IEV improvements: add "masculine/feminine" grammatical gender

[ronaldtse]

From IEC:

It is necessary to add the value "masculine/feminine" to cater for the decision taken by the Académie française, which adopted a report about the "féminisation des noms de métiers et de fonctions". The rapport is available here: http://www.academie-francaise.fr/sites/academie-francaise.fr/files/rapport_feminisation_noms_de_metier_et_de_fonction.pdf

EXAMPLES (from IEC)

internaute, m/f [IEV 732-09-05]

responsable de sécurité laser, m/f [IEC 60825-1:2014, 3.50]

[opoudjis]

Already addressed in Designation:

  +gender: DesignationGender[0..*]

In the general case, any noun with a gender may have more than one gender.

[skalee]

For the record, m/f gender is called common in our data model, see #20. And the relationship should be:

+gender: DesignationGender[0..1]

[opoudjis]

No, there are languages with nouns which can have multiple genders; happens a fair bit in Ancient Greek.

[strogonoff]

@opoudjis

Grammatical traits supported by Glossarist allow optional noun gender to be masculine, feminine, common or neuter. That seems to strike the best balance between consensus in the field, suitable flexibility across languages, while disallowing creating structures that make no sense in real world.

If there is a source about Greek having differing grammatical gender requirements, I am all ears.

Or perhaps we should leave this schema to control bodies?

[ronaldtse]

And @skalee will be familiar with all the grammar-related attributes in the IEV. I do not think we can come up with a single "international grammar model" because different bodies may want to have different types.

Regarding this particular issue, the exact concept is "m/f" (m + f), not "common"...

[strogonoff]

@ronaldtse, we have your and Nick’s claims here, versus (supposedly) the consensus captured by Wikipedia page on grammatical gender. (Now, of course anyone can edit Wikipedia, but presumably people who are maintaining that page had investigated this issue.) I believe the "m/f" shortcut is an artifact of people in charge of IEC not having the relevant linguistical background (which they are not really supposed to have), and in fact stands for common and neuter genders. There is no m/f concept as such.

[strogonoff]

If I am wrong in my interpretation of the source, I'd be happy to be corrected

[skalee]

Regarding this particular issue, the exact concept is "m/f" (m + f), not "common"...

As far as I understand after clarifications from @strogonoff in #20, linguists typically distinguish four genders: masculine, feminine, neuter, and common. This is enough to describe basic grammatical differences between nouns, adjectives, etc. in most languages. Common gender describes situation when language evolution made masculine/feminine grammatical difference disappeared for some group of words. To me it looks exactly like what happened to genders in Dutch.

Still, we need to display it as m/f for Dutch terms on IEV pages, or whatever is most appropriate in local language. And I'm pretty sure we'll have more local display rules, e.g. feminine in Polish as ż, feminine in Serbian as ж, plurality annotation always present in Serbian.

Also, I'm pretty sure that at some point we'll have to extend our models with more grammatical contrasts or gender subclasses, for example animate vs inanimate (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender#Slavic_languages).

[ronaldtse]

@strogonoff it would be dangerous to second-guess IEC's decision:

I believe the "m/f" shortcut is an artifact of people in charge of IEC not having the relevant linguistical background (which they are not really supposed to have), and in fact stands for common and neuter genders. There is no m/f concept as such.

This decision was adopted by the IEC Central Office, proposed by IEC/TC 1 ("Terminology") and IEC's Terminology Manager, who are all French literate. I would consider them closer to linguists than most of us, except @opoudjis who has a linguistics PhD 😉

[skalee]

For reference, all terms in IEV spreadsheets which have m/f or f/m gender:

select ievref, language, term, termattribute
from concepts
where termattribute like '%m/f%' or termattribute like '%f/m%';

IEVREF      LANGUAGE    TERM        TERMATTRIBUTE
----------  ----------  ----------  --------------------------
102-03-23   nl BE       norm        <van een vector> m/f
102-04-22   nl BE       abscis      m/f
102-04-30   nl BE       radiaal     m/f
102-04-47   nl BE       steradiaal  m/f
102-06-10   nl BE       orde        <van een vierkante matr
102-06-22   nl BE       norm van e  m/f
732-09-05   fr          internaute  m/f

I've made similar query for synonyms too, but it returned the empty result set.

[skalee]

@strogonoff it would be dangerous to second-guess IEC's decision:

I believe the "m/f" shortcut is an artifact of people in charge of IEC not having the relevant linguistical background (which they are not really supposed to have), and in fact stands for common and neuter genders. There is no m/f concept as such.

This decision was adopted by the IEC Central Office, proposed by IEC/TC 1 ("Terminology") and IEC's Terminology Manager, who are all French literate. I would consider them closer to linguists than most of us, except @opoudjis who has a linguistics PhD 😉

Wiktionary in Dutch also annotates some nouns with m/f gender (actually v/m, in which v stands for feminine), for example https://nl.wiktionary.org/wiki/abscis or https://nl.wiktionary.org/wiki/radiaal.

That said, the question is not about presentation, but about our data model. And we have two options: [masculine, feminine] array or common single item, in my understanding both meaning exactly the same. Unless other gender mixes are possible (e.g. m+n) and unless gender order matters (m+f vs f+m) I support the idea of representing them as common, because it's simpler.

[strogonoff]

Display does not affect the schema, so we can show common as "m/f" or whatever localized version iff we confirm that it is (1) indeed the same and that (2) it *should* be shown as m/f (which I doubt a little).

…

On 21 Jan 2021, at 8:06 PM, Sebastian Skałacki ***@***.***> wrote:  For reference, all terms in IEV spreadsheets which have m/f or f/m gender: select ievref, language, term, termattribute from concepts where termattribute like '%m/f%' or termattribute like '%f/m%'; IEVREF LANGUAGE TERM TERMATTRIBUTE ---------- ---------- ---------- -------------------------- 102-03-23 nl BE norm <van een vector> m/f 102-04-22 nl BE abscis m/f 102-04-30 nl BE radiaal m/f 102-04-47 nl BE steradiaal m/f 102-06-10 nl BE orde <van een vierkante matr 102-06-22 nl BE norm van e m/f 732-09-05 fr internaute m/f I've made similar query for synonyms too, but it returned the empty result set. — You are receiving this because you were mentioned. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub, or unsubscribe.

[skalee]

it should be shown as m/f (which I doubt a little).

@strogonoff Many dictionaries use m/f or f/m to denote what you call common gender, including Wiktionary. I'm pretty sure this is how common gender is supposed to be displayed in IEV too. Or maybe as v/m which is the same but in Dutch.

So-called common gender describes situation when given word is either f or m, but in modern grammar it doesn't really matter because there is no difference in declension for both these genders.