Grammaticalization and the Winged Universe

What if "left wing" and "right wing" became integral components of a grammar?

A random photo with a book entitled “Grammar and Gender”

You’re reading Steam Calliope Scherzos, a blog that synthesizes media ecology with Peircean semiotics to discuss practically everything under the sun. You can consider the following post to be a linguistics-based thought experiment.

I. On Gendered Languages

Ever since Hegel’s commentary on the Yijing (or I Ching), we’ve been aware that the tendency to break everything down into binaries is more or less universal. Humans are symmetrical beings. We have two of each limb, various organs that come in pairs, and we have both a left and right. And for this reason, our tendency to see the world in binaries shows up in many of our languages across world history. Everyone reading this post will be familiar with gendered languages, i.e. languages wherein each noun is grammatically inflected to indicate being “male,” “female,” or “neuter,”¹ and that is the most obvious example of how binary distinctions feature in our most basic aspects of communication. Fewer will be aware that earlier primitive languages would make grammatical distinctions to establish the animacy status of each noun, i.e. whether or not the thing can move on its own, or otherwise possesses the traits of a living being.

Animacy as a grammatical distinction can occur in various ways. For instance, in the Navajo language, it is considered improper to place the inanimate noun before the animate one when constructing a sentence. Thus, the animacy of a noun will determine the sentence’s word order, regardless of which is the subject and which the object. In Nahuatl, animate nouns can be pluralized, but all inanimate nouns are meant to be treated as uncountable and thus singular. And in the Algonquin languages like Potawatomi and Cree, they demarcate animate nouns from inanimate ones by using grammatical inflection, much as various modern European languages do with gender. This distinction of animate vs. inanimate can also be somewhat arbitrary, based on cultural perception as opposed to scientific reality. For instance, in Navajo, lightning is classed as animate. If today’s English were to use a grammatical distinction between animate and inanimate objects, our choices would be perhaps surprising: consider that we often speak about machines and computers as though they are animate beings, e.g. “the computer is thinking about it; the TV doesn’t feel like working right now.”

Nevertheless, one can predict with decent accuracy which nouns might be considered animate and which wouldn’t be in most languages. There’s something quite intuitive about the distinction. When it comes to gendered nouns, however, that’s when we lose all ability to predict anything. Gendered nouns in German, for instance, are fairly strange: fork (die Gabel) is feminine, spoon (der Löffel) is masculine, and knife (das Messer) is neuter. For obvious reasons, poking devices are understood cross-culturally as masculine, while holding/storage vessels are typically understood as feminine, and so this breakdown is quite odd indeed. And there isn’t even much of a connection in German between gendered nouns and cross-cultural metaphysical associations: moon (der Mond) is masculine, while sun (die Sonne) is feminine, a total reversal from the norm.² Whatever the reason this may be, arbitrariness is pretty typical among gendered languages, and it’s worth considering exactly why this is, and moreover how these languages became gendered in the first place.

Historical linguistics is never 100% reliable in its theories, but the most probable reason for the existence of gendered languages goes something like this: long ago, various primitive peoples grouped their names for things into separate categories, and gender formed the line of demarcation, if animacy hadn’t done so already.³ At first, maybe a language had the word for “woman” and the word for “man,” and so the speakers started to use some quality found within these words for everything that seemed masculine or feminine. Perhaps abstract nouns took on these associations: “strength” became associated with manhood, while “beauty” became associated with womanhood, and so some aspect of the word for “man” or “woman” became affixed to these other words. Perhaps objects that resembled male or female characteristics were placed into the same binary grouping mechanism.

As to how these groups were differentiated, it’s hard to say. Maybe different articles existed for “male” words and “female” words. Maybe the words were used with different prepositions in sentences, and maybe these prepositions operated as either prefixes or suffixes. Maybe word order had something to do with it, as with animacy in the Navajo language. However “masculine” and “feminine” may have figured structurally within the makeup of the language, there was a clear distinction between words belonging to these categories. I’m being vague here, admittedly, since all sorts of different languages have gendered nouns, and therefore it is impossible to tell the exact same story for the development of each one… but basically, a process of grammaticalization was taking place. What was originally a cluster of loose, relatively free associations that affected the expression of the language turned into a system of rules that newborns and toddlers internalized through analogy during their formative years of language acquisition: “If I say the word ‘man’ this way, and the word ‘strength’ this way, then maybe I should say other similar words the same way.” And so the process continued on.

