Is it a boy or a girl?

Once of the challenges of  the new global village is trying to determine whether your correspondent is a male or female. When interaction was limited to the local and known culture, the gender of the name was almost always known just through passive experience.  For example, in England, Jim was man while Jane was a woman.  Today, as a translator, I communicate with people worldwide, often leaving me clueless whether my interlocker is male or female. Googling the name in pictures often clears up the issue, but not always.  The cultural / language basis is also sometimes helpful.

For example, English names for girls often end in the ee sound, i.e. Julie, Mary, Stacie, Stephanie and Nancy.  Most other female names are traditional, such as Jane and Susanne.  Interestingly, it is very rare that a “girls” name is given to a boy, maybe for reasons expressed in Johnny’s Cash’s famous song “A Boy Named Sue” (See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOHPuY88Ry4  if are not familiar with this classic song.). Given the omnipresence of Anglo-Saxon culture, most people can distinguish the women from the men.

In Metropolitan France, the letter e at the end of the name feminizes it.  Examples include Jean and Jeanne, Paul and Paulette, Henri and Simon and Simone, to name a few.  Also, since it was traditional to name children after saints (partly as part of policy to eliminate langue d’oc, a common language in France several centuries ago), French French names are easily identifiable.  Interestingly, African French names are wonderful hodgepodges of the two cultures: typical French first names and exotic (to Western ears) African last names. So, gender identification is generally not difficult for French names.

By contrast, Hebrew is quite a challenge, even for Hebrew speakers.  First, many names are unfamiliar to Western cultures, including Idan and Shiran.  Some names have specific and humorous meanings in English, such as Moran and Pines (a girl and a boy, respectively).  The only rule is that generally if a name ends in an a sound, it refers to a female.  Examples include Yosef/Yosefa, Ziv/Ziva, Ayal/Ayala and Michael/Michaela. Also, names ending in it are feminine, e.g. Ronit, Sigalit, etc.  The major problem is that, consistent with the stereotypical macho culture, girls are often given many traditional boy names (but not the other direction), creating mass gender confusion.  Some of the androgynous names include Tal, Chen, Gal and Chen. To given an idea of how confusing this is, I teach one class with three students named Mor, two of them female.  Alas, guessing the gender of a Hebrew name can be a crapshoot.

So, faced with foreign name without a gender-identifying title, correspondents have few alternatives. They can google the name as a word or picture; they can make a guess based on the ending of the name; or they can simply ask as politely as possible if the person is a boy or girl.  Hopefully, the respondent will understand that nothing is obvious in a global village.

What you don't know does not always hurt you - Gender distinction

The Middle East is a sexist place, socially and linguistically.   Gender definitely matters.  The exact form depends on the specific ethnic and religious subgroup.  For example, in many subcultures in Israel, women and men sit separately, sometimes even in different rooms.

It also affects language.  English and Russian have the unisex they and они [oni], respectively;  French has the flexible on, which can refer to any grammatical gender or person.  By contrast, in Hebrew, the second and third person pronouns and all verb forms must reflect gender.  There is no escape in ambiguity.

For example, a typical American teenager can make the following statement:  They (the friends) invited me to a party.  The parents have the privilege of pretending that the invitation came from friends of the same sex.  Ignorance is bliss.  Hebrew parents can have no illusion.   הם [hem] and הן [hen]  are both gender specific, male and female in this case. 

This clarity also affects the world of entertainment.  For example, in English, Frank Sinatra’s signature song I did it my way can be sung by both male and female singers.  That is true for most love songs also.  Unfortunately, that does not work in Hebrew.   The verb form for the female “did” and “love” will have a different number of syllables, making it difficult to convert for a singer of the opposite sex.  If the singer chooses not to change the words, it creates a disjunction between the gender of the singer and verb form. 

This sharp distinction also creates daily decisions for Hebrew speakers.  Imagine the head nurse speaking to the hospital nursing staff: 18 female nurses and one male nurse.  Which form should the head nurse use, the male or female form?  Traditionally, the male form was and is used, although today it seems a bit awkward, even if most Israeli females do not make an open fuss about it.

So, as the French and diplomats know very well, there is nothing wrong with ambiguity sometimes, especially if you want to hide information or keep the peace.

Dear Sir or Madam

Modern informality may have made people closer, but it has certainly created gender confusion.  In the past, a person’s title in English included the obligatory Mr., Mrs, or Miss.  Also, before the days of the Internet, ordinary citizens didn’t correspond with people living in places across the ocean and having interesting stamps.  So, for the few people and few occasions when a writer had to address a correspondence to distant location, it was clear whether the respondent was male or female.

Today, we have created a global village of people addressing each other by their first name or at best by the first and last name, without title.  Granted, the vast majority of names are clearly male or female in any language.  Some languages make it easier by adding feminine endings to male names: Stephen / Stephanie in English; Jean / Jeanette in French; Joseph / Josepha in Hebrew; Yevgeni / Yevgenia in Russian.  Knowing the rules often give the writer a solid basis to know whether to use the masculine or feminine forms of words when such a distinction must be made.

However, it is often not quite so simple.  Sometimes, the writer is not familiar with the writer’s culture and does not know if the name is for boys or girls.  Even worse, some names, such as Billie in English and Tal in Hebrew can go both ways.  The worse situation is a name of a writer whose first name is only an initial, i.e. A G. Alexander.

One solution is to use Google pictures searching for the name in question.  If 95% of the pictures indicate a specific gender, it is safe to assume to make an assumption.  You could be wrong, but the person will probably understand.  Just recall that Johnny Cash song A Boy Named Sue. Of course, it is always possible, albeit a bit clumsy, to ask the correspondent with words to the effect: I apologize for any embarrassment, but would you mind telling me if you are a man or women.  The last option, granted a bit formal, is to write Dear Sir or Madam at the top of the letter and hope they understand.

Alas, those were the good old days….