53
words belonging to the class of foods, the women used 179. “In general
the feminine traits revealed by this study are an attention to the
immediate surroundings, to the finished product, to the ornamental,
the individual, and the concrete; while the masculine preference is
for the more remote, the constructive, the useful, the general and the
abstract.” (See Havelock Ellis, _Man and Woman_, 4th ed., London, 1904,
p. 189.)
Another point mentioned by Jastrow is the tendency to select words
that rime and alliterative words; both these tendencies were decidedly
more marked in men than in women. This shows what we may also notice
in other ways, that men take greater interest in words as such and in
their acoustic properties, while women pay less attention to that side
of words and merely take them as they are, as something given once
for all. Thus it comes that some men are confirmed punsters, while
women are generally slow to see any point in a pun and scarcely ever
perpetrate one themselves. Or, to get to something of greater value:
the science of language has very few votaries among women, in spite
of the fact that foreign languages, long before the reform of female
education, belonged to those things which women learnt best in and out
of schools, because, like music and embroidery, they were reckoned
among the specially feminine ‘accomplishments.’
Woman is linguistically quicker than man: quicker to learn, quicker
to hear, and quicker to answer. A man is slower: he hesitates, he
chews the cud to make sure of the taste of words, and thereby comes to
discover similarities with and differences from other words, both in
sound and in sense, thus preparing himself for the appropriate use of
the fittest noun or adjective.
XIII.--§ 9. Adverbs.
While there are a few adjectives, such as _pretty_ and _nice_, that
might be mentioned as used more extensively by women than by men, there
are greater differences with regard to adverbs. Lord Chesterfield
wrote (_The World_, December 5, 1754): “Not contented with enriching
our language by words absolutely new, my fair countrywomen have gone
still farther, and improved it by the application and extension of old
ones to various and very different significations. They take a word
and change it, like a guinea into shillings for pocket-money, to be
employed in the several occasional purposes of the day. For instance,
the adjective _vast_ and its adverb _vastly_ mean anything, and are
the fashionable words of the most fashionable people. A fine woman ...
is _vastly_ obliged, or _vastly_ offended, _vastly_ glad, or _vastly_
sorry. Large objects are _vastly_ great, small ones are _vastly_
little; and I had lately the pleasure to hear a fine woman pronounce,
by a happy metonymy, a very small gold snuff-box, that was produced in
company, to be _vastly_ pretty, because it was so _vastly_ little.”
Even if that particular adverb to which Lord Chesterfield objected
has now to a great extent gone out of fashion, there is no doubt that
he has here touched on a distinctive trait: the fondness of women for
hyperbole will very often lead the fashion with regard to adverbs
of intensity, and these are very often used with disregard of their
proper meaning, as in German _riesig klein_, English _awfully pretty_,
_terribly nice_, French _rudement joli_, _affreusement délicieux_,
Danish _rædsom morsom_ (horribly amusing), Russian _strast’ kakoy
lovkiy_ (terribly able), etc. _Quite_, also, in the sense of ‘very,’
as in ‘she was quite charming; it makes me quite angry,’ is, according
to Fitzedward Hall, due to the ladies. And I suspect that _just sweet_
(as in Barrie: “Grizel thought it was just sweet of him”) is equally
characteristic of the usage of the fair sex.
There is another intensive which has also something of the eternally
feminine about it, namely _so_. I am indebted to Stoffel (Int. 101)
for the following quotation from _Punch_ (January 4, 1896): “This
little adverb is a great favourite with ladies, in conjunction with an
adjective. For instance, they are very fond of using such expressions
as ‘He is _so_ charming!’ ‘It is _so_ lovely!’ etc.” Stoffel adds the
following instances of strongly intensive _so_ as highly characteristic
of ladies’ usage: ‘Thank you _so_ much!’ ‘It was _so_ kind of you to
think of it!’ ‘That’s _so_ like you!’ ‘I’m _so_ glad you’ve come!’ ‘The
bonnet is _so_ lovely!’
The explanation of this characteristic feminine usage is, I think,
that women much more often than men break off without finishing their
sentences, because they start talking without having thought out what
they are going to say; the sentence ‘I’m so glad you’ve come’ really
requires some complement in the shape of a clause with _that_, ‘so glad
that I really must kiss you,’ or, ‘so glad that I must treat you to
something extra,’ or whatever the consequence may be. But very often it
is difficult in a hurry to hit upon something adequate to say, and ‘so
glad that I cannot express it’ frequently results in the inexpressible
remaining unexpressed, and when that experiment has been repeated time
after time, the linguistic consequence is that a strongly stressed _so_
acquires the force of ‘very much indeed.’ It is the same with _such_,
as in the following two extracts from a modern novel (in both it is a
lady who is speaking): “Poor Kitty! she has been in _such_ a state of
mind,” and “Do you know that you look _such_ a duck this afternoon....
