Shulem wrote: ↑Fri Apr 22, 2022 1:31 pm
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that I don't think ancient (600 BC) Jews or ship captains in Israel referred to their vessels using the feminine pronouns of
she &
her in a literal sense. There is no reason for me to believe that.
The problem here is an over-literal reading of the grammatical terminology "masculine" and "feminine." The use of "she" with ships is not a question of grammar but of usage. As grammatical category, gender only occasionally overlaps with biological gender, and by definition that is only in the case of animate beings in most languages that have masculine/feminine distinction in their nouns. Instead of "masculine" and "feminine," we could use "Category 1" and "Category 2" or use some other scheme. We use "masculine" and "feminine" in grammatical description because of that occasional overlap with biological gender but largely out of tradition; at the head of that tradition were grammarians who were trying to describe their languages to themselves. In trying to classify nouns, they used a very concrete, immediate style of language drawing from their everyday experience (whereas modern people prefer an abstract style and numbers), and so they looked at nouns ending in "a" or whatever and said to themselves, "you know what? All the women I know have names that end in that, so I'm gonna call those 'womanish' nouns." Adjectives modifying them were also "womanish," as were the pronouns. Dr. Steuss is correct about the Hebrew word for ship being feminine, and any pronoun referring to it would also be feminine, as would any adjectives modifying the noun. So, yes, in fact in Hebrew the pronoun referring to a ship would always be "hī" (literally, "she" in English) which is the feminine pronoun, because the word for ship was grammatically feminine. But I think you are absolutely right, Shulem, that the average Hebrew speaker would not have thought of it as literally a feminine object (those Hebrew speakers out there reading this must surely have marveled, as I have, that in Hebrew "he" is she and "who" is he and "me" is who...someone will get that pun). It would be absurd to translate it as "she" then, and certainly you could not do this consistently without sounding ridiculous: every city in such a translation would be a "she," as would the earth, chariots, many abstract concepts, and in general every other feminine noun in Hebrew.
Added to this, the English of Joseph Smith and/or the divine Early Modern English of the Book of Mormon did not have gendered nouns. Grammatical gender has not existed in English nouns for roughly 800 years, depending on the dialect of Early Middle English you are looking at, and even when they did, in the Old English period, the word for "ship" was neuter (although the word for "boat" was variously masculine or feminine), as it still is in German. The modern English use of "she" for ships or other objects is a personfication dating to the eighteenth century, not a reflection of grammatical gender (which English doesn't have, except in pronouns). In other words, it is not a question of something inherent to the language (its grammar) or something that has survived translation from a language with gendered nouns; rather, it is a reflection of how the English language is used (pragmatics), so "she" for "ship" in the Book of Mormon reflects the usage of the translator/composer.
Regarding the question posed about "reformed Egyptian," who knows? We should check Sindarin and Quenya while we're at it. Yet the word for ship in Demotic Egyptian (
ḏj) was grammatically masculine, as was that in Late Egyptian (
ḏꜣy) that preceded it, although there were other words for water-traveling vessels that were feminine (e.g.
ḏꜣt). Interestingly, the English word "barge" ultimately goes back through French, Latin, Greek, and Coptic to the Egyptian word
bꜣjr. So there is that for the apologist playpen: another Egyptian connection to the Jaredites alongside "deseret."
Shouldn't we be thinking about Uto-Aztecan though? Unfortunately, I suspect that nouns did not have gender in the Proto-Uto-Aztecan spoken by the Nephites and Lamanites (nouns don't in Classical Nahuatl, Ute, Shoshone, or in Hopi, but I do not know enough about any other U-A languages). As in many languages of Native America (e.g. Algic and Iroquoian languages), animacy vs. inanimacy is the major distinction in nouns, although there also many other oppositional categories that are extremely interesting. So, while the Stubbs thesis would have us believe that Aramaic + Hebrew + Egyptian had effect even on the verbal system, the category of grammatical gender (which all have) had no effect on Proto-Uto-Aztecan, which had noun animacy/inanimacy as well as other noun categories (which Aramaic, Hebrew, and Egyptian do not have).
Oh but perhaps Arabic, which Lehi also must have spoken, had some influence here, since animacy vs. inanimacy is a distinction for noun plurals (noun plurals of inanimate nouns are treated grammatically as feminine singular). And maybe John Robertson could step in to tell us whether nouns in Mayan languages had gender, and whether "ships" were "she." It's not an Uto-Aztecan language but we might find something else to put in the playpen.
