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Sophie Salvo, "Articulating Difference: Sex and Language in the German Nineteenth Century"(U Chicago Press, 2024)
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- [00:01]
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Sophie Salvo
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Deep Acharya
Welcome to the New Books Network welcome to the New Books Network. I am your host, Deepacharya, and today I'm joined by Sophie Salvo, assistant professor at the University of Chicago, to discuss her recently published book with the University of Chicago Press, regulating Sex and Language in the German 19th century. Drawing on a wide range of texts, from understudied ethnographic and scientific works to canonical literature and philosophy, Salvo uncovers the prehistory of the inextricability of gender and language. Taking German discourses on language as her focus, she argues that we are not the inventors, but rather the inheritors and adapters of the notion that gender and language are interrelated. Particularly during the long 19th century, ideas about sexual differences shaped how language was understood, classified, and analyzed. As Salvo explains, philosophers asserted the patriarchal origins of language, linguists investigated women's languages and grammatical gender, and literary modernists imagined feminine science systems. And in doing so, they not only deemed sex based divisions to be necessary categories of language, but also produced a plethora of gender tropes and fictions which they used both to support their claims and delimit their disciplines. Articulating difference in that regard charts new territory, revealing how gendered conceptions of language make possible the misogynistic logic of exclusion that underlies arguments claiming, for example, that women cannot be great orators or writers. While Salvo focuses on how male scholars aligned language study with masculinity, she also uncovers how women responded, highlighting the contributions of understudied 19th century works on language that women wrote even as they were excluded from academic opportunities. Sophie, your work rightly enriches contemporary debates about gendered language by probing the very histories of the sciences that study it. It is a pleasure to have you here on the New Books Network.
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Sophie Salvo
Thank you so much for having me.
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Deep Acharya
So I would first like to begin reading your book. I understand you'd occupations with the intersections of language and gender. So I would want to understand how you arrived at this particular question. Is it a product of your dissertation? Since it's your first book, were there any diversions from your dissertation to this first book? And how did you become interested in this idea of language agenda?
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Sophie Salvo
Yeah, I think to answer that, I probably have to go back even further than graduate school and go back to college, which is where I, while I was a comparative literature major and where I first encountered literary theory more generally, and then specifically feminist theory and feminist theories of language. And yeah, at I don't know, age 20, it just sort of blew my mind. I'm talking about theories like Cixu ir Garai Christivas or sort of what are commonly called the French feminists writing in the 1970s, 80s, some still writing today. And I think I carried that interest. So these theories talked, among other things, about it. They posited a certain specifically feminine relation to language or masculine language. And as I went into graduate school, I was still very much interested in those kinds of questions. But I think I realized I wanted to look at the questions from a historical perspective rather than maybe, you know, whether they're true or not, which is how I was reading them in college. And so I think I took from that kind of feminist theory. I still took and still benefit from, you know, a certain kind of framework or method of interpretation, you know, asking questions like, you know, who is this universal human subject? Who is defining the human? How is it being defined? Who is being excluded? So that's just to say that I think I still Am working with a lot of ideas from this kind of feminist theory, but I wanted to shift my focus to think about how gender and language. Yeah. Was thought about in an earlier period, specifically the 19th century, which is when language science is understood to have developed. And also there's a lot of philosophical speculation about the origin of language.
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Deep Acharya
Oh, that's great to know. It's always really helpful to understand what the author's journey was like to conceive a project that is as huge as you have made in your project. And it was absolutely a pleasure and so interesting to read the book. And I actually got a copy which is so, like, I refuse to read from a PDF.
- [06:25]
Sophie Salvo
So I have to say the University of Chicago Press did an amazing job on the COVID I had nothing to do with it, but I like it very much. Yes.
- [06:32]
Deep Acharya
Yes, actually. Indeed. So I would like to begin with the historiographical intervention you make in the introduction. You note that while scholarship has extensively documented the history of pronouns or marginalization of women's writing, the theoretical link between language, signs and sex has remained largely under examined. You characterize this through 19th century German sprach Wischenschaft, not just as a precursor to modern linguistics, but as a pivotal chapter in the history of misogyny. To quote you, could you elaborate on how this fantasy of sexual complementarity acted as a necessary premise for the production of linguistic knowledge in this era?
