When European missionary linguists began studying Chinese and compiling the earliest descriptions of the language, they were so fascinated by its functioning despite a complete lack of inflectional morphology that they thought to have discovered a language substantially different from all the others. Thanks to their writings, which vehiculated and long monopolised the notions on the Chinese language available to the European public, Chinese became the “isolating language” par excellence. Yet, the grammatical framework employed by those missionaries, based on Greek and Latin with their convoluted morphology, required categories such as “case,” “number,” and “gender” to be also treated, even only to meet the expectations of grammarians schooled in that system.
Starting with Martini’s Grammatica Linguae Sinensis (1652–1653) and Varo’s Arte de la lengua mandarina (1703), European authors have thus posited the existence of gender distinctions in Chinese, influencing not only fellow missionary linguists, who all devote passages in their grammars to gender as a linguistic category, but also, after they began compiling Chinese grammars in the European fashion — that is, since Ma Jianzhong’s Ma shi wentong (1898) — the Chinese themselves. An influence which, despite not altering the Chinese language at its essence, played a significant role in the renovation of the Chinese written language (Guoyu, Putonghua) during the first half of the 20th Century, especially in the introduction of an artificial and merely graphic, yet normative gender distinction in personal pronouns. An innovation which, besides the influence of translations from western languages, was made possible by the adoption of gender as a grammatical category in the Chinese metalanguage. Based on primary sources, the present lecture aims to demonstrate how the treatment of gender in early modern Chinese grammars affected its eventual emergence as a linguistic feature of modern Chinese.