This hat suits you _so_--you are _such_ a _grande dame_ in it.” Exactly
the same thing has happened with Danish _så_ and _sådan_, G. _so_ and
_solch_; also with French _tellement_, though there perhaps not to the
same extent as in English.
We have the same phenomenon with _to a degree_, which properly requires
to be supplemented with something that tells us what the degree is, but
is frequently left by itself, as in ‘His second marriage was irregular
to a degree.’
XIII.--§ 10. Periods.
The frequency with which women thus leave their exclamatory sentences
half-finished might be exemplified from many passages in our novelists
and dramatists. I select a few quotations. The first is from the
beginning of _Vanity Fair_: “This almost caused Jemima to faint with
terror. ‘Well, I never,’ said she. ‘What an audacious’--emotion
prevented her from completing either sentence.” Next from one of
Hankin’s plays. “Mrs. Eversleigh: I must say! (but words fail her).”
And finally from Compton Mackenzie’s _Poor Relations_: “‘The trouble
you must have taken,’ Hilda exclaimed.” These quotations illustrate
types of sentences which are becoming so frequent that they would seem
soon to deserve a separate chapter in modern grammars, ‘Did you ever?’
‘Well, I never!’ being perhaps the most important of these ‘stop-short’
or ‘pull-up’ sentences, as I think they might be termed.
These sentences are the linguistic symptoms of a peculiarity of
feminine psychology which has not escaped observation. Meredith says
of one of his heroines: “She thought in blanks, as girls do, and some
women,” and Hardy singularizes one of his by calling her “that novelty
among women--one who finished a thought before beginning the sentence
which was to convey it.”
The same point is seen in the typical way in which the two sexes build
up their sentences and periods; but here, as so often in this chapter,
we cannot establish absolute differences, but only preferences that may
be broken in a great many instances and yet are characteristic of the
sexes as such. If we compare long periods as constructed by men and by
women, we shall in the former find many more instances of intricate or
involute structures with clause within clause, a relative clause in the
middle of a conditional clause or vice versa, with subordination and
sub-subordination, while the typical form of long feminine periods is
that of co-ordination, one sentence or clause being added to another
on the same plane and the gradation between the respective ideas being
marked not grammatically, but emotionally, by stress and intonation,
and in writing by underlining. In learned terminology we may say that
men are fond of hypotaxis and women of parataxis. Or we may use the
simile that a male period is often like a set of Chinese boxes, one
within another, while a feminine period is like a set of pearls joined
together on a string of _ands_ and similar words. In a Danish comedy a
young girl is relating what has happened to her at a ball, when she is
suddenly interrupted by her brother, who has slyly taken out his watch
and now exclaims: “I declare! you have said _and then_ fifteen times in
less than two and a half minutes.”
XIII.--§ 11. General Characteristics.
The greater rapidity of female thought is shown linguistically, among
other things, by the frequency with which a woman will use a pronoun
like _he_ or _she_, not of the person last mentioned, but of somebody
else to whom her thoughts have already wandered, while a man with his
slower intellect will think that she is still moving on the same path.
The difference in rapidity of perception has been tested experimentally
by Romanes: the same paragraph was presented to various well-educated
persons, who were asked to read it as rapidly as they could, ten
seconds being allowed for twenty lines. As soon as the time was up the
paragraph was removed, and the reader immediately wrote down all that
he or she could remember of it. It was found that women were usually
more successful than men in this test. Not only were they able to
read more quickly than the men, but they were able to give a better
account of the paragraph as a whole. One lady, for instance, could
read exactly four times as fast as her husband, and even then give
a better account than he of that small portion of the paragraph he
had alone been able to read. But it was found that this rapidity was
no proof of intellectual power, and some of the slowest readers were
highly distinguished men. Ellis (_Man and W._ 195) explains this in
this way: with the quick reader it is as though every statement were
admitted immediately and without inspection to fill the vacant chambers
of the mind, while with the slow reader every statement undergoes an
instinctive process of cross-examination; every new fact seems to stir
up the accumulated stores of facts among which it intrudes, and so
impedes rapidity of mental action.