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Sophie Salvo
So maybe first I could just say that one thing that struck me as I was doing research for this book is especially reading scholarship on these canonical figures like Humboldt, Healder, Fichte. Those are three I talked about in the first chapter. Is often scholars would note that indeed there seems to be something gendered going on here. Or especially Humboldt. He's using. He writes a lot about gender categories or masculine and feminine. But then the typical move would be to just dismiss this as irrelevant, which I found fascinating, but also shocking because I think any other. Well, we could discuss whether we want to call it a metaphor or a framework, but any other thing that recurred so frequently I think would be taken seriously. And so, and I wondered, you know, I. I think there's probably obvious answers to why it wasn't, but. So the more I started looking, I saw that there really were a lot of places. I mean, certainly not everywhere, but there were a lot of different areas of writing on language where authors were drawing on or even depending on certain ideas about men and women in order to make their claims. And often it's because a lot of the texts are invested in Answering questions that can only really be answered through speculation, right. About the origins of language itself or specific. Or more specifically, the origins of grammatical gender. And it requires constructing a kind of fiction about the origin of humanity. And as I argue in the book, I think one thing that a lot of writers from this period use, I mean, not. I don't. Not necessarily willfully, but one way that they sort of ground these fictions is by saying, well, you know, there is a certain household economy of the human species. For example, there's a certain kind of division of labor that happens between man and woman in the household. Or, you know, men are a certain way, women are a certain way. And there. And that is like sort of the uninterrogated premise or one of the uninterrogated premises of then making claims about how language came to be, how it developed and what it is, and therefore also how it should be studied.
- [09:26]
Deep Acharya
That's fascinating to know. And I really like how you, like, connected and made that claim. And this really leads us into the gendered origins of language, which you pursue in chapter one. And so you trace a striking shift around 1800, where the enlightenment wild pair, the male and female children who created language through reciprocal exchange, suddenly disappears from origin narratives. So why was this solitary male character, such as Hevda she, naming human or Fichte's father conceptually necessary to the new definition of human language?
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Sophie Salvo
Yeah, well, as I argue in the book, I think it has less to do with changes in the status of women. You know, it's not like something radical happened between, I don't know, 1760 and 1770 that all of a sudden women had equality. That's, of course, not the case, but rather something really changes in terms of how language is conceptualized. So a lot of, like, the wild pair narratives that you're referring to, I go over a number of these from German and English and French sources in the book, where earlier theories of the origin of language basically usually, say, language developed out of animal communication. So something really primitive, like the grunts of animals. And then gradually humans were. I mean, depends on the theorist how exactly this happened. But somehow then humans developed it into something more sophisticated, like the language we use today. And so the way I understand it then is because a lot of those theories will offer as an example of the characters that they use to tell the story is usually a male and a female pair or a boy and a girl, or even, in one case, two girls. And I think there, you know, the question that's sort of circling around all this is what constitutes the human or who may stand in as an example for the human? Are women really human? And that sounds sort of silly, but you know, of course women are human and there's no author who's saying like they're a totally different species. But there is this sense that men are more sort of more human than women are. Right, they're more emphatically human. Women don't have the kind of rational capacities, so it's often said that men do. That is then used to define humans in contradistinction to animals. And so beginning in the late 18th century, theories shift away from this idea that language has an animal origin and instead posit that language is sort of human from its variance inception. And so whereas I think when language has a crude beginning, it doesn't really matter who can be the character who's going to stand in as an example. It could be a man, it could be a woman, it could be a girl. Right. Because it's not illustrating anything so remarkable necessarily. But once you have theories like with Herder or Fichte or Humboldt or those who come after him, after them, who really say that no, language sort of was human from its beginning and they define human as, I mean it depends on the theorist, but as sort of rational reflection or what have you, these are attributes that they are also not only associating with the human in general, but with masculinity in particular or with the man in particular. And then one thing I track in the chapter is how the kinds of characters that actually get mobilized to illustrate these stories in these conjectural histories, these philosophical origins and narratives, they change from, you know, a variety of combinations of the sexes to just men.
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Deep Acharya
Okay, yeah. So with that regard, like moving to chapter two, you explore the construct of women's language. I'm guessing Weiberg, Spacher. It's fascinating how like a 17th century missionary report about the island Caribbean was like universalized into a theory of female. How did the human sciences use this primitive foil to define the boundaries? Let's say an authority of their own precise scientific discourse.
