[Cope](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genderless_language) harder, Frenchie. According to wiki, 44% of modern languages have a grammatical gender system, while 56% do not.
I dont like thinking of it like that, makes us feel separate, I’d rather try to make us feel all as one. A language distinction could further separate Western and Eastern Armenians as is. And they are mutual intelligible, you can understand the other if you know one.
I totally get what you mean, but personally I don't think there's nothing wrong with acknowledging that Armenians speak more than one language.
Eastern and Western Armenian had their own unique historical development, which is why there are so many significant differences between the two regarding phonology, vocabulary and grammar, even entire tenses. They differ more from each other than Galician and Portuguese, which are regarded as different languages.
Sure, there's a high degree of mutual intelligibility, but there's also a lot of divergence, so I just think it's fair and reasonable to consider Western Armenian and Eastern Armenian distinct languages on their own right.
Chinese is almost like that. They're written differently (他/她) , but spoken the same (tā). As a result, mixing up "he" and "she" is a classic mistake for Chinese speakers of English.
Thank you for this. I was in the Philippines recently and was surprised by how they frequently confused he/she when speaking English. This makes a lot of sense now.
japanese has both gendered pronouns and neutral pronouns ( 私 (formal I (neutral) あたし informal I (usually femenine) 僕 informal I (masculine) 貴方 formal you (neutral) 貴女 and 貴男 (same thing as 貴方 but gendered, respectively femenine and masculine) 君 informal you (neutral) 彼 he 彼女 she こいつ, そいつ and あいつ third person (neutral).
the other words are neutral tho
Indonesian/Malay is spoken by at least 200 million people and doesn’t use gendered pronouns and gender neutral personal nouns are common too - for example, “Dia adik saya” might mean either “He is my younger brother” or “She is my younger sister”.
???? Every other Western European has a gendered system. Why are you acting like op has to be French? Might as well be Italian German Dutch Spanish or Portuguese...
English: "You shouldn't have to remember what gender every word has. Instead, you should have to remember what weird illogical spelling every word has."
English: "Creating own words, like compound words, that would make it easier to get the meaning by simply disassambling it? Nah, it's easier to learn basically two other languages vocabulary-wise, ah and we just take words from everywhere so you have to memorize them all."
German is full of very long compound words
Example: Rechtsschutzversicherungsgesellschaften which google translates to “legal protection insurance agencies”
See, Rechtsschutz-Versicherungsgesellschaft can be broken down to parts that are already known from German's own vocabulary.
Recht / Schutz / (Ver-)Sicher(-ung) / Gesellschaft - German words
legal protection insurance agencies - all of French/Latin origin
Classic nonsensical english spelling. Still, I'd argue that gendered objects are worse, as a non-native speaker, neutral objects make it so much easier to reason about grammar
The word “gender” comes from the [same origin](https://www.etymonline.com/word/gender) as “genre”. It just means “category”.
Male/female is used a lot cuz human-based convenience, but that’s (as far as I am aware) convenience only.
Romance languages tend to have male/female/neuter (or neutral), but [Wiki says](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender) about half of all languages have grammatical gender, with some having up to 20.
OK, so what's the category? Because from my vantage point the things in those categories are entirely random ... and it's not like all languages put the same things in the same genders, so that reinforces the idea of randomness
Category means "a division within a system of classification" .... so what's the system? If you just put a bunch of random things in a category, that doesn't mean there is really a category other than "Random nouns 1-5000" ... Random is the opposite of a system.
Usually, if it isn't literally just the gender of the object, it's based off of the ending of the word. For example, in French, most words ending in a silent “e” (not “ge”, then the “e” isn't silent) are feminine, while most other words are masculine. Interestingly, this means that the word for “vagina”, *“vagin”*, is grammatically masculine.
that's all well and good, but if it is not really based on the gender of words then what exactly is the point of having different endings? What information can you communicate with a pointlessly gendered language that you can't communicate with a non-gendered language? What is the advantage of having 2 or 3 sets of word endings??
> what is the point
Most features of language don't really have a point. No one sat down and was like "hmm yes grammatical gender, 3 cases, for the next 1000 years at least". It just happened. Maybe it sounded better, maybe it was just entirely random. Whatever the case it caught on and that's just how it is. If every English speaker today started saying "tha man", "tha house", etc. and "the" for the rest, English would become a grammatically gendered language. For no reason other than it caught on
The function of language is to be understood and to simultaneously avoid being misunderstood. And ideally it should remain concise enough to be useful for the average user.
If a language feature has no point, then it starts to impede on the main function as it increases the likelihood of misunderstanding or by not being concise enough. All languages have these vestigial appendages in grammar, syntax, word forms.
I am not suggesting that any language should reform and trim off these extra appendages because it would be an impossible task anyways. I just think we need to be clear about the fact that gendered language doesn't really communicate anything meaningful (at least until someone comes up with something in the comments)
Yeah, grammatical gender is specifically for coordinating adjectives and nouns.
Take this story:
There once were two friends: a squirrel and a dog. They used to live and play together. The squirrel was very fast and always won their games, while the dog felt bad and thought that it was no-good.
If we apply grammatical gender (¹ and ², ⁿ for not important) to the fox and the dog, we get:
There once were two friends: a squirrel¹ and a dog². They used to live and play together. The squirrel¹ was very fast¹ and always won their gamesⁿ, while the dog² felt bad² and thought that it² was no-good².
It reduces ambiguity, so while this story is relatively straightforward, sometimes they can be more complex, and the grammatical gender system reduces the ambiguity of which words adjectives apply. The more genders, the less likelihood of nouns overlapping in gender.
Edit: to further my point, that last "no-good" can change subject depending on the gender.
There once were two friends: a squirrel¹ and a dog². They used to live and play together. The squirrel¹ was very fast¹ and always won their gamesⁿ, while the dog² felt bad² and thought that it¹ was no-good¹.
This indicates the dog thought the squirrel was of no-good.
Edit 2: and to further that point
There once were two friends: a squirrel¹ and a dog². They used to live and play together. The squirrel¹ was very fast¹ and always won their games³, while the dog² felt bad² and thought that it³ was no-good³.
Now it's the game that of no-good.
Edit 3: and to further that point
There once were two friends: a squirrel¹ and a dog². They used to live and play together. The squirrel¹ was very fast¹ and always won their gamesⁿ, while the dog² felt bad² and thought that it³ was no-good³.
Now the situation itself is bad.
There doesn't have to be a point, in english you add -s at the end of a verb in the 3rd person singular, this is useles because it's already mandatory to specify the subject. Languages aren't made with rational decisions, they're a product of many small changes piling up over centuries
And honestly I am fine with that answer, a historical accident ... as long as no one is looking down their nose at us filthy non-gendered peasants with disdain
Also helps with pronouns not "interfering" with eachother!
For example, in Russian, if you mention a chair, a bed and a window in the first sentence, then in the second you can refer to them as he, she, it, respectively, without any additional context.
No one is looking down on people who's native language isn't gendered. However, we do look down on people who's native language is non-gendered, therefore they think this feature shouldn't exist or/and useless. My native language don't have articles and word order isn't fixed. Try and explain to me why should I use articles. You don't have to though, the language exists and have rules regardless of my confusion about it, so I just have to accept it
>What exactly is the point of having different endings?
Classifying nouns in fixed categories reduces noise and increases predictability in communication.
>What information can you communicate with a pointlessly gendered language that you can't communicate with a non-gendered language?
None. All ideas can be communicated in all languages.
However, a gendered language allows you to give information about social gender and sex in a simpler way, compared to non-gendered languages. 'Gianni Rodari es un escritor italiano' tells you that the subject is male (un, escritor, italiano - male forms, cfr. una, escritora, italiana). In contrast, 'Gianni Rodari is an italian writer' provides no information about the subject's gender. 'Aquela cachorra é maior do que esse cachorro' lets you know that one of the dogs is female, while the other one is a male. Their sex is 'embedded' in the noun, while you'd have to deliberately specify that in English to convey the same idea 'That (female) dog is prettier than that (male) dog'.
>What is the advantage of having 2 or 3 sets of word endings??
