which in the men’s speech would mean only ‘She went to her house.’
To many substantives the men prefix a vowel which the women do not employ, thus o-petas ‘turtle,’ u-tamokos ‘dog,’ i-pis ‘wood.’ For some very important notions the sexes use distinct words; thus, for the names of kinship, ‘my father’ is iyai and išupu, ‘my mother’ ipaki and ipapa, ‘my brother’ tsaruki and ičibausi respectively.
Among the languages of California, Yana, according to Dixon and Kroeber (The American Anthropologist, n.s. 5. 15), is the only language that shows a difference in the words used by men and women—apart from terms of relationship, where a distinction according to the sex of the speaker is made among many Californian tribes as well as in other parts of the world, evidently “because the relationship itself is to them different, as the sex is different.” But in Yana the distinction is a linguistic one, and curiously enough, the few specimens given all present a trait found already in the Chiquito forms, namely, that the forms spoken by women are shorter than those of the men, which appear as extensions, generally by suffixed -(n)a, of the former.
It is surely needless to multiply instances of these customs, which are found among many wild tribes; the curious reader may be referred to Lasch, S. pp. 7-13, and H. Ploss and M. Bartels, Das Weib in der Natur und Völkerkunde (9th ed., Leipzig, 1908). The latter says that the Suaheli system is not carried through so as to replace the ordinary language, but the Suaheli have for every object which they do not care to mention by its real name a symbolic word understood by everybody concerned. In especial such symbols are used by women in their mysteries to denote obscene things. The words chosen are either ordinary names for innocent things or else taken from the old language or other Bantu languages, mostly Kiziguha, for among the Waziguha secret rites play an enormous rôle. Bartels finally says that with us, too, women have separate names for everything connected with sexual life, and he thinks that it is the same feeling of shame that underlies this custom and the interdiction of pronouncing the names of male relatives. This, however, does not explain everything, and, as already indicated, superstition certainly has a large share in this as in other forms of verbal tabu. See on this the very full account in the third volume of Frazer’s The Golden Bough.
XIII.—§ 3. Competing Languages.
A difference between the language spoken by men and that spoken by women is seen in many countries where two languages are straggling for supremacy in a peaceful way—thus without any question of one nation exterminating the other or the male part of it. Among German and Scandinavian immigrants in America the men mix much more with the English-speaking population, and therefore have better opportunities, and also more occasion, to learn English than their wives, who remain more within doors. It is exactly the same among the Basques, where the school, the military service and daily business relations contribute to the extinction of Basque in favour of French, and where these factors operate much more strongly on the male than on the female population: there are families in which the wife talks Basque, while the husband does not even understand Basque and does not allow his children to learn it (Bornecque et Mühlen, Les Provinces françaises, 53). Vilhelm Thomsen informs me that the old Livonian language, which is now nearly extinct, is kept up with the greatest fidelity by the women, while the men are abandoning it for Lettish. Albanian women, too, generally know only Albanian, while the men are more often bilingual.
XIII.—§ 4. Sanskrit Drama.
There are very few traces of real sex dialects in our Aryan languages, though we have the very curious rule in the old Indian drama that women talk Prakrit (prākrta, the natural or vulgar language) while men have the privilege of talking Sanskrit (samskrta, the adorned language). The distinction, however, is not one of sex really, but of rank, for Sanskrit is the language of gods, kings, princes, brahmans, ministers, chamberlains, dancing-masters and other men in superior positions and of a very few women of special religious importance, while Prakrit is spoken by men of an inferior class, like shopkeepers, law officers, aldermen, bathmen, fishermen and policemen, and by nearly all women. The difference between the two ‘languages’ is one of degree only: they are two strata of the same language, one higher, more solemn, stiff and archaic, and another lower, more natural and familiar, and this easy, or perhaps we should say slipshod, style is the only one recognized for ordinary women. The difference may not be greater than that between the language of a judge and that of a costermonger in a modern novel, or between Juliet’s and her nurse’s expressions in Shakespeare, and if all women, even those we should call the ‘heroines’ of the plays, use only the lower stratum of speech, the reason certainly is that the social position of women was so inferior that they ranked only with men of the lower orders and had no share in the higher culture which, with the refined language, was the privilege of a small class of selected men.
XIII.—§ 5. Conservatism.
As Prakrit is a ‘younger’ and ‘worn-out’ form of Sanskrit, the question here naturally arises: What is the general attitude of the two sexes to those changes that are constantly going on in languages? Can they be ascribed exclusively or predominantly to one of the sexes? Or do both equally participate in them? An answer that is very often given is that as a rule women are more conservative than men, and that they do nothing more than keep to the traditional language which they have learnt from their parents and hand on to their children, while innovations are due to the initiative of men. Thus Cicero in an often-quoted passage says that when he hears his mother-in-law Lælia, it is to him as if he heard Plautus or Nævius, for it is more natural for women to keep the old language uncorrupted, as they do not hear many people’s way of speaking and thus retain what they have first learnt (De oratore, III. 45). This, however, does not hold good in every respect and in every people. The French engineer, Victor Renault, who lived for a long time among the Botocudos (in South America) and compiled vocabularies for two of their tribes, speaks of the ease with which he could make the savages who accompanied him invent new words for anything. “One of them called out the word in a loud voice, as if seized by a sudden idea, and the others would repeat it amid laughter and excited shouts, and then it was universally adopted. But the curious thing is that it was nearly always the women who busied themselves in inventing new words as well as in composing songs, dirges and rhetorical essays. The word-formations here alluded to are probably names of objects that the Botocudos had not known previously ... as for horse, krainejoune, ‘head-teeth’; for ox, po-kekri, ‘foot-cloven’; for donkey, mgo-jonne-orône, ‘beast with long ears.’ But well-known objects which have already got a name have often similar new denominations invented for them, which are then soon accepted by the family and community and spread more and more” (v. Martius, Beitr. zur Ethnogr. u. Sprachenkunde Amerikas, 1867, i. 330).