This reminds me of one of Swift’s “Thoughts on Various Subjects”: “The
common fluency of speech in many men, and most women, is owing to the
scarcity of matter, and scarcity of words; for whoever is a master of
language, and hath a mind full of ideas, will be apt in speaking to
hesitate upon the choice of both: whereas common speakers have only one
set of ideas, and one set of words to clothe them in; and these are
always ready at the mouth. So people come faster out of a church when
it is almost empty, than when a crowd is at the door” (_Works_, Dublin,
1735, i. 305).
The volubility of women has been the subject of innumerable jests: it
has given rise to popular proverbs in many countries,[55] as well as
to Aurora Leigh’s resigned “A woman’s function plainly is--to talk”
and Oscar Wilde’s sneer, “Women are a decorative sex. They never have
anything to say, but they say it charmingly.” A woman’s thought is no
sooner formed than uttered. Says Rosalind, “Do you not know I am a
woman? when I think, I must speak” (_As You Like It_, III. 2. 264). And
in a modern novel a young girl says: “I talk so as to find out what I
think. Don’t you? Some things one can’t judge of till one hears them
spoken” (Housman, _John of Jingalo_, 346).
The superior readiness of speech of women is a concomitant of the fact
that their vocabulary is smaller and more central than that of men. But
this again is connected with another indubitable fact, that women do
not reach the same extreme points as men, but are nearer the average
in most respects. Havelock Ellis, who establishes this in various
fields, rightly remarks that the statement that genius is undeniably
of more frequent occurrence among men than among women has sometimes
been regarded by women as a slur upon their sex, but that it does not
appear that women have been equally anxious to find fallacies in the
statement that idiocy is more common among men. Yet the two statements
must be taken together. Genius is more common among men by virtue of
the same general tendency by which idiocy is more common among men. The
two facts are but two aspects of a larger zoological fact--the greater
variability of the male (_Man and W._ 420).
In language we see this very clearly: the highest linguistic genius
and the lowest degree of linguistic imbecility are very rarely found
among women. The greatest orators, the most famous literary artists,
have been men; but it may serve as a sort of consolation to the other
sex that there are a much greater number of men than of women who
cannot put two words together intelligibly, who stutter and stammer and
hesitate, and are unable to find suitable expressions for the simplest
thought. Between these two extremes the woman moves with a sure and
supple tongue which is ever ready to find words and to pronounce them
in a clear and intelligible manner.
Nor are the reasons far to seek why such differences should have
developed. They are mainly dependent on the division of labour enjoined
in primitive tribes and to a great extent also among more civilized
peoples. For thousands of years the work that especially fell to men
was such as demanded an intense display of energy for a comparatively
short period, mainly in war and in hunting. Here, however, there was
not much occasion to talk, nay, in many circumstances talk might even
be fraught with danger. And when that rough work was over, the man
would either sleep or idle his time away, inert and torpid, more or
less in silence. Woman, on the other hand, had a number of domestic
occupations which did not claim such an enormous output of spasmodic
energy. To her was at first left not only agriculture, and a great
deal of other work which in more peaceful times was taken over by men;
but also much that has been till quite recently her almost exclusive
concern--the care of the children, cooking, brewing, baking, sewing,
washing, etc.,--things which for the most part demanded no deep
thought, which were performed in company and could well be accompanied
with a lively chatter. Lingering effects of this state of things are
seen still, though great social changes are going on in our times which
may eventually modify even the linguistic relations of the two sexes.
FOOTNOTES:
[53] “_Ai_ is the man’s diphthong, and soundeth full: _ei_, the
woman’s, and soundeth finish [i.e. fineish] in the same both sense,
and vse, _a woman is deintie, and feinteth soon, the man fainteth
not bycause he is nothing daintie_.” Thus what is now distinctive of
refined as opposed to vulgar pronunciation was then characteristic of
the fair sex.
[54] There are great differences with regard to swearing between
different nations; but I think that in those countries and in those
circles in which swearing is common it is found much more extensively
among men than among women: this at any rate is true of Denmark. There
is, however, a general social movement against swearing, and now there
are many men who never swear. A friend writes to me: “The best English
men hardly swear at all.... I imagine some of our fashionable women now
swear as much as the men they consort with.”
[55] “Où femme y a, silence n’y a.” “Deux femmes font un plaid, trois
un grand caquet, quatre un plein marché.” “Due donne e un’ oca fanno
una fiera” (Venice). “The tongue is the sword of a woman, and she never
lets it become rusty” (China). “The North Sea will sooner be found
wanting in water than a woman at a loss for a word” (Jutland).