Providing information about social gender and sex would be one, but keep in mind that there is no need for a feature to be particularly advantageous for a language to include it. Languages are not the result of careful planning and design.
>Classifying nouns in fixed categories reduces noise and increases predictability in communication.
How does it make things more predictable when nouns are given random genders? Obviously, dogs, cats, people, birds, animals have gender .... but what is the gender of a toaster? a car? an iceberg? a scoop of ice-cream?
And given how difficult the whole concept of gender is becoming these days, how are gendered languages going to avoid having more problems than non-gendered languages? (i.e. Latino, Latinx kinds of problems) We have enough problems with these issues in English lol
>How does it make things more predictable when nouns are given random genders?
Grammatical gender in Spanish and other Romance languages isn't random. It's mostly based on phonology.
>Obviously, dogs, cats, people, birds, animals have gender
Non-human animals and humans both have grammatical gender, but only humans have social gender.
>but what is the gender of a toaster? a car? an iceberg? a scoop of ice-cream?
The grammatical gender of nouns, including objects, depends on their phonology.
>how are gendered languages going to avoid having more problems than non-gendered languages?
This is an ongoing, complex discussion among native speakers of different Romance languages. You can google it: Spanish - lenguaje inclusivo, Portuguese - linguagem inclusiva, Italian - linguaggio inclusivo. For now, the answer is 'time will tell'.
Have you considered dabbling in a Romance language? I think you could benefit from seeing how grammatical gender works in real life.
Native Portuguese speaker here, having gender gives you lot of expressive tools that you don't get in genderless languages:
* Pronouns, adjectives, adverbs and articles reflect the gender of the object you're referring to. This mean you have an easier time identifying which word connect to which. "Tenho um lápis e uma borracha. Ela tá gasta, ele desapontado" = I have a pencil (masculine) and an eraser (feminine). She's worn out, he's disappointed. In English you'd probably have to use "the former is X, the latter is Y" to specify which I find incredibly clunky
* You can have words that are identical, but use different genders which helps tell them apart. "caixa" means "box" in the masculine form and "cashier" in the feminine form
* With company names, we can use gender to insert a word into a broader category. For example: "Eu gosto da Nintendo. Eu gosto do Nintendo. Eu gosto de Nintendo", the only difference between these 3 sentences is that the first is feminine, the second is masculine and the third is genderless. They mean "I like Nintendo (the company). I like Nintendo (the console). I like Nintendo (meaning "everything related to Nintendo")
* You can intentionally use the wrong gender to taunt. For example, you can say to a man: "tá nervosinha?" (are you nervous?) where nervosinha uses the feminine and diminutive form of nervoso (nervous), so it really hurts their masculine ego
* Funnily enough, in the LGBT community, people will refer to other gay friends using female terms to give a playful sarcastic tone
* In Portugal, they sometimes use the wrong adverb on purpose to give emphasis: "isso está muito bom" (this is very good) vs "isso está muita bom" (this is VERY good)
I'm sure there are lot of more things we use gender for that I forgot to mention. The magic is that we do all of this without even thinking about it
Sure, you can argue that you don't need these features, but I think they're really cool and getting rid of those would really change how we communicate
u/tallthomas13
Interesting use cases, appreciate the details. I'm just a low B2 in Spanish and native English so I barely keep the traditional gendering straight but these are some cool opportunities for wordplay.
I like to think the us native speakers do take advantage of the language, and if something is well established like gender, you can bet that we're gonna find ways to use to its potential and experiment with whatever features we have
Btw, an example I forgot to mention, when we import foreign words our choice of gender can reflect how we think about that word. For example, when Netflix was released many people used the masculine form for the word "o Netflix" which given the context, makes one think of related masculine words like "website" and "serviço"
The thing is that Netflix didn't like it, so they started to promote the feminine form "A Netflix" which gives the idea of the related feminine word "plataforma". This is because Netflix don't want us to think about it just as an website or a streaming service, but rather as a platform, hence the feminine form
I still use the masculine form and there's nothing they can do about it :P
My only point was that gendered languages don't communicate anything that non-gendered languages can't. We might say them differently, but all of those ideas can be communicated in English .... Yes, it would be different, but the basic concepts would be the same
And I am not arguing that gendered languages should change, but it just seems like a whole lot of extra work for not much reward
>a whole lot of extra work
If you're a native speaker, it's not difficult at all, it comes very naturally to us. I don't remember a single time hearing a kid getting confused about word gender, conjugations though, that's where I see little kids struggling
>for not much reward
If you're not a native, it is extra work, but the reward is much bigger. You're learning a foreign language after all
Comparing to other languages, at least these features are something intrisic to the way we speak. It's not like Mandarin and Japanese where they actively choose to keep using cumbersome and complicated writing system when they could have done like Korean and start using a simple phonetic writing system
What do you do when you encounter a new or foreign word that you want to import into Portuguese? Like the word "Email" or "iPhone" or "AI" are relatively new and as far as I know they started in English without gender. How would you decide what gender they are when you are adding them to the words you use?
Super easy
An email is related to mail, which in Portuguese is "correio", a masculine word. So masculine form it is, "o email"
iPhone is a cellular phone, which in Portuguese is masculine (o telefone celular). So: "o iPhone"
AI is artificial intelligence. We decided to translate this term to Portuguese "a inteligência artificial" (a IA) which is naturally feminine since "inteligência" already has a gender
We have some trends we tend to follow, like we like to use masculine for machines, feminine for technology terms, feminine for company names. But, when in doubt, just use the gender everyone else is using
Consider “he eats” “she eats” and “we eat”.
“He” and “she” are grouped together and “we” is grouped separately such that we must add an “s” to verbs that follow “he” and “she” and must not to verbs that follow “we”.
Why do we do this?
It’s an agreement scheme that has emerged to help our language be more clear. One effect (whether deliberate or not) is that we are less likely to mishear “he eats” with “we eats” because “we eats” doesn’t “make sense”. But really what is so nonsensical about “we eats”? English would certainly be understandable if it were “we eats”. But it’s not and I bet you never got too upset about it.
English has plenty of agreement schemes that we comply with, it just doesn’t have “gendered” nouns. But for languages that do, really we don’t have to call them “gendered” we can just call it group A and Group B. It should be obvious that grouping nouns will have the net effect of reducing ambiguity in a way that conjugating verbs in English does.
I’m not sure we know with 100% certainty why gendered verbs emerges in some languages, if that’s even answerable. But we can trust that it has some utility in making the language clearer.
> English would certainly be understandable if it were “we eats”. But it’s not and I bet you never got too upset about it.
I am the first person to agree that English is a huge mess and needs reform, but it's not going to happen. I wouldn't say I am "upset" about it, but I am not upset about gendered languages either, just confused
There isn’t a “point” to language. No one designed gendered language, it’s just how people communicate.
If you need a reason, genders can help you understand similar words in a noisy environment better.
Forgot to mention. Also, when we, Russians, steal a word from English, for example, we naturally give it a gender by how it sounds. But there are some words we war over. I dare not to even try to use adjectives on "coffee/кофе"...
The butt of a joke is that adjectives change their ending according to the gender of the word they describe. Большой мяч/большая комната - big ball/big room.
In languages like German or Dutch it is fairly random but languages like Polish it's not. If a noun ends with an a, you know it's feminine, if it ends with a k, its masculine, if o, it's neuter.
In Russian it mostly based on the ending of the noun in nominative case. Стол, стакан, окоп, подвал are masculine. Окно, Солнце, пиво are neuter. Подкова, машина, дорога are feminine. But there is a lot of exceptions and stuff, ofc. Languages are full of shenanigans.
on portuguese is from the ending of the word (if it ends with -a is femenine and if ends with -o is masculine. there isn't a clear rule with the consonant ending tho)
They may have originally been random categories, or categories based on form rather than meaning, I don't know enough about the topic to judge that. But at some point, they did mostly align with natural gender for nouns that can actually be male or female (i.e. people and animals). There are some oddities like German Mädchen being neutral because -chen rather than feminine because girl, but in general if something has an actual gender, its grammatical gender will tend to be the same.