Now, up to that point, these associations were rooted in nature, or at least lived observation. They were “motivated” rather than purely conventional. “Strength” might be a masculine noun because men are stronger than women, and “beauty” might be a feminine noun, because human females are easier on the eyes. So far, so good. But the process of grammaticalization has a way of snowballing out of control: once it has taken root in a language, it can start to affect every aspect of it, going far beyond what its original tendency suggested. Thus, in accordance with this peculiarity regarding how language tends to evolve, gendered words eventually stopped needing to resemble any observed aspects of reality. Basically, speakers decided, “Oh, I add these little markers to so many words already, I might as well just do ‘em all,” and so that’s precisely what they did, giving genders to words quite haphazardly, seemingly at random.

Thus we can understand why languages gender their nouns, often in ways that seem to make no sense at all.

II. On Winged Language

Let me get to the my main point. I bring all of this up because I’ll often see people label things “right wing” or “left wing” in much the same fashion, seemingly randomly, often done so out of what seems like obligation rather than conviction. What inspired this post was some goofy, culturally impoverished conservative on social media who said something like,

The irony of left-wing “media literacy” advocates is that they argue that the author’s intention is the most important thing, as though the author has final say, but placing emphasis on authorial intention is actually quite deeply right-wing.

People seemed to find the post convincing, but there is no evidence of it being the case (other than, I guess, the writer’s own anecdotal experiences), and in fact plenty of historical evidence to prove the contrary. As a rule of thumb, whenever you’re spotting “irony,” you should ask yourself: is this actually irony, or is it counter-evidence that directly disproves my own misconception?

But the claim was well-received nevertheless because it speaks to the need for people to neatly arrange every tendency into “right wing” and “left wing” camps, regardless of how distant it might be from what “left” and “right” are meant to indicate. It’s as if the concepts are going through their own “grammaticalization” in which we’re no longer gendering but instead winging the universe, not out of any sense of meaningful observation but instead the universal desire to fit everything into some kind of conceptual bifurcation. It got me thinking: could this tendency ever affect language to the extent that gendering nouns once did thousands of years ago? In other words, could we ever invent a language that presents “right wing” and “left wing” politics as not just symmetrical but also infused within all of our nouns, the building blocks we use to interpret reality as we know it? And what would the implications of this be?

Let’s imagine you set up a noun classification system in which everything is marked as either “left wing,” “right wing,” or “centrist.” Some of these designations could be made due to commonplace cultural conventions: hammers and sickles are left-wing, no question. Axes and rods? Right-wing, without a doubt. Then we could start assigning the label to objects based on the belief that the right is masculine while the left is feminine. A fork has gotta be right wing, clearly. A spoon? Left-wing. Knives would have to be centrist. A gun is right-wing, and a slingshot is left-wing. You get the idea — and surely you can perceive by now that it wouldn’t be long before we begin to ask ourselves absurd questions.

In fact, this whole idea is ridiculous on its face, but I’m curious as to why this should be so. One reason that it might seem ridiculous is that left-wing and right-wing are essentially asymmetrical. For instance, right-wing ideas tend to be more diverse and agglomeratively constructed in nature, while left-wing thought tends to be more conformist, proceeding forward from just a few stalwart principles, with equality being its #1 ideal. Additionally, left-wing thinkers often have the privilege of labeling what’s “left-wing” and “right-wing,” themselves occupying more prominent positions within mainstream discourse, such as academia and journalism. As right-wingers of different ideological denominations will sometimes quip, “We have a serious problem with allowing leftists to choose our friends for us.”

But this asymmetry isn’t too much of a hindrance, when you think about it, because the participants on each side scramble to create symmetry whenever possible. Again: we all love symmetry; we can’t help it. A different, better reason that the idea of creating a new language through bifurcating a noun system along political lines should be taken as absurd is that there is no stability in the ways left-wingers and right-wingers understand themselves. An idea will become left-wing one minute and right-wing the next, and the participants on each side will scramble to make the adjustment with everyone pretending that they’ve always felt the same way from the very beginning. A commonly shared desire for political complementarity is actually helpful for creating such a language, but the impermanence of political attitudes isn’t. Therefore, turning “left-wing” and “right-wing” into a nominal classification system would have to mean that each side becomes ideologically stable and thus frozen in time.

