on bilingual gender mixing

[Ruth Berman]

Here are my two cents worth on this issue:

My daughter Shelli lost her native Hebrew after a year in the US aged 3
to 4, and when she came back to Israel and started returning to being
Hebrew-dominant (a process recorded in an old paper of mine in the
unfortunately now defunct OISE publication *Working papers in
bilingualism* No. 19, 1979), she would use Hebrew-based agreement, e.g.,
referring to a train or witch (Hebrew *rakevet* and *maxshefa*, both
feminine nouns) as *she* in English.  This is clear evidence, I would
say, that the division of all Hebrew nouns into one of the two genders
-- masculine or feminine -- is strongly embedded in the lexical
representation Hebrew speakers have for nouns.

Also anecdotally, but based on observation of hundreds of cases over
many years -- 2nd language speakers of Hebrew, which has a very rich
system of gender agreement, tend to make errors in this domain even when
they are very proficient otherwise (e.g., university lecturers of
English-speaking background).  On the other hand, native speaking kids
master the system basically by age 3, and by early school age will
rarely make errors even in the case of lexical exceptions and irregular
forms.

In answer to Anette's comment, tough for femininists, but masculine
gender is also neuter in Hebrew, which marks not only pronouns, but also
agreement in verbs and adjectives for both gender and number across the
board -- with animate nouns being nearly always marked for gender by
natural sex and all inanimates either masculine or feminine (e.g. French
feminine *chaise* is masculine *kise* in Hebrew whereas French masculine
*lit* is feminine *mita* in Hebrew).  The evidence for masculine =
neuter is syntactic (e.g., "The husband and wife talk on the phone every
day" requires a masculine never feminine form of the verb *talk*, and
"The block (Fem) and the ball (Masc) are both red" requires masculine
marking on the adjective for "red");  *semantic (e.g., *yeladim*
'children' includes boys and girls, but feminine *yeladot* refers only
to girls); pragmatic (e.g., you can use masculine or feminine gender in
a nursing school or all-female college to address classes, but you could
not use feminine gender address in an all-male context); and
morphological -- feminine endings are added to masculine stems;  and
historically, neutralization or leveling of distinctions is always from
feminine to masculine, e.g., in the form of plural pronouns standing for
"you: and "they" -- current usage uses only the masculine form even with
reference to females or feminine nouns, and 2nd and 3rd person plural
verbs in the future tense also tend to ignore the feminine form option.

Best wishes
Ruth Berman