Education of the republic of uzbekistan termez state university foreign philology faculty the department of english language and literature

Etymology and usage

Derivation

The modern English word gender comes from the Middle English gender, gendre, a loanword from Anglo-Norman and Middle French gendre. This, in turn, came from Latin genus. Both words mean "kind", "type", or "sort". They derive ultimately from a Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root *ǵénh₁- 'to beget',^[26] which is also the source of kin, kind, king, and many other English words, with cognates widely attested in many Indo-European languages.^[27] It appears in Modern French in the word genre (type, kind, also genre sexuel) and is related to the Greek root gen- (to produce), appearing in gene, genesis, and oxygen. The Oxford Etymological Dictionary of the English Language of 1882 defined gender as kind, breed, sex, derived from the Latin ablative case of genus, like genere natus, which refers to birth.^[28] The first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED1, Volume 4, 1900) notes the original meaning of gender as "kind" had already become obsolete.

History of the concept

The concept of gender, in the modern sense, is a recent invention in human history.^[29] The ancient world had no basis of understanding gender as it has been understood in the humanities and social sciences for the past few decades.^[29] The term gender had been associated with grammar for most of history and only started to move towards it being a malleable cultural construct in the 1950s and 1960s.^[30]
Before sexologist John Money and colleagues introduced the terminological distinction between biological sex and gender as a role in 1955, it was uncommon to use the word gender to refer to anything but grammatical categories.^[3][1] For example, in a bibliography of 12,000 references on marriage and family from 1900 to 1964, the term gender does not even emerge once.^[3] Analysis of more than 30 million academic article titles from 1945 to 2001 showed that the uses of the term "gender", were much rarer than uses of "sex", was often used as a grammatical category early in this period. By the end of this period, uses of "gender" outnumbered uses of "sex" in the social sciences, arts, and humanities.^[1] It was in the 1970s that feminist scholars adopted the term gender as way of distinguishing "socially constructed" aspects of male–female differences (gender) from "biologically determined" aspects (sex).^[1]
In the last two decades of the 20th century, the use of gender in academia has increased greatly, outnumbering uses of sex in the social sciences. While the spread of the word in science publications can be attributed to the influence of feminism, its use as a synonym for sex is attributed to the failure to grasp the distinction made in feminist theory, and the distinction has sometimes become blurred with the theory itself; David Haig stated, "Among the reasons that working scientists have given me for choosing gender rather than sex in biological contexts are desires to signal sympathy with feminist goals, to use a more academic term, or to avoid the connotation of copulation."^[1]