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Sophie Salvo
Yeah, So I track in the chapter this early accounts of a so called women's language in the Caribbean. These are 17th century reports by missionaries, mostly written in French, who say that the Caribbean and women speak two totally different languages. And they usually explain this just as, you know, another example of their so called savagery or primitive nature and have a kind of narrative of, well, what they call bridal capture and then what. But what really the bulk of the chapter is interested in is how Beginning in the 19th century, linguists and anthropologists start referencing this women's language and they add they have found other ones across the globe. And the way they explain it is not as a result of some, you know, so called primitive practice, but rather it's the, you know, the phrase alchbaitons, you know, among us too, is often what they use. And you know, like we all know that women and men speak differently and it's, but it's a kind of difference that's not just the matter of a few, you know, pieces of vocabulary or one grammatical structure. It's somehow like a general difference that imbues the language wholesale. And that is also a kind of very nebulous claim. Right? It's sort of like we can't tell you exactly what the difference is, but we all know it's there. And so I think, at least as I tried to argue one way, that again, that they ground this very speculative claim or sort of a claim that cannot actually really be substantiated. Just this general idea that all women speak differently is then by making recourse to the Carib women's language or other, you know, so called primitive languages around the globe. So they sort of become, they conflate these two different things, what we would now call a genderlect. And then this idea that all women speak differently and one is then marshaled as evidence, which is important, right, because the language sciences are, and anthropology too are, you know, invested in the scientificity of their own disciplines, proving that they are worthy, you know, scientific endeavors. And so data and evidence is important at least you can see that in the way that they describe the fashioning of their own disciplines.
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Deep Acharya
Listening to this story and listening to you talk about this particular problem that you're addressing in chapter two, I am wondering about the methodological strategies that you employed while telling the story or writing the story. And I guess for all early career scholars like me and for listeners who are going to be listening to this podcast, I think it's really important to know how you as an author employed such strategies and how did you come up with it and was it difficult in a way, or what were some learning points? I'm just wondering how you approached this problem and chose to write about it.
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Sophie Salvo
You mean sort of how I found the material or how I interpreted it?
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Deep Acharya
Yes, both in a way.
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Sophie Salvo
Well, I think I first encountered the idea because I read a Humboldt text where he talks about Weiber Sprache, that's German for women's language, and mentions the Carib Women's language. And actually he wrote. Assembled his own dictionary of some of the words. And I just thought, what is this? And I sort of started tracking. I mean, this is. I think, as everyone knows, it's often not very systematic, but rather you get a hint somewhere and you follow it to something else and you get another hint. And, yeah, that was a lot of graduate school trying to find those sources and compile them, I think, in terms of methodology, I do remember that my. When I. This was the first chapter I wrote when it was a dissertation. And I remember my advisor said to me, like, you know, this is a great story you're telling, but there's no, like, where are you? Where's the critical distance? What does it all mean? You know? And I thought, I don't know. And then maybe 10 years later, when I was working on turning this into a book, like some people, then that question sort of finally made sense. Right. It took a while to come up with the framing of the argument. So I don't know that I have any real advice, except maybe patience and be willing also to rethink things and write down those good questions from your advisor so you can come back to them a decade later.
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Deep Acharya
Yeah, no, no, those are great advice. I mean, I would think so that it takes time and it takes a lot of effort on the person's end to arrive at certain conclusions that you have. And it's absolutely clear to me what you're arguing. So. And I believe that this is a fascinating book. So. Yeah, thank you for that. I now want to talk about the tautology of, like, heterosexual nouns, which you approach in, like, chapter three, and you talk about Jacob Grimm, how he used biological sex to decipher Germanic languages, where he argued that, like, feminine forms are by nature derivative and passive. Could you tell us something about the 1890s debate about. Between these Romantics and the Neo grammarians? At its heart was this a struggle over whether the human could be even imagined as a sexless category. Like, what was happening at this moment.
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Sophie Salvo
Yeah, if it's okay, I'll just go backwards a little bit to set the context, which is. Yeah. So grammatical gender, you know, for those who don't speak a language with grammatical gender, that's sort of the sorting of nouns into categories. Masculine, feminine, sometimes neuter. This was sort of a problem that vexed a lot of language scientists. You know, in other words, why is this a structure that we have? And they usually would suggest that it had to do with how, you know, our forefathers first created language and you know, when the original people, they, they saw everything as being alive and, and anything that had like, a masculine characteristic, like strength, sigh, like size, vitality, I mean, the list goes on. They would call a masculine noun and anything that was sort of passive or small or delicate or whatever would be feminine. And. And then the neuter was much even more difficult. But there were different theories explaining how that came to be. And so this is kind of an explanation that Grimm and others use to really make claims about why certain nouns are masculine or feminine or neuter. So it's not about the formal development of the noun, but rather it's a semantic explanation. So why is balm tree masculine? Or. One example I talk about is foot versus hand. And he has these conjectures, well, a foot is bigger. And so I think it's interesting for a number of reasons. First, because it assumes that they can have kind of access to the minds of these, you know, Germanic forefathers. There's also kind of nationalistic perspective that's being developed here. But also, you know, what is masculine and what is feminine never changes, right? So the one problem is that languages all have different genders for the same words. And so one way they explain it is like, well, all cultures look at things differently. You know, some culture might see the sun as like life giving and fertility, and therefore it will be feminine. Some might see it as in a more masculine sense. And then the word for sun will have a masculine on. Anyway, sorry, I'm getting a little off track. There comes then to be a debate actually, after Jacob Grimm's death, but with his followers. And then there's a new kind of school of linguists called the Neo grammarians. And there's a kind of debate back and forth between Klim's followers and the Neo grammarians. And the neo grammarians say, you know, grammatical gender is formally. Is purely about how words developed formally. There's not a semantic meaning that we can project into that. And Grimm's defenders say, you know, doh. And one place that just is so fascinating to me is that they start debating whether, you know, okay, let's say that the Neo grammarians say. Let's say that the first people really did anthropomorphize everything and they saw everything as alive. Well, that doesn't mean that they necessarily assigned it a sex. And then the Grimm's father say, you know, that of course they did. Right? Everything has to be male or female. So it ends up being this debate about actually whether one can conceive of the human as not already sexed, where there is. There is some kind of idea of the neutral human outside of sexual identity, which is not what they're interested in. Right. Like, that's not what they're. The point is. The point is to debate the origin of grammatical gender. But that's kind of one of the things I hone in on at the end of the chapter. Yeah.
