The gender of a key
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Julesy's knowledge of linguistics is not restricted to East Asia:
This video is titled "You are the Language you Speak: Evidence for Linguistic Relativity" (9/30/24). Julesy comments: "In this video, I provide evidence to show that there is a link between the grammatical gender of inanimate objects and the visual connection we make with those objects in real life.*
*The study has been replicated, but results show varied effects of linguistic relativity.
On her Instagram channel, Julesy states:
According to MIT researchers*, it all depends on your native language. In German, key is a masculine noun, so German speakers think of key as “useful” and “jagged.” In Spanish, key is a feminine noun, so Spanish speakers think of key as “delicate” and “pretty.”
What do you think? Is this some crazy discovery or complete BS?
*Boroditsky, L., Schmidt, L., & Phillips, W. (2002). Can quirks of a language affect the way you think? Spanish and German speakers’ ideas about the genders of objects. Manuscript submitted for publication.
Selected readings
- "Sapir-Whorf redux" (5/15/25)
- "Linguistic relativity: snow and horses" (4/15/25)
Yves Rehbein said,
October 22, 2025 @ 3:20 pm
In German, a key has a beard, so I'll have to say it's maskulin.
I understand that many Asian languages have classifiers especially in counting e.g. for long round things (if you know what I mean), so a simple bipartite system in comparison with Spanish is likely insufficient
The one that always get's me is sun vs. moon – I am delighted that's what she starts with.
Pamela said,
October 22, 2025 @ 3:52 pm
This is a good one.
Charles Antaki said,
October 22, 2025 @ 4:02 pm
I don't think she does that (or that the study shows that, if that's what it claims).
At best it shows a connection between the name of the object and the kind of adjectives that it conjures up in a word-association task.
That's not the same as a "visual connection". That should mean something like noticing/being aware of the brightness of the key rather than its hardness, and so on (the more exciting Whorfian case).
Stephen Goranson said,
October 22, 2025 @ 6:11 pm
I would gladly hear Julesy, a great teacher, discuss anything she finds interesting about language, but this one, of the ones I know, in my view, is the least persuasive. Usually she relies on more than one publication. A prior question is why Spanish or German assigned genders in the first place. Once done, associations may be affected–but to what extent?
Chris Button said,
October 22, 2025 @ 6:33 pm
It's surprising she doesn't make any connection with classifiers in Chinese to then debunk the idea that grammatical gender has anything to do with biological gender.
AntC said,
October 22, 2025 @ 6:41 pm
Colour me unconvinced. I remember being perplexed why Latin 'nauta' (= sailor) is Feminine, when presumably all Roman sailors were male. Does it indicate something about being confined in a small space for lengthy voyages? (The Latin master of course wasn't going to entertain any such discussion.)
To probe this we need research on synonyms within the same language but of different gender. French une bête vs un animal. Most names for large scary species are masculine, excepting the souris that roared. (English 'beast' I'd associate more with masculine/aggressive/scary qualities than 'animal' being more neutral, although not particularly feminine.)
Christian Horn said,
October 22, 2025 @ 9:19 pm
Very interesting topic.
As a native German speaker, I notice that I have the gender of the words readily available if for example a foreign language learner asks me about them, but I would not have thought that the gender of words is impacting me this much.
Victor Mair said,
October 22, 2025 @ 9:35 pm
I think that grammatical gender is one of the deepest, darkest mysteries of IE languages, and I'm grateful to Julesy for helping us to contemplate that fact.
Jonathan Smith said,
October 22, 2025 @ 9:38 pm
As with many Whorf-adjacent possibilities, there probably isn't much to it and there probably isn't nothing to it. Same is definitely true with "classifiers": e.g. Mandarin one "sheet" face 一张脸, three "strips" dog 三条狗, etc., etc., can't have literally zero impact on one's thinking regarding faces, dogs…
Robert Weaver said,
October 22, 2025 @ 10:56 pm
David Shariatmadari talks about this research in Don't Believe a Word. From memory, he also refers to the research that people speaking object-gendering languages find it easier to recall a gender appropriate name for an object than otherwise e.g Spanish speakers are quicker to recall the name of a table if you told them it was called Rosalita than if the name you gave was Juan.
AlexB said,
October 23, 2025 @ 12:45 am
The fact that the most phallic object in Paris is called LA tour Eiffel makes me sceptical.
Martin said,
October 23, 2025 @ 3:02 am
@AntC 'nauta' is of course not feminine but first-declension masculine, like 'agricola' et al, which is probably why your Latin teacher didn't want to have the discussion!
AntC said,
October 23, 2025 @ 4:23 am
@Martin, then why would my Latin master say feminine? And emphasise the point — viz. that it's not like agricola? (Indeed it is first declension, many of which are feminine, but I see no "of course" anything. [**]) Why does wiktionary say "m or f"? Did its gender change at some point? (We were taught very much Caesar-era Latin, not Church/Mediaeval.)
[**] The correlation of declension with gender is a tendency, not a rule, was what I was taught.
There's an answer here says "nauta, sailor, is feminine", not that it's supported by citations, neither would I give Quora much credence.
The nau(t)- words derive from Greek 'ship', which is feminine.
Chris Button said,
October 23, 2025 @ 5:55 am
She also doesn't address how the grammatical gender is affected by the form of the word.
Take "o samba", which is masculine in Portuguese and hails from West Africa. It is borrowed into Spanish as "la samba", which is feminine on account of its form (compare "la gamba").
I also recall an Italian once complaining how the composer Ennio Morricone referred to "la samba" (feminine, as it is apparently usually treated–I dont speak Italian myself) rather than "il samba" (masculine).
Martin said,
October 23, 2025 @ 8:47 am
@Antc your teacher was mistaken, I'm afraid. It is exactly like 'agricola', in that it's masculine. Sure, it can in principle be feminine as well — there is no distinct word for a female sailor — but you'll usually see it in combination with masculine adjectives, as in some of the classical examples here:
https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=nauta&fromdoc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0059
Horace writes 'pavidus nauta' not '*pavida'.
Greek 'nautes' has the same feature in that it's in first declension, in which most nouns are feminine. But there are many more agentive Greek nouns in this group than the handful in Latin. In both languages gender is not defined by the declension but by the agreement with other parts of speech, which is why it's possible to say quite clearly that nauta is masculine.
Coby said,
October 23, 2025 @ 8:52 am
AntC: The Latin nauta comes from a dialectal Greek word whose Attic form is ναύτης, just like poeta and all the -ista words, and is of course masculine, whatever your teacher may or may not have said.
If you want to find a language where a word's gender is independent of the sex of the person described by it, it's French, in which a woman president is addressed as Madame le Président, and a sentinel is une sentinelle even if male.
Rodger C said,
October 23, 2025 @ 9:22 am
"Ille agricola illum quercum ascendit." Yes, trees have masculine (or rather o-stem) endings and feminine gender.
Bob Ladd said,
October 23, 2025 @ 2:35 pm
@Rodger C:
Was your example supposed to be "Ille agricola illam quercum ascendit." ?
DDeden said,
October 23, 2025 @ 9:51 pm
In Malay, key is neither masculine nor feminine, but infantile.
Kunci : lock
Anak kunci : key (anak = baby, child of)
An aside, I'm exploring the etymology of 'tall', as I find those at etymology online, wiktionary and OED to be very unlikely. Instead I link tall to tally, particularly to the notching of long sticks, held upright to read. https://groups.io/g/1WorldofWords/topic/115591957#msg731