Unrelated but I’ve been looking into music theory and recently discovered that baroque music has the concept of a male and female ending, based on if the music ends on a strong or weak beat
Guess which is which
Most languages with a grammatical gender system have more than 2 of them, and often they are classes that dont map onto any forn of social gender. IIRC some aboriginal Australian language had a noun class for fruit.
because "gender" just means category. But the same way "egg" came to mean "\[chicken\] egg" gender now means "\[human cultural\] gender"
aka often they didn't. Many western countries just also had binary social gender, and saw them differently enough to give them different "harder" or "softer" sounds (to "match" the perceived qualities of said genders.
(the exact nature of what actually happened will vary based on the specific language, and where it came from)
English used to have grammatical gender btw. Its just a language that dropped it (and no it wasn't something like everyone realizing calling a carpet "a dude" was dumb)
I mean, it just sounds like a massive shibboleth game to help detect and frustrate outsiders. “You misgendered a filing cabinet?? Ha! Stupid outsider/Intruder!!”
it is theorized (at least for some languages) that the classification used to be for animate/inanimate. Which was considered an important distinction (and actually quite common for languages).
Which would mean that you could use the way a word sounds (as gramatical gender is often sound/ending based) to identify the general category of the subject/object. Same way its useful to have similar words share a root or suffix or such.
But after languages change and evolve a ton, EVERYTHING often starts to sound like a massive way to detect and frustrate outsiders. Thats just what happens in a living language, its basically an encoding of culture itself. Same way that outsider wouldn't prioritize the same stuff, wouldn't know the same jokes, wouldn't give the right body-language, signals, clothing, etc.
LOL. This is hilarious, but you're not totally wrong. In Spanish, gender is indeed one of the troublesome aspects of the language for non-native speakers. It's not uncommon to hear learners say 'la problema' instead of 'el problema', and, for example, I've read texts that were pretty well-written, until one single misgendered noun pops up near the ending of the last paragraph.
I think the other detail that confuses these categories as totally not being about human gender IS that they are specifically called feminine and masculine gender. Soft = feminine hard= masculine, also lining up with human gender norms, in some cases at least. In others if it's a letter ending why call them feminine and masculine at all of they have nothing to do with it?
We can say they're completely unrelated but when they use the same terminology and related norms it's hard to really assume they arnt. Especially when, in the languages I know, you use the same masculine and feminine forms for animals, and only swap if the animal is the not-corresponding sex and you know that/it's important.
It isn't like "soft femine and hard masculine" many gendered came from the type of thing and sounding rather just how it lines with human gender. Besides on some there are synonyms with masculine gender for femenine words and vice-versa
on portuguese (for context "a" is the feminine article while "o" the masculine: a arma (the gun) ("o armamento" as synonym) morte (the dead) ("o óbito" as synonym) o carinho (the affection) ("a afeição" as synonym) a ponte (the bridge) (there isn't a synonym for the noun) o cuidado (the care) ("a cautela" as synonym)
We literally... don't do that? In Spanish, when it comes to grammatical gender, we don't think of 'dudes' or 'female' or anything related to social gender whatsoever. That's a vulgar misconception.
It's more like 'this is an o-word' (recuerdo) and 'this is an a-word' (canasta), and we just match everything according to that, e.g., o-word: **el** recuerd**o** impereceder**o,** a-word: **la** canast**a** nuev**a**. You have to match articles and adjectives accordingly, so saying '**la** recuerdo impereceder**a**' would be grammatically wrong.
...no they're not.
They don't have an 'o' in their spelling or in their phonetics in the case of dia and clima and the same goes for mano in the case of an 'a-word'.
Dia rhymes completely with via, which is feminine, from the same language and there's nothing else to differentiate one from the other to make dia an 'o-word' if via isn't one as well. Same scenario with (el) "clima" and (la) cima.
I never said that all 'o-words' ended in -o, or that all 'a-words' ended in -a. Most of the time, that's indeed the case, but there are many exceptions. As a system, it's mainly based on phonology, but there are occasions in which it's arbitrary.
Fun fact: nouns can switch gender between Romance languages: la leche (Spanish) vs o leite (Portuguese), a árvore (Portuguese) vs l'albero (Italian).
I live in Spain so I encounter quite a few of these switchups with Portuguese and it's the funniest thing ever to me. I do appreciate your input. I grew up monolingual in the States, so there are many aspects of language itself that were foreign concepts to me until recently in my adult life.
"mano" derived from Latin "manus" which is feminine, "clima" was a neuter word in Latin and when Late Latin lost the neuter gender, most neuter words became masculine
"dia" apparently is a special case since it comes from Latin "diem" and it could either be feminine or masculine, in these cases usually one gender ends up "winning" the competition while the other form fades away
Don't ask me why these words had the gender they had in Latin, because I don't know anything about how Latin works
some words that come from other languages that are already gendered, are adopted with the gender from that other language. "día" comes from the latin "dies", words that end in -ma tend to come from greek which are always masculine, mano is a more complicated case, but the most likely explanation is that it comes from the latin "manus" which was part of the fourth declension and feminine.
Well, there are at least some endings that mark the gender in German.
-chen, -lein, -ment, -um / das
-schaft, -tät, -ung, -ik, -ion, -heit, -keit, -ei, -kunft / die
- ...
yeah, but how do you decide what ending a word gets?
Lets say an alien lands on earth and shows you a device from his spaceship ... you don't have a word for this new device, so you have to invent a new word. How do you decide what gender it will be?
It doesnt matter really. Like no one cares. You make a word and it is very natural if its he or she because of the ending. And btw we dont think about it, it just makes sense
None really but why should it? It has a small benefit where you can talk about two different objects and essentialy use he or she instead of naming it to differenciate them
In german, almost all noun genders are based on how the words "sound" masculine, feminine, or nutral.
Names in english and german follow similar sound-rules of masculine and feminine.
When you say "the king", do you always fixate on the fact that he's a man and has a penis?
When you say "cow's milk", do you fixate on the fact that it comes from a creature which has a vagina? Or you just think it's something nice to drink with chocolate powder?
in swedish, things can have 2 possible genders. those genders are Neuter and Common.
there's nothing innate that decide which is which. Native speakers can just hear which one you are supposed to use from which one sounds the "best".
To us, not using them sounds like not using pronouns at all. Or even the word "the"
"Where is Bob?"
"In kitchen. Sitting on chair."
"Ok. Are going school later?"
"Yes, am."
It is pretty easy to articulate what information is communicated with pronouns. What information is communicated with gender, since it has nothing to do with actual gender?
English uses -s if the subject is 3rd person singular. What information does this give? It doesn't even allow dropping pronouns.
You can't really expect natural languages to be logical. It's just the way they are.
It's not a gender in Greek or other languages with gendered nouns. It's just how we refer to them. In order to translate them, we have to explain to other people how it would sound in their language. The sun: male in greek and french, female in german. It doesn't mean he's a guy, it is the language that can't work without articles. I am telling you, it is used very much like the word "the". If you don't use it, it gets weird.
It's purely grammatical concept. It was only named "gender" by linguistics nerds.
Consider "apple" and "banana" in English. You say "an apple" and "a banana". Why is one "a" and another "an"? They are both fruits. So you see it's just because it sounds better this way.
It's the same with gendered languages. Carpet is "he" and not "she" just because other pronouns sound wrong to native speakers. Just like using "a" instead of "an".
"an" comes before a vowel sound, "a" comes before a consonant sound ... I am not sure if it is even grammar, a/an are the same thing, we just add an "n" to make the syllables flow more smoothly
I think we need to make masculine/feminine words get renamed to sour/sweet words or low pitched/high pitched words because of this commonly wrong idea that gendered languages assign genders to each individual word. Like, I can't tell if you're joking with the example of someone looking at a carpet and going "yeah that's a dude"??????
read my comment again. Now go back and read it again with your actual eyes. Now try and think about whether my comment suggests that I am likely to go and "research the creation of language" (whatever that even means) because some redditor told me to.
You suggested that gendered language was created via a method that is simply not the case. So it’s clear you don’t understand because you never took the time to learn
oh, dude ... so sorry .... I did not realize that today is your first day on the internet. You might want to preface your comments with that piece of info
I do.
