Chris Weimer

Julian, why can't concepts be metaphorical? Adelphos is brother, however in Greek the meaning can be extended "sisters" or other loved ones, but the word is brother. In Greek, it's no longer "brothers and sisters in christ" but merely "brothers in christ" and brothers encapsulates the female as well.

Peter Kirby

Chris, adelphoi includes the feminine in the passages of concern. Our word brothers does not.

best,
Peter Kirby

Chris Weimer

Peter - that's a little too oversimplified. Sure the adelphoi can include females, but what except sexism is stopping brothers from including females too?

John A. Broussard

My Greek is rusty, and I'm too lazy to look it up, but I think the closest translation of adelphi is brethren.

Diogenes the Cynic

"Brethren" is accurate, just a little rustic.

I think what has to be remembered here is that the only thing that makes adelphoi "brothers" rather than "sisters" is that it has the masculine plural ending. In Greek, adelphos is brother and adelphe is sister (the plural forms are adelphoi and adelphai respectively).

My point with this is that the Koine words for "brother" and "sister" were really the same, they were just distinguished by their masculine or feminine endings. So if there is a collective use that includes siblings of both genders, the masculine ending is the default but to the Greek ear, adelphoi did not necessarily ring as exclusively masculine as the word "brothers" does in English.

An analogy in English might be something like the words "actor" and 'actress." We hear "actress" as being distincly feminine but if we hear the word "actors" in the plural we don't necessarily hear it as connoting only men.

John A. Broussard

Now we get into the peculiarities of Indo-European languages. Linguisitic gender has only a tenuous realtionship to physiological gender. Maiden in german is a neutral noun, for example. And in those I-E languages I'm even vaguely familiar with, linguistic gender is strewn all over the place. I'll bow to superior judgement regarding Greek, however, since I can't remember how gender was treated there. Seems to me there even was a dual gender, or am I confusing that with something else?

Diogenes the Cynic

Greek has masculine, female and neuter genders. There's no dual-gender that I've ever heard of but there was a dual number at one point. Maybe that's what you're thinking of?

Chris Weimer

Yes, both Latin and Greek once had the dual number (as Old English did, and probably PIE), but no dual gender. In fact, there wasn't even a neuter gender until late.

But like Diogenes said on actors, or until recently what we called mailmen (for both female and male) it's only the uber-feminism that makes us think like this.

John A. Broussard

Thanks, folks. I was thinking of dual number, and I didn't know the neuter gender was a recent accretion in Indo-European, but I'm quite sure that masculine and feminine genders are only loosely tied to physiological masculine and feminine "objects," in at least some of IE descendants.

Chris Weimer

well, not even really. Snoru* neice commonly had "masculine endings" and shows that from the earliest. Latin's pirata or poeta were "masculine" i.e. their adjectives that define them are masculine but the endings are that of a feminine noun (similar to mathetes etc... in Greek). It was more linguistic than physiological.