Keep the cucumbers away from the tomatoes
From
an AP
story by Todd Pitman, 4/20/07, printed in the
Houston Chronicle under the head
"Iraqi insurgents now fighting each other":
American commanders cite al-Qaida's
severe brand of Islam, which is so extreme that in Baqouba, al-Qaida
has warned street vendors not to place tomatoes beside cucumbers
because the vegetables are different genders, Col. David Sutherland
said.
Ok, it's a bit dubious, but on the other hand, I've had to confront
some pretty strange ideas, and this one is not even close to the edge;
it looks like a more-or-less standard confusion of sex and grammatical
gender.
(Original tip from Ron Hardin on sci.lang, who heard about it
here.)
Here's the idea: ordinary people learn something about the conventional
grammatical terminology for their language, and they assume it maps
pretty directly onto the real world. If the terminology includes
grammatical genders labeled "feminine" and "masculine", they figure
those labels pick out females and males, respectively (and, of course,
sometimes they do).
Now in Arabic, as various Language Log informants tell me, the ordinary
words are (in transliteration):
Modern Standard Tuma:Ta / Iraqi Tama:Ta 'tomato' (fem.)
khiya:r '(smooth salad)
cucumber' (masc.)
so that juxtaposing the two vegetables in public would be an indecent
mixing of the sexes, if you believe in that "grammatical gender = sex"
idea. The fact that, chopped up, tomatoes and cucumbers mingle in
salads all the time throughout the Arab world -- and even in Palo Alto,
where my local Jordanian restaurant serves some delicious combinations
of the two vegetables -- suggests that something is going on other than
simple identification of grammatical gender with sex, plus an enforced
separation of the sexes. The simplest theory is that somebody is
having somebody on here, but as I say, weird things happen. Maybe
what's relevant is the difference between the whole vegetables, the
obviously (metaphorically) female tomatoes and the obviously
(metaphorically) male cucumbers, and those vegetables chopped up so as
to lose their identities as sexualized entities.
Lila Gleitman suggests (but very much does not advocate) a
heavy-Whorfian interpretation, in which even people who know nothing
about the grammatical terminology would connect the grammatical
categories with categorizations in the real world, and would use those
connections in understanding the world around them. That is, they
would "see" tomatoes as female and cucumbers as male.
My own inclination is to see something less complex: either crude
identification of grammatical gender with sex, or media embroidery on a
slow news day (if it's not true, it makes a good story).
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at April 21, 2007 09:06 PM