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Deep Acharya
I was. When I was reading your book, I was particularly struck by chapter four, where you highlight women who manage to theorize within this masculine field. You mentioned Elise Richter, who adapted phonetic diagrams from textbooks to remove the moustache. Like, how did these androgynous diagrams allow women scholars to carve out this neutral and structural space that challenged the field's masculine coding?
- [23:05]
Sophie Salvo
Yeah, well, so I should say that I don't know. I don't think there's a way to know now whether Krishta really herself, you know, chose those diagrams. I can only speak about what was produced in the text and, you know, whose decision that was, I don't know. But, yeah, she was a linguist working in Vienna in the early 20th century. And one thing I show in the book is that she reproduces a lot of diagrams of phonological diagrams, which was common. You know, a lot of texts were borrowed from earlier ones, but there's a few that it's really striking where in the original text from the late 19th century, the speaker has a mustache of this open mouth. Or there's another example from that book, I think is Teshma, you know, where one man is investigating how a certain sound is produced in the mouth of another man, and they have, like, sideburns and clearly male clothing. And then when some of these diagrams show up in Elisa Richter's book, there are no more secondary sex characteristics, which, of course, were unnecessary to the argument that they were being used to make in their original context, too.
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Deep Acharya
Right.
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Sophie Salvo
You don't need sideburns to talk about how, like, the consonant R is produced in this mouth. But. So I think, yeah, whether it was her or her publisher, there seems to have been a decision to not make this figure of the speaking subject and the language scientist explicitly sexed.
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Deep Acharya
So I'm wondering, to that end, was there could you track any reactions to this, positive or negative, to this idea that Wishta was pursuing? And if at all there were any reactions, was it any form of repudiation or was it appropriated by others, or did it create any repercussions or did it create any ripples in the kind of era that you're talking about?
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Sophie Salvo
You Mean the diagrams?
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Deep Acharya
Yeah.
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Sophie Salvo
Oh, no, I think that would be too much of an overstatement, Right, to say, like. I mean, that would be a very interesting story, but I'm not sure that they were received as provocative. You know, I think there's other people who have done much more work on Enrique, and they argue that she didn't herself explicitly. She didn't align herself with the feminist movement. Whether that was a strategic choice or she didn't believe in it, you know, I don't know, but I think so. I think it makes sense less to think about it in terms of a deliberate subversion and instead think about how once women were gradually allowed to enter the realm of language science or language philosophy, which really only started to happen in the early 20th century and not en masse by any means, new figures, new examples, new characters were required. So at least implicitly, it required a questioning of the kind of necessarily masculine subject that had just gone unquestioned for the last 150 years.
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Deep Acharya
Okay, so your final chapter addresses this modernist language crisis, which you argue was specifically a masculine crisis, and used the term benevolent misogyny, which I really like, in a way, to describe how writers like Hoffmann, Stahl and Musill projected utopian poss onto silent female bodies. So why did these. I'm wondering, why did these modernists project their dream of another language onto women and while simultaneously reinforcing tropes of female inarticulacy? So is this a relationship of tension here, these two ideas, are they in conjunction or are they, like, opposing? How would you contextualize this?