Otherwise, it would have to mean that the complementarity of the ideas has surpassed the ideas themselves in importance. Basically, you just need to lump things into a “left,” “right,” or “centrist” category, and the process of lumping is now the goal unto itself. Whatever seemed vital and living about “right” and “left” as political worldviews has now been fully subordinated to the need to grammaticalize them. Grammaticalization has the effect of turning living words into dead husks.

In the past, various feminists have attacked gendered noun systems for reinforcing stereotypes and presenting the masculine form as the default, with feminine or neuter being presented as secondary forms. To my knowledge, though, there have never been any feminist language reformers who have attempted to get rid of gendered noun systems altogether, and this is surely because gender is so deeply ingrained in the makeup of certain languages so as to be inextricable. For that reason, when you look at feminist language reforms from the 1970s up to now, they seem fairly tepid by comparison; just pesky little demands that blindly grope towards the construction of a new, privileged elite tongue within a diglossic language system (I’ve written about this idea here).

But whether or not it’s possible to completely overthrow gendered languages, one could argue from a feminist perspective that it would be unwise to do so anyways because the existence of languages with gendered noun systems has been, if anything, helpful to the modern egalitarian cause. After all, the arbitrariness with which nouns have been assigned genders has helped make the case that gender is itself arbitrary, and therefore gender roles carry the same arbitrariness. In the first place, turning gender into a feature of grammatical syntax is a sign that both human sexes have become complementary and more or less comfortable with one another. And then when you examine these distinctions through the lens of modern linguistics, it becomes all the easier to make the case that our cultural associations are just as conventional, or “socially constructed,” as our linguistic ones.

In the same way that the process of gendering languages has actually served to make a mockery of the distinctions between man and woman, “winging” a language would similarly serve to make a mockery of the distinction between left and right — freezing a certain understanding of them in place, thus highlighting their arbitrariness. Only if Francis Fukuyama had been correct and liberal democracy marked the ultimate stage in ideological evolution, then such a language could actually be possible, as it would signify the complete ossification of both “left-wing” and “right-wing” political categories. For quite a long time, liberal humanists have wanted to create some sort of universal language that brings all of our species together in unity. L.L. Zamenhof’s creation of Esperanto has been but one attempt, though the idea for a highly efficient universal language dates back to the enlightenment.⁴

But I think that if you were to attempt the creation of a universal language, developing such a noun classification system would act as a punctuation mark emphasizing the total and complete victory of liberalism, which has always sought to eliminate the friend/enemy distinction between left-wing and right-wing groups by way of a relatively toothless complementarity — something that Carl Schmitt wrote about, as everyone knows. I suspect that we haven’t really been “liberal” according to this definition since the end of World War II.

From this admittedly strange thought experiment, I’m left to conclude two things: 1) people seem to want to live in a winged universe, because there’s a desire to label every thought, tendency, idea, and perhaps even object as either “left-” or “right-wing.” But (and this is item 2) the impermanence of our cultural discourse, along with the dire importance that we attribute to all of its ephemera, makes such an undertaking impossible.

1. The existence of “neuter” does not detract at all from the basic binary distinction between male and female, since it only approximates a 0 point on a positive and negative integer line. I have no idea why people who identify as “non-binary” or even actual hermaphroditic/intersex people believe that they have somehow broken beyond the binary distinction of gender. All explanations I’ve heard thus far strike me as unconvincing.

2. The perennial traditionalist/occultist Julius Evola actually speculated once that some corrupting force perhaps affected the German tribes early on in their development as they departed from the original Aryan peoples

3. Actually, there is a pretty interesting theory that the proto-Indo-European tongue originally divided nouns into animate vs. inanimate/neuter categories (a distinction preserved in Hittite), but then, as the languages branched out, slowly began to switch to gender instead of animacy, with the animate class splitting into male and female.

4. The notorious George Soros, interestingly enough, is an Esperanto speaker, as his father Tivadar was not only a strong proponent of Esperanto but in fact an author of his own memoir in the language.