I request your kind help to complete a quick poll about the subject of flute and piccolo genders (if any).

Here it goes: Suppose you are trying to explain a child the classes of wind instruments. You could be using the "family" metaphor, which is quite popular. When you come to flutes,

Would you say that the piccolo is the "little sister" of the flute, is the "little brother" of the flute or you would just avoid this metaphor at all?

Please post here your answer simply as "sister", "brother" or "none". It is very important for me that you also include what your mother tongue is because I want to relate the perception of grammatical gender to it, no matter what your current language is.

As usual, I do it first:

brother, spanish

Thank you a lot!


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If you prefer complete anonymity and feel reluctant to post your mother tongue, it's OK, just complete "sister", "brother" or "none"

none, English

Sister, English.

Jose, I think you might need to explain more about the whole piccolo gender question, it makes more sense in the flute-naming thread.

Anyway, I do think of the piccolo as feminine, though in English of course inanimate objects do not have a gender, so this is a bit of a foreign idea to native English speakers.

But come to think of it, the piccolo in music is not as often 'feminine' and lyrical like the flute (or oboe, or clarinet) but more often very bold and obvious- more masculine traits, I think. (This may be why a lot of flute players don't WANT to play the piccolo- it's bold and showy and they don't like it.)

i call it the baby flute. babies as a whole typically are non-sexual, i guess you would say. ive always figured my flute to be female since its case is a nice maroon color and my thumbport is pink. but gender in english at all is pretty much non-existent except when referring to various latin-based words, i guess.

we americans always use the same gender-specifying colors: pink for girl, blue for boy. other than that, were not smart enough. instead we stuff our faces full of mcdonalds.

what?

Tibbiecow asked for more explanations about "the why" of this poll. I am not looking for terms to solve the no-gender or perceived gender of the piccolo. "Baby". "relative", "cousin" and others are OK, but this not what I am looking for.


The idea came to my mind while consulting this problem in a another Forum; I was looking for a way to prove (or disprove) that there maybe unconscious residual gender for some nouns. The family metaphor question was perfect for it and I posted this idea there. There was an interesting reply, which I quote below.

Note that Bernstein and Britten had opposite views (brother and sister):

" Re: Nouns gender
Now this is very interesting, what you have brought up, I'm sorry it took me so long to understand. I took a look on google and found lots of articles talking about the piccolo as the little brother of the flute family, the bass clarinet the big brother of the clarinet, and the English horn as the big brother of the oboe. But Leonard Bernstein (for a kids' concert) also talked about the piccolo as being the little sister of the woodwinds.

Quote:
What do we mean when we say "families"? Well, I'm sure most of you must have heard that word "family" used over and over again whenever the orchestra was being described to you. You're always hearing about the woodwind family, with Mama clarinet, and Grandfather bassoon:
[BASSOON: Prokofieff - Peter and the Wolf]
You all know that one. And little sister piccolo, and big sister flute, and uncle English horn, and auntie oboe. And all the rest of the family. Well, in spite of all that baby-talk, it's still true that these woodwinds are a sort of family. They're alike because they're all played by blowing wind into them, and they're all - well, almost all - made of wood. So they're called woodwinds. They all sit near one another, and behave like a family. And they have all kinds of cousins, too, different kinds of clarinets, for instance: like the little E-flat clarinet, and the bass clarinet. And then there are saxophones, and alto flutes, oboe d'amore, and contra-bassoons. Oh, it's a long list. Thank you. And there's even a group of sort of second cousins, called the French horns. And they're second cousins because they're made of brass, and they really should belong to the brass family; but they blend so well with either the woodwinds or the brass that they are related to both families - so that they're kind of in-laws, I guess.
To compare, Britten's "A Young Person's Guide To The Orchestra" only has one mention of brother or sister in the whole text, even though it's all about musical families:

Quote:
Now let us hear each instrument play a variation of its own. The highest of the Woodwind theme is the clear, sweet voice of the FLUTE, with its shrill little brother, the PICCOLO.
I had trouble finding anything of note for the strings or the brass.

So I'm forced to say that there isn't any real consistency in this. Note in the Britten that in the same sentence where the piccolo is a little brother, the flute is an "it".

I don't know if this is conclusive, but I think it indicates that there isn't really any historical basis for the unconscious noun gendering in these examples.

What do you think?

"
Those interested can follow that conversation here:
http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?p=5299174#post5299174.

Also, the issue of how we should call ourselves was introduced recently in that same thread so it could add some additional interest. But I understand it has been settled here long ago and we are to be called "Flutists".



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Please continue answering the sister/ brother/ none (or other) question.

neither, baby flute!(pointing out the shrill voice the piccolo has compared to a small child of either gender.)

kissing cousins

In the past I would refer to the picc as 'baby'. But now reading the posts I will be changing to something else (I don't know what yet).

Regarding gender.I am American English so I suppose I don't really care as we don't assign gender to nouns as is done in so many other languages. Also, as Americans I believe we default to smaller as female and larger as male.

However in the post above about Bernstein and Britten. I got to thinking. Although Berstein is American born, his parents are from the Eastern Block area what is now known as the Ukraine. Based on gender association because of language it is entirely possible the gender assignment he learned was because of language gender association. Also, for a long long time musicans in 'serious' orchestras were only men. The Vienna Philharmonic still follows this belief that only men can perform classical music properly. They believe because men and women are different that can never interpret any music the same way. And since classical music is written by men it can only be interpretted properly by men. So to be a really good group the orchestra would have to be all men.(Their documented opinion - not mine). So with all men for so long the culture could easily have assigned a male gender to the Picc and every other instrument.

What a great question!

In my language both cases are possible. If you use the international name (I mean "piccolo", which, I suppose, is Italian) it would be a masculine name and would be inflected as a masculine noun. If you use the "official" name (which is "the small flute"), it would be feminine because "flute" is feminine.

For me personally the piccolo looks more masculine, while the flute is definitely feminine. My native language is Lithuanian.

I'm usually silent on this forum, but I thought, this time my oppinion would be interesting as the other replies were mainly posted by English-speakers.

And what do you think? Flute is masculine in Spanish, right?

sister, english

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i think a piccolo sounds ery sweet and hih (like a little girl)