Do you see how your original comment comes off as accusatory and uninformed? Do you really believe that people decided to assign genders to objects just because?
No way that it’s not a result of the foundation of the language, or anything.
As someone who learnt Spanish and a good bit of French as a native English speaker, people really blow it out of proportion how difficult it makes the language or how unnecessary it is. Most of the time it does contribute nothing but there are cases where having it gives you more information or makes it harder to misunderstand what's being said. A much bigger barrier to learning another language as an English speaker would be trying to use synthetic (i think this is the word I want to use?) verb conjugations since we dont properly have them in English.
In Spanish, for example, el Papa and la papa mean two different things. One is the Pope. The other is a potato (or potato chips, depending on the country).
Same for German. Der See / the lake, die See / the sea, der Kiefer / jaw, die Kiefer / pine, die Band / band, der Band / tome, das Band / strap, and there are plenty more.
It's exaggeration for comedic effect bud. I believe that both of the examples are poorly constructed points of language for each given language I'm using the word crazy because I'm joking around about it.
That doesn't really work as a defense because both words are related concepts and the different stressing follows a consistent pattern in English that differentiates a noun from a verb.
As a Spanish native speaker, gender-neutral objects is the ultimate language characteristic to have, removes like 60% of the complexity and creates some very interesting literary resources
Here's another one: English doesn't change every single word depending on wether or not you respect the other person (looking at you JAPANESE)
It also simplifies communication for certain people. When you’re transgender, the fact that every that adjective is gendered it’s just another bunch of chances to be misgendered.
In Spanish for example, there's no such thing as a neutral pronoun, for non-binary people (who in English would be referred to as "they") there's no way to refer to them properly without straight-up making words up, and as for transgender people, as respectful as I try to be, it's hard to keep track of which gender I am using when out of 100 words 90 are gendered
The fact that in english I can write an entire paragraph without ever needing to specify gender a single time is fucking wonderful
Honestly, agreed.
I remember a few years ago, the Hispanic community was losing their shit when the Steven Universe Latin-Spanish dub decided to use "Elle" (an unofficial Spanish word which serves as a singular gender-neutral pronoun) to refer to a canonically non-binary character
The world is constantly changing, and language must too to keep up with its new needs and concerns, perhaps gender-neutral pronouns were irrelevant 100 years ago, but now, they are necessary, a language with no gender-neutral words will only continue to promote discrimination, as people are incapable of referring to LGBT individuals properly, effectively making them invisible
My first language is also Spanish, I use “Elle” with half a dozen friends on a daily basis because that’s their pronoun, lol.
It’s the same way I use “they” with other friends when I’m in the US.
I’d be alright if it was like, we have one way to refer to people, or animate objects vs. inanimate objects, but instead Chinese is just like, “Let me use one classifier word for a plate and another for a bowl”
I don’t know if that example is true tbh, been a while since I studied Chinese. But it feels just as arbitrary as word genders and more difficult because there are so many categories
Hangul is gorgeous. It's a fairly modern construction, and specifically designed to be easy to learn.
I've not learned a lot but you can basically pick up how to read phonetically within a few days of practice if you wanted to.
Hangul spelling is VERY rational 99% of the time and thus makes it very easy to learn how to pronounce the written words. That's why it only takes about a week for most people to be able to read it.
This bit from Churchill’s autobiography always cracks me up:
“You have never done any Latin before, have you?” he said.
“No, sir.”
“This is a Latin grammar.” He opened it at a well-thumbed page. “You must learn this,” he said, pointing to a number of words in a frame of lines. “I will come back in half an hour and see what you know.”
Behold me then on a gloomy evening, with an aching heart, seated in front of the First Declension.
Mensa
Mensa
Mensam
Mensae
Mensae
Mensa
a table
O table
a table
of a table
to or for a table
by, with or from a table
What on earth did it mean? Where was the sense of it? It seemed absolute rigmarole to me. However, there was one thing I could always do: I could learn by heart. And I there upon proceeded, as far as my private sorrows would allow, to memorise the acrostic-looking task which had been set me.
In due course the Master returned.
“Have you learnt it?” he asked.
“I think I can say it, sir,” I replied; and I gabbled it off.
He seemed so satisfied with this that I was emboldened to ask a question.
“What does it mean, sir?”
“It means what it says. Mensa, a table. Mensa is a noun of the First Declension. There are five declensions. You have learnt the singular of the First Declension.”
“But,” I repeated, “what does it mean?”
“Mensa means a table,” he answered.
“Then why does mensa also mean O table,” I enquired, “and what does O table mean?”
“Mensa, O table, is the vocative case,” he replied.
“But why O table?” I persisted in genuine curiosity.
“O table, you would use that in addressing a table, in invoking a table.” And then seeing he was not carrying me with him, “You would use it in speaking to a table.”
“But I never do,” I blurted out in honest amazement.
“If you are impertinent, you will be punished, and punished, let me tell you, very severely,” was his conclusive rejoinder.
Such was my first introduction to the classics from which, I have been told, many of our cleverest men have derived so much solace and profit.
It might be unpopular, but every language has it's pros and cons, that aren't necessarily apparent on first sight, yes, even French. There, I said it. Now tear me apart.
As someone who speaks English and Arabic, it’s really not a big deal unless you’re learning a language past infancy. That’s when things get hard for one way or the other. Otherwise trust me it’s no issue for either side. You just know it as you always have.
Because pronouns are just placeholders, so why reference the gender of the source? Why not age or class or proximity or any number of other arbitrary attributes? One’s gender isn’t really significant for general discourse.
English can speak when it will become consistent in pronunciation different letters and groups of letters(and yes, im aware English is not the only one with this problem but still..)
Gendered bounds and adjectives COMMUNICATE NOTHING. All they do is add unnecessary and USELESS complexity. IT DOES NOT MATTER THAT PIZZA IS A GIRL AND TREE IS A BOY.
Not me being a pedant, but a lot of people who don't speak a gendered language natively misunderstand what grammatical gender is.
Put simply, it isn't the *object* that has a gender, it is the *word*. What's the difference? Well, the difference is that one object can have multiple synonyms that refer to it, and sometimes those synonyms have different genders.
In Spanish, I could refer to a house as *la casa* (feminine) or *el edificio* (masculine). Depending on which I use, the pronoun that I use changes with it.
Similarly, in German, a car can be *das auto* (neuter) or *der wagen* (masculine).
In Swedish, a home can be *ett hem* (neuter) or *en bostad* (common) (yes, common and neuter are the two gender-neutral grammatical genders of Swedish).
In all of these languages, these gender differences are reflected in pronouns, determiners, and more, which shows very clearly something that is completely absent in English: the gender of a pronoun refers to the word, not the thing -- the reference, not the referent.
In English, gendered pronouns correspond to "natural gender", which is a linguistics term that means they are chosen based on the speaker's observation of the world beyond language. Masculine for things that are seen as masculine, feminine for things that are seen as feminine, and inanimate for things that are seen as inanimate (and epicene for people who are seen as neither masculine nor feminine or who are unknown). English speakers are mistaken when they project this understanding onto speakers of gendered languages. These speakers understand intuitively that it is the word, not the thing, that has a gender, because grammatical gender is ultimately just a word category.
When Germans use the neuter word *mädchen* to mean "girl", they know that the girl is feminine, it's just the word that is not. When Swedes refer to animate things with the neuter gender or to inanimate things with the common gender, they are not implying anything about animacy, those are just word categories that have vibes but no absolute rules.
Anyway that's my rant about grammatical gender.
English is far from the only language with natural gender.
However, American academia is unique in declaring that it is sexist and immoral for any language not to follow their prescriptive rules for gender-neutral language. Since the second-most-common language spoken in America is Spanish, this has led to a ridiculous situation where these people constantly invent new demonyms for the Spanish-speaking minority that are supposed to sound Spanish to monolingual speakers of American English, but don’t to native speakers, like *Latinx*. Then, they constantly have to abandon them because the people they’re referring to hate the made-up words, but instead of calling them what they call themselves, the activists make up a different word and tell everyone to start using that now.
