The Gender of άνθρωπος: An Excercise in False Generics

Greek has been described as a language which possesses grammatical gender that is a syntactic category which classifies nouns into three classes (masculine/feminine/neuter) for the sole purpose of agreement. As gender assignment is generally believed to be arbitrary, no direct correlation seems to hold between biological gender or sex and grammatical gender, with the exception of animates or more strictly humans since as a rule, males are referred to by masculine nouns and females by feminine nouns. Additionally, nouns marked for masculinity may be used generically, i.e. refer to both males and females, on the ground that the masculine is “semantically unmarked” when referring to persons. This paper looks into the use of “generic” άνθρωπος in real life situations i.e. in addressing and/or referencing real human beings rather than in grammar book representations, with the intent to reveal its true sexual identity which more often than not – in 80% of the cases examined as a matter of fact - bears the mark of maleness and so excludes women from their fair share in humanity