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Sophie Salvo
Yeah. Being inarticulate and silent? Seemingly, yes. Well, I think in the texts that I look at in this chapter, they're kind of one and the same because they. In these literary texts, they imagine often female characters whose language is really pushed to the total extreme of language, such that, like, whatever, the language I speak is somehow really ontologically different from regular language, such that maybe it can't even be expressed. So the being inarticulate, it's not just, you know, like Fitzmautner might write, this is someone I talk about in chapter two, you know, that women use all these French phrases and they don't know what they're saying or something. It's actually much more. It's a much more radical vision of that. And for these authors, it's actually something that they valorize. And as for why, you know, it gets associated with femininity, I can't know. You know, I can't know for sure what their intention Was. But I think it makes sense to say that, you know, the association of women with materiality, with the body, with a different kind of language is something that is just was accepted. Right? I mean, we saw that in the 19th century. So it's kind of a device that they can call on without having to construct it themselves and without having to think too much about it. But then I do think that there are also moments in these texts where they seem to criticize their own, this, the very approach that they are undertaking and think about the limits of using the idea of woman in this way. And I think it's also maybe then not a surprise that for a number of these writers, even though they persist in being interested in questions of language and positing another sort of utopian language, whereas earlier in their career they might take recourse to characters, feminine characters, to explain this, later on they abandon that and they use other kinds of characters or other kinds of metaphors to explore the same problem. So I think that this also shows how they kind of recognize the limits of that approach.
- [29:19]
Deep Acharya
Okay, and finally, and this is one of the most striking aspects about this book that I found, and I really like your usage of the word coda of the end, how you connect your conclusion and you really bring this story into the present day. You mentioned, and as we all know, the AV Day, the far right parties, like them, view gender inclusive language, gegen derch der spache, as this, like a threat to national identity. So how do you think understanding the 19th century belief in language as this, you call it a sacred patrimony, Right. Help us like decode today's like linguistic culture wars and whatever is happening around us. And it's not just the AV Day, it's happening in the us it happens in India with the Bharatiya Janata Party. And I'm wondering, how might your book help in looking through that?
- [30:12]
Sophie Salvo
Yeah, I mean, I think. I don't know that it will make such a difference. But what I try to argue is, you know, that a lot of these political parties or the text that they put out or the speeches or website, you know, they are arguing for a return to. I mean, in the AFD's case, they call it like classical gender norms. So they are, you know, or look, make America great again. Right. There's often an argument about a return to an earlier, more idyllic period where, I don't know, men were men and women were women or whatever that means. And in terms of gendered language, it's an argument that, you know, well, feminists or queer people or whoever the malicious actor is, is corrupting our language and therefore our cultural identity. And we need to go back to a period where this wasn't happening, you know, before woke politics or whatever. And I think what I tried to show in the book is that this has always been happening, right? That I mean, that that idea of an ungendered language is a fantasy. And that people who write about language or who study language or who document language, you know, even in the 19th century were relying on ideas about masculinity and feminin to understand or to say something about what language is. It's just that back then there was a kind of an idea of sexual complementarity that often determined meant that determined what they thought about men and women. And now we have a different, or a lot of us have a different understanding of gender and sex. So that's what I hope, you know, hope the intervention is, I guess, and also to show, you know, that, yeah, the way that this threat, the so called threat of gendered language is presented often is that it's something new. And so if we can actually see that it has a history, it might help us or be less panicked about it.
- [32:16]
Deep Acharya
So what I'm sensing from your answer is there is this continuum of the interlinkages between language and gender, and it has always been there. And this far right claim of this manipulation of language by these supposedly woke movements is something that is predicated upon something that has been always happening. So I am wondering, to that end, where would you like, how for you, what would be the foremost message that this book bears? Like, if I have to ask you, in a way that what was your biggest takeaway after writing this book? And what would you want people to know more after they read this book or even after hearing this podcast? Because I'm wondering, people will come to New Books Network after reading your book or even before reading your book. So what would be that one message? And I asked this to all the authors.
- [33:13]
Sophie Salvo
It's hard to distill it into a sentence or such. I guess I would say that gender is important or ideas about gender have been important in the history of thinking about what language is. And that to think about the history of language science or the philosophy of language as neutral and that, you know, it's only with the advent of, say, feminist theories in the second half of the 20th century or Sociolinguistics that it's only then that interests of gender get brought into the study of language that. That I think is a misconception.
- [33:50]
Deep Acharya
Great so the book is articulating difference, sex and language in the German 19th century. Sophie Salvo, thank you very, very much for this very, very insightful conversation. And thank you again for coming to the New Books Network.
- [34:06]
Sophie Salvo
Thank you. It's been a real pleasure.
- [34:09]
Deep Acharya
Thank you. So you're watching the New Books Network. This is Deep Acharya, and we'll see you in the next podcast.