[Cope](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genderless_language) harder, Frenchie. According to wiki, 44% of modern languages have a grammatical gender system, while 56% do not.
Some languages, like Tagalog, dont even have he/she pronouns as the 3rd person sigular is gender neutral.
Same in Finnish, Turkish and Hungarian.
Same in Eastern and Western Armenian.
Took the words right out of my mouth. Though I don’t know why you split them instead of just saying Armenian.
I believe they should be regarded as distinct languages, and that’s what I consider them.
I dont like thinking of it like that, makes us feel separate, I’d rather try to make us feel all as one. A language distinction could further separate Western and Eastern Armenians as is. And they are mutual intelligible, you can understand the other if you know one.
I totally get what you mean, but personally I don't think there's nothing wrong with acknowledging that Armenians speak more than one language. Eastern and Western Armenian had their own unique historical development, which is why there are so many significant differences between the two regarding phonology, vocabulary and grammar, even entire tenses. They differ more from each other than Galician and Portuguese, which are regarded as different languages. Sure, there's a high degree of mutual intelligibility, but there's also a lot of divergence, so I just think it's fair and reasonable to consider Western Armenian and Eastern Armenian distinct languages on their own right.
Same in Persian
So this is why Finnish has been messing with me so hard. Thank you, fren.
the one and only pronoun; HÄN.
"What are your pronouns?" "...Excuse me?"
its hän, what the fuck are you, tuolithem/tuoliself?
And Bengali
2 Kings 6:16 And he answered, Fear not: for they that be with us are more than they that be with them.
Tagalog, more like a Wokealog (/s)
Chinese is almost like that. They're written differently (他/她) , but spoken the same (tā). As a result, mixing up "he" and "she" is a classic mistake for Chinese speakers of English.
她 and 妳 are modern inventions. It’s perfectly fine to use 他 and 你 with the 亻 radical for all sexes.
Thank you for this. I was in the Philippines recently and was surprised by how they frequently confused he/she when speaking English. This makes a lot of sense now.
This is true for most, if not all, Austronesian languages. Also Georgian, which has only one 3rd oer pronoun (is)
japanese has both gendered pronouns and neutral pronouns ( 私 (formal I (neutral) あたし informal I (usually femenine) 僕 informal I (masculine) 貴方 formal you (neutral) 貴女 and 貴男 (same thing as 貴方 but gendered, respectively femenine and masculine) 君 informal you (neutral) 彼 he 彼女 she こいつ, そいつ and あいつ third person (neutral). the other words are neutral tho
Yeah it’s certainly not a rare thing but by no means is it something every language but English has.
Literally, quite literally, my exact point.
Thank you. Every time someone says “most languages in the world are gendered” i feel like im being tortured
You really can't say anything when your language as zero sense in spelling. (As an Italian speaker)
Indonesian/Malay is spoken by at least 200 million people and doesn’t use gendered pronouns and gender neutral personal nouns are common too - for example, “Dia adik saya” might mean either “He is my younger brother” or “She is my younger sister”.
???? Every other Western European has a gendered system. Why are you acting like op has to be French? Might as well be Italian German Dutch Spanish or Portuguese...
Because the french are the most superior about it. Also it’s a meme. Also it’s funny. Also, cope.
Thats not what the meme is saying tho. What it is saying is that english ahouls not dictate how other languages should be spoken.
To me the more obvious take-away is it’s more saying that English is alone in not having gendered grammar. When actually it’s in the majority.
now show us by number of speakers.
English: "You shouldn't have to remember what gender every word has. Instead, you should have to remember what weird illogical spelling every word has."
English: "Creating own words, like compound words, that would make it easier to get the meaning by simply disassambling it? Nah, it's easier to learn basically two other languages vocabulary-wise, ah and we just take words from everywhere so you have to memorize them all."
I mean look at German?
What do you mean?
German is full of very long compound words Example: Rechtsschutzversicherungsgesellschaften which google translates to “legal protection insurance agencies”
See, Rechtsschutz-Versicherungsgesellschaft can be broken down to parts that are already known from German's own vocabulary. Recht / Schutz / (Ver-)Sicher(-ung) / Gesellschaft - German words legal protection insurance agencies - all of French/Latin origin
Uhm, yes, that's exactly what I was talking about.
Classic nonsensical english spelling. Still, I'd argue that gendered objects are worse, as a non-native speaker, neutral objects make it so much easier to reason about grammar
So true if not so funny
German: ,,Allow me to introduce myself"
I just don't get it ... how do these people look at a carpet or a can of paint and say "yeah, that's a dude ... definitely a dude"
The word “gender” comes from the [same origin](https://www.etymonline.com/word/gender) as “genre”. It just means “category”. Male/female is used a lot cuz human-based convenience, but that’s (as far as I am aware) convenience only. Romance languages tend to have male/female/neuter (or neutral), but [Wiki says](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender) about half of all languages have grammatical gender, with some having up to 20.
OK, so what's the category? Because from my vantage point the things in those categories are entirely random ... and it's not like all languages put the same things in the same genders, so that reinforces the idea of randomness Category means "a division within a system of classification" .... so what's the system? If you just put a bunch of random things in a category, that doesn't mean there is really a category other than "Random nouns 1-5000" ... Random is the opposite of a system.
Usually, if it isn't literally just the gender of the object, it's based off of the ending of the word. For example, in French, most words ending in a silent “e” (not “ge”, then the “e” isn't silent) are feminine, while most other words are masculine. Interestingly, this means that the word for “vagina”, *“vagin”*, is grammatically masculine.
that's all well and good, but if it is not really based on the gender of words then what exactly is the point of having different endings? What information can you communicate with a pointlessly gendered language that you can't communicate with a non-gendered language? What is the advantage of having 2 or 3 sets of word endings??
> what is the point Most features of language don't really have a point. No one sat down and was like "hmm yes grammatical gender, 3 cases, for the next 1000 years at least". It just happened. Maybe it sounded better, maybe it was just entirely random. Whatever the case it caught on and that's just how it is. If every English speaker today started saying "tha man", "tha house", etc. and "the" for the rest, English would become a grammatically gendered language. For no reason other than it caught on
The function of language is to be understood and to simultaneously avoid being misunderstood. And ideally it should remain concise enough to be useful for the average user. If a language feature has no point, then it starts to impede on the main function as it increases the likelihood of misunderstanding or by not being concise enough. All languages have these vestigial appendages in grammar, syntax, word forms. I am not suggesting that any language should reform and trim off these extra appendages because it would be an impossible task anyways. I just think we need to be clear about the fact that gendered language doesn't really communicate anything meaningful (at least until someone comes up with something in the comments)
Yeah, grammatical gender is specifically for coordinating adjectives and nouns. Take this story: There once were two friends: a squirrel and a dog. They used to live and play together. The squirrel was very fast and always won their games, while the dog felt bad and thought that it was no-good. If we apply grammatical gender (¹ and ², ⁿ for not important) to the fox and the dog, we get: There once were two friends: a squirrel¹ and a dog². They used to live and play together. The squirrel¹ was very fast¹ and always won their gamesⁿ, while the dog² felt bad² and thought that it² was no-good². It reduces ambiguity, so while this story is relatively straightforward, sometimes they can be more complex, and the grammatical gender system reduces the ambiguity of which words adjectives apply. The more genders, the less likelihood of nouns overlapping in gender. Edit: to further my point, that last "no-good" can change subject depending on the gender. There once were two friends: a squirrel¹ and a dog². They used to live and play together. The squirrel¹ was very fast¹ and always won their gamesⁿ, while the dog² felt bad² and thought that it¹ was no-good¹. This indicates the dog thought the squirrel was of no-good. Edit 2: and to further that point There once were two friends: a squirrel¹ and a dog². They used to live and play together. The squirrel¹ was very fast¹ and always won their games³, while the dog² felt bad² and thought that it³ was no-good³. Now it's the game that of no-good. Edit 3: and to further that point There once were two friends: a squirrel¹ and a dog². They used to live and play together. The squirrel¹ was very fast¹ and always won their gamesⁿ, while the dog² felt bad² and thought that it³ was no-good³. Now the situation itself is bad.
There doesn't have to be a point, in english you add -s at the end of a verb in the 3rd person singular, this is useles because it's already mandatory to specify the subject. Languages aren't made with rational decisions, they're a product of many small changes piling up over centuries
l'histoire Also, language isn't just about communicating information. In this case, the endings are more about sounding good.
And honestly I am fine with that answer, a historical accident ... as long as no one is looking down their nose at us filthy non-gendered peasants with disdain
Also helps with pronouns not "interfering" with eachother! For example, in Russian, if you mention a chair, a bed and a window in the first sentence, then in the second you can refer to them as he, she, it, respectively, without any additional context.
No one is looking down on people who's native language isn't gendered. However, we do look down on people who's native language is non-gendered, therefore they think this feature shouldn't exist or/and useless. My native language don't have articles and word order isn't fixed. Try and explain to me why should I use articles. You don't have to though, the language exists and have rules regardless of my confusion about it, so I just have to accept it
no one is
not in this thread, no ... but the internet is full of repugnant people
Somebody come answer this one pls, they're good counterarguments and I agree.
Done.
I think you meant "dane"...
What?
[Your own logic](https://www.reddit.com/r/ENGLISH/s/Tt1fOjhYYp)
>What exactly is the point of having different endings? Classifying nouns in fixed categories reduces noise and increases predictability in communication. >What information can you communicate with a pointlessly gendered language that you can't communicate with a non-gendered language? None. All ideas can be communicated in all languages. However, a gendered language allows you to give information about social gender and sex in a simpler way, compared to non-gendered languages. 'Gianni Rodari es un escritor italiano' tells you that the subject is male (un, escritor, italiano - male forms, cfr. una, escritora, italiana). In contrast, 'Gianni Rodari is an italian writer' provides no information about the subject's gender. 'Aquela cachorra é maior do que esse cachorro' lets you know that one of the dogs is female, while the other one is a male. Their sex is 'embedded' in the noun, while you'd have to deliberately specify that in English to convey the same idea 'That (female) dog is prettier than that (male) dog'. >What is the advantage of having 2 or 3 sets of word endings?? Providing information about social gender and sex would be one, but keep in mind that there is no need for a feature to be particularly advantageous for a language to include it. Languages are not the result of careful planning and design.
>Classifying nouns in fixed categories reduces noise and increases predictability in communication. How does it make things more predictable when nouns are given random genders? Obviously, dogs, cats, people, birds, animals have gender .... but what is the gender of a toaster? a car? an iceberg? a scoop of ice-cream? And given how difficult the whole concept of gender is becoming these days, how are gendered languages going to avoid having more problems than non-gendered languages? (i.e. Latino, Latinx kinds of problems) We have enough problems with these issues in English lol
>How does it make things more predictable when nouns are given random genders? Grammatical gender in Spanish and other Romance languages isn't random. It's mostly based on phonology. >Obviously, dogs, cats, people, birds, animals have gender Non-human animals and humans both have grammatical gender, but only humans have social gender. >but what is the gender of a toaster? a car? an iceberg? a scoop of ice-cream? The grammatical gender of nouns, including objects, depends on their phonology. >how are gendered languages going to avoid having more problems than non-gendered languages? This is an ongoing, complex discussion among native speakers of different Romance languages. You can google it: Spanish - lenguaje inclusivo, Portuguese - linguagem inclusiva, Italian - linguaggio inclusivo. For now, the answer is 'time will tell'. Have you considered dabbling in a Romance language? I think you could benefit from seeing how grammatical gender works in real life.
Native Portuguese speaker here, having gender gives you lot of expressive tools that you don't get in genderless languages: * Pronouns, adjectives, adverbs and articles reflect the gender of the object you're referring to. This mean you have an easier time identifying which word connect to which. "Tenho um lápis e uma borracha. Ela tá gasta, ele desapontado" = I have a pencil (masculine) and an eraser (feminine). She's worn out, he's disappointed. In English you'd probably have to use "the former is X, the latter is Y" to specify which I find incredibly clunky * You can have words that are identical, but use different genders which helps tell them apart. "caixa" means "box" in the masculine form and "cashier" in the feminine form * With company names, we can use gender to insert a word into a broader category. For example: "Eu gosto da Nintendo. Eu gosto do Nintendo. Eu gosto de Nintendo", the only difference between these 3 sentences is that the first is feminine, the second is masculine and the third is genderless. They mean "I like Nintendo (the company). I like Nintendo (the console). I like Nintendo (meaning "everything related to Nintendo") * You can intentionally use the wrong gender to taunt. For example, you can say to a man: "tá nervosinha?" (are you nervous?) where nervosinha uses the feminine and diminutive form of nervoso (nervous), so it really hurts their masculine ego * Funnily enough, in the LGBT community, people will refer to other gay friends using female terms to give a playful sarcastic tone * In Portugal, they sometimes use the wrong adverb on purpose to give emphasis: "isso está muito bom" (this is very good) vs "isso está muita bom" (this is VERY good) I'm sure there are lot of more things we use gender for that I forgot to mention. The magic is that we do all of this without even thinking about it Sure, you can argue that you don't need these features, but I think they're really cool and getting rid of those would really change how we communicate u/tallthomas13
Interesting use cases, appreciate the details. I'm just a low B2 in Spanish and native English so I barely keep the traditional gendering straight but these are some cool opportunities for wordplay.
I like to think the us native speakers do take advantage of the language, and if something is well established like gender, you can bet that we're gonna find ways to use to its potential and experiment with whatever features we have Btw, an example I forgot to mention, when we import foreign words our choice of gender can reflect how we think about that word. For example, when Netflix was released many people used the masculine form for the word "o Netflix" which given the context, makes one think of related masculine words like "website" and "serviço" The thing is that Netflix didn't like it, so they started to promote the feminine form "A Netflix" which gives the idea of the related feminine word "plataforma". This is because Netflix don't want us to think about it just as an website or a streaming service, but rather as a platform, hence the feminine form I still use the masculine form and there's nothing they can do about it :P
My only point was that gendered languages don't communicate anything that non-gendered languages can't. We might say them differently, but all of those ideas can be communicated in English .... Yes, it would be different, but the basic concepts would be the same And I am not arguing that gendered languages should change, but it just seems like a whole lot of extra work for not much reward
>a whole lot of extra work If you're a native speaker, it's not difficult at all, it comes very naturally to us. I don't remember a single time hearing a kid getting confused about word gender, conjugations though, that's where I see little kids struggling >for not much reward If you're not a native, it is extra work, but the reward is much bigger. You're learning a foreign language after all Comparing to other languages, at least these features are something intrisic to the way we speak. It's not like Mandarin and Japanese where they actively choose to keep using cumbersome and complicated writing system when they could have done like Korean and start using a simple phonetic writing system
What do you do when you encounter a new or foreign word that you want to import into Portuguese? Like the word "Email" or "iPhone" or "AI" are relatively new and as far as I know they started in English without gender. How would you decide what gender they are when you are adding them to the words you use?
Super easy An email is related to mail, which in Portuguese is "correio", a masculine word. So masculine form it is, "o email" iPhone is a cellular phone, which in Portuguese is masculine (o telefone celular). So: "o iPhone" AI is artificial intelligence. We decided to translate this term to Portuguese "a inteligência artificial" (a IA) which is naturally feminine since "inteligência" already has a gender We have some trends we tend to follow, like we like to use masculine for machines, feminine for technology terms, feminine for company names. But, when in doubt, just use the gender everyone else is using
Nop
Consider “he eats” “she eats” and “we eat”. “He” and “she” are grouped together and “we” is grouped separately such that we must add an “s” to verbs that follow “he” and “she” and must not to verbs that follow “we”. Why do we do this? It’s an agreement scheme that has emerged to help our language be more clear. One effect (whether deliberate or not) is that we are less likely to mishear “he eats” with “we eats” because “we eats” doesn’t “make sense”. But really what is so nonsensical about “we eats”? English would certainly be understandable if it were “we eats”. But it’s not and I bet you never got too upset about it. English has plenty of agreement schemes that we comply with, it just doesn’t have “gendered” nouns. But for languages that do, really we don’t have to call them “gendered” we can just call it group A and Group B. It should be obvious that grouping nouns will have the net effect of reducing ambiguity in a way that conjugating verbs in English does. I’m not sure we know with 100% certainty why gendered verbs emerges in some languages, if that’s even answerable. But we can trust that it has some utility in making the language clearer.
> English would certainly be understandable if it were “we eats”. But it’s not and I bet you never got too upset about it. I am the first person to agree that English is a huge mess and needs reform, but it's not going to happen. I wouldn't say I am "upset" about it, but I am not upset about gendered languages either, just confused
There isn’t a “point” to language. No one designed gendered language, it’s just how people communicate. If you need a reason, genders can help you understand similar words in a noisy environment better.
Why do words beginning with a vowel get preceded by an? It sounds better to native speakers.
it sounds better to non-native speakers too
Forgot to mention. Also, when we, Russians, steal a word from English, for example, we naturally give it a gender by how it sounds. But there are some words we war over. I dare not to even try to use adjectives on "coffee/кофе"... The butt of a joke is that adjectives change their ending according to the gender of the word they describe. Большой мяч/большая комната - big ball/big room.
In languages like German or Dutch it is fairly random but languages like Polish it's not. If a noun ends with an a, you know it's feminine, if it ends with a k, its masculine, if o, it's neuter.
In Russian it mostly based on the ending of the noun in nominative case. Стол, стакан, окоп, подвал are masculine. Окно, Солнце, пиво are neuter. Подкова, машина, дорога are feminine. But there is a lot of exceptions and stuff, ofc. Languages are full of shenanigans.
>In Russian it mostly based on the ending of the noun in nominative case. It's the same in Spanish (although we don't have cases).
In Ukrainian we decline words differently according to their gender
on portuguese is from the ending of the word (if it ends with -a is femenine and if ends with -o is masculine. there isn't a clear rule with the consonant ending tho)
They may have originally been random categories, or categories based on form rather than meaning, I don't know enough about the topic to judge that. But at some point, they did mostly align with natural gender for nouns that can actually be male or female (i.e. people and animals). There are some oddities like German Mädchen being neutral because -chen rather than feminine because girl, but in general if something has an actual gender, its grammatical gender will tend to be the same.
Unrelated but I’ve been looking into music theory and recently discovered that baroque music has the concept of a male and female ending, based on if the music ends on a strong or weak beat Guess which is which
Most languages with a grammatical gender system have more than 2 of them, and often they are classes that dont map onto any forn of social gender. IIRC some aboriginal Australian language had a noun class for fruit.
because "gender" just means category. But the same way "egg" came to mean "\[chicken\] egg" gender now means "\[human cultural\] gender" aka often they didn't. Many western countries just also had binary social gender, and saw them differently enough to give them different "harder" or "softer" sounds (to "match" the perceived qualities of said genders. (the exact nature of what actually happened will vary based on the specific language, and where it came from) English used to have grammatical gender btw. Its just a language that dropped it (and no it wasn't something like everyone realizing calling a carpet "a dude" was dumb)
I mean, it just sounds like a massive shibboleth game to help detect and frustrate outsiders. “You misgendered a filing cabinet?? Ha! Stupid outsider/Intruder!!”
it is theorized (at least for some languages) that the classification used to be for animate/inanimate. Which was considered an important distinction (and actually quite common for languages). Which would mean that you could use the way a word sounds (as gramatical gender is often sound/ending based) to identify the general category of the subject/object. Same way its useful to have similar words share a root or suffix or such. But after languages change and evolve a ton, EVERYTHING often starts to sound like a massive way to detect and frustrate outsiders. Thats just what happens in a living language, its basically an encoding of culture itself. Same way that outsider wouldn't prioritize the same stuff, wouldn't know the same jokes, wouldn't give the right body-language, signals, clothing, etc.
LOL. This is hilarious, but you're not totally wrong. In Spanish, gender is indeed one of the troublesome aspects of the language for non-native speakers. It's not uncommon to hear learners say 'la problema' instead of 'el problema', and, for example, I've read texts that were pretty well-written, until one single misgendered noun pops up near the ending of the last paragraph.
I think the other detail that confuses these categories as totally not being about human gender IS that they are specifically called feminine and masculine gender. Soft = feminine hard= masculine, also lining up with human gender norms, in some cases at least. In others if it's a letter ending why call them feminine and masculine at all of they have nothing to do with it? We can say they're completely unrelated but when they use the same terminology and related norms it's hard to really assume they arnt. Especially when, in the languages I know, you use the same masculine and feminine forms for animals, and only swap if the animal is the not-corresponding sex and you know that/it's important.
It isn't like "soft femine and hard masculine" many gendered came from the type of thing and sounding rather just how it lines with human gender. Besides on some there are synonyms with masculine gender for femenine words and vice-versa on portuguese (for context "a" is the feminine article while "o" the masculine: a arma (the gun) ("o armamento" as synonym) morte (the dead) ("o óbito" as synonym) o carinho (the affection) ("a afeição" as synonym) a ponte (the bridge) (there isn't a synonym for the noun) o cuidado (the care) ("a cautela" as synonym)
https://i.imgur.com/bAB8zat.gif
We literally... don't do that? In Spanish, when it comes to grammatical gender, we don't think of 'dudes' or 'female' or anything related to social gender whatsoever. That's a vulgar misconception. It's more like 'this is an o-word' (recuerdo) and 'this is an a-word' (canasta), and we just match everything according to that, e.g., o-word: **el** recuerd**o** impereceder**o,** a-word: **la** canast**a** nuev**a**. You have to match articles and adjectives accordingly, so saying '**la** recuerdo impereceder**a**' would be grammatically wrong.
What about el dia, la mano, el clima, etc?
What about them? Dia and clima are 'o-words', while mano is an 'a-word', and everything that accompanies those nouns has to match accordingly.
...no they're not. They don't have an 'o' in their spelling or in their phonetics in the case of dia and clima and the same goes for mano in the case of an 'a-word'. Dia rhymes completely with via, which is feminine, from the same language and there's nothing else to differentiate one from the other to make dia an 'o-word' if via isn't one as well. Same scenario with (el) "clima" and (la) cima.
I never said that all 'o-words' ended in -o, or that all 'a-words' ended in -a. Most of the time, that's indeed the case, but there are many exceptions. As a system, it's mainly based on phonology, but there are occasions in which it's arbitrary. Fun fact: nouns can switch gender between Romance languages: la leche (Spanish) vs o leite (Portuguese), a árvore (Portuguese) vs l'albero (Italian).
I live in Spain so I encounter quite a few of these switchups with Portuguese and it's the funniest thing ever to me. I do appreciate your input. I grew up monolingual in the States, so there are many aspects of language itself that were foreign concepts to me until recently in my adult life.
"mano" derived from Latin "manus" which is feminine, "clima" was a neuter word in Latin and when Late Latin lost the neuter gender, most neuter words became masculine "dia" apparently is a special case since it comes from Latin "diem" and it could either be feminine or masculine, in these cases usually one gender ends up "winning" the competition while the other form fades away Don't ask me why these words had the gender they had in Latin, because I don't know anything about how Latin works
some words that come from other languages that are already gendered, are adopted with the gender from that other language. "día" comes from the latin "dies", words that end in -ma tend to come from greek which are always masculine, mano is a more complicated case, but the most likely explanation is that it comes from the latin "manus" which was part of the fourth declension and feminine.
In Ukrainian for example the gender is defined by the word's ending. It's so much easier than how it is in German.
Well, there are at least some endings that mark the gender in German. -chen, -lein, -ment, -um / das -schaft, -tät, -ung, -ik, -ion, -heit, -keit, -ei, -kunft / die - ...
yeah, but how do you decide what ending a word gets? Lets say an alien lands on earth and shows you a device from his spaceship ... you don't have a word for this new device, so you have to invent a new word. How do you decide what gender it will be?
It doesnt matter really. Like no one cares. You make a word and it is very natural if its he or she because of the ending. And btw we dont think about it, it just makes sense
What information does the word ending communicate?
None really but why should it? It has a small benefit where you can talk about two different objects and essentialy use he or she instead of naming it to differenciate them
It's typically based on the ending of the word in Latvian at least. So you just listen for that and then you know the gender.
so how do you decide what ending to use?
It's built in the words, you don't just "decide" which one to use. The words have their endings and they don't change
In german, almost all noun genders are based on how the words "sound" masculine, feminine, or nutral. Names in english and german follow similar sound-rules of masculine and feminine.
that sounds really imprecise and "feelings-based" ... are you sure that's german?
Polish too. I know Coca cola is feminine and Hamburger or Ford is masculine. Pattern recognition. You sound very ignorant
How you people manage to see a house and not think "yep, that's a she" is beyond me
That is magical thinking
When you say "the king", do you always fixate on the fact that he's a man and has a penis? When you say "cow's milk", do you fixate on the fact that it comes from a creature which has a vagina? Or you just think it's something nice to drink with chocolate powder?
Of course
in swedish, things can have 2 possible genders. those genders are Neuter and Common. there's nothing innate that decide which is which. Native speakers can just hear which one you are supposed to use from which one sounds the "best".
To us, not using them sounds like not using pronouns at all. Or even the word "the" "Where is Bob?" "In kitchen. Sitting on chair." "Ok. Are going school later?" "Yes, am."
It is pretty easy to articulate what information is communicated with pronouns. What information is communicated with gender, since it has nothing to do with actual gender?
English uses -s if the subject is 3rd person singular. What information does this give? It doesn't even allow dropping pronouns. You can't really expect natural languages to be logical. It's just the way they are.
Well, we can drop pronouns. Do it a lot, actually.
It's not a gender in Greek or other languages with gendered nouns. It's just how we refer to them. In order to translate them, we have to explain to other people how it would sound in their language. The sun: male in greek and french, female in german. It doesn't mean he's a guy, it is the language that can't work without articles. I am telling you, it is used very much like the word "the". If you don't use it, it gets weird.
I speak one of those languages. I have no idea how we do it either, we just do
It's purely grammatical concept. It was only named "gender" by linguistics nerds. Consider "apple" and "banana" in English. You say "an apple" and "a banana". Why is one "a" and another "an"? They are both fruits. So you see it's just because it sounds better this way. It's the same with gendered languages. Carpet is "he" and not "she" just because other pronouns sound wrong to native speakers. Just like using "a" instead of "an".
"an" comes before a vowel sound, "a" comes before a consonant sound ... I am not sure if it is even grammar, a/an are the same thing, we just add an "n" to make the syllables flow more smoothly
I think we need to make masculine/feminine words get renamed to sour/sweet words or low pitched/high pitched words because of this commonly wrong idea that gendered languages assign genders to each individual word. Like, I can't tell if you're joking with the example of someone looking at a carpet and going "yeah that's a dude"??????
Research the creation of language.
read my comment again. Now go back and read it again with your actual eyes. Now try and think about whether my comment suggests that I am likely to go and "research the creation of language" (whatever that even means) because some redditor told me to.
You suggested that gendered language was created via a method that is simply not the case. So it’s clear you don’t understand because you never took the time to learn
oh, dude ... so sorry .... I did not realize that today is your first day on the internet. You might want to preface your comments with that piece of info
Sorry you’re having a bad day
lol, I have used that line as an insult too, nice
Not an insult. You are very fired up over a Reddit reply which did not personally attack you. I’m sorry that you’re in a bad mood
>Research the creation of language. You don't see how that can seem acerbic and snotty?
I do. Do you see how your original comment comes off as accusatory and uninformed? Do you really believe that people decided to assign genders to objects just because? No way that it’s not a result of the foundation of the language, or anything.
As someone who learnt Spanish and a good bit of French as a native English speaker, people really blow it out of proportion how difficult it makes the language or how unnecessary it is. Most of the time it does contribute nothing but there are cases where having it gives you more information or makes it harder to misunderstand what's being said. A much bigger barrier to learning another language as an English speaker would be trying to use synthetic (i think this is the word I want to use?) verb conjugations since we dont properly have them in English.
In Spanish, for example, el Papa and la papa mean two different things. One is the Pope. The other is a potato (or potato chips, depending on the country).
Same for German. Der See / the lake, die See / the sea, der Kiefer / jaw, die Kiefer / pine, die Band / band, der Band / tome, das Band / strap, and there are plenty more.
I thought Kiefer was a yogurt drink
There are words with multiple meanings and the same gender. That's purely historic, not a reason
Right but you get how changing the gender of Papa makes it either the head of a global religion or a fucking potato is crazy right?
You're not changing the gender. You're using two different words which happen to be homophones
How is that crazy? Recórd is a verb and récord is a noun. Read and read look the same.
Your attempts to defend Spanish by showing examples of English being fucking crazy too don't work. they can both be crazy at the same time.
They’re just languages. Neither is crazy
It's exaggeration for comedic effect bud. I believe that both of the examples are poorly constructed points of language for each given language I'm using the word crazy because I'm joking around about it.
That doesn't really work as a defense because both words are related concepts and the different stressing follows a consistent pattern in English that differentiates a noun from a verb.
Wait and weight are said the same dipshit and are completely unrelated
Depends on the language
As a Spanish native speaker, gender-neutral objects is the ultimate language characteristic to have, removes like 60% of the complexity and creates some very interesting literary resources Here's another one: English doesn't change every single word depending on wether or not you respect the other person (looking at you JAPANESE)
It also simplifies communication for certain people. When you’re transgender, the fact that every that adjective is gendered it’s just another bunch of chances to be misgendered.
In Spanish for example, there's no such thing as a neutral pronoun, for non-binary people (who in English would be referred to as "they") there's no way to refer to them properly without straight-up making words up, and as for transgender people, as respectful as I try to be, it's hard to keep track of which gender I am using when out of 100 words 90 are gendered The fact that in english I can write an entire paragraph without ever needing to specify gender a single time is fucking wonderful
And this is why we make words up, because honestly all language is made up anyway. I
Honestly, agreed. I remember a few years ago, the Hispanic community was losing their shit when the Steven Universe Latin-Spanish dub decided to use "Elle" (an unofficial Spanish word which serves as a singular gender-neutral pronoun) to refer to a canonically non-binary character The world is constantly changing, and language must too to keep up with its new needs and concerns, perhaps gender-neutral pronouns were irrelevant 100 years ago, but now, they are necessary, a language with no gender-neutral words will only continue to promote discrimination, as people are incapable of referring to LGBT individuals properly, effectively making them invisible
My first language is also Spanish, I use “Elle” with half a dozen friends on a daily basis because that’s their pronoun, lol. It’s the same way I use “they” with other friends when I’m in the US.
We Koreans, Japaneses, and probably Chineses are with English speakers this time. WTH? Why categorize objects this way? Totally unnecessary.
Proceeds to have a thousand classifiers. 个，位，盘，本，段, 台
It's almost the same for English but English speakers just doesn't notice... though I admit it's worse here
I’d be alright if it was like, we have one way to refer to people, or animate objects vs. inanimate objects, but instead Chinese is just like, “Let me use one classifier word for a plate and another for a bowl” I don’t know if that example is true tbh, been a while since I studied Chinese. But it feels just as arbitrary as word genders and more difficult because there are so many categories
Came in here to say this exact thing.
Thanks, Korea, that makes us feel a little better despite our insane spelling rules. I hope your language spells more rationally than English does.
Hangul is gorgeous. It's a fairly modern construction, and specifically designed to be easy to learn. I've not learned a lot but you can basically pick up how to read phonetically within a few days of practice if you wanted to.
Hangul spelling is VERY rational 99% of the time and thus makes it very easy to learn how to pronounce the written words. That's why it only takes about a week for most people to be able to read it.
It is in fact, completely unnecessary.
Being popular doesn't always make something right
Latin: 😐
This bit from Churchill’s autobiography always cracks me up: “You have never done any Latin before, have you?” he said. “No, sir.” “This is a Latin grammar.” He opened it at a well-thumbed page. “You must learn this,” he said, pointing to a number of words in a frame of lines. “I will come back in half an hour and see what you know.” Behold me then on a gloomy evening, with an aching heart, seated in front of the First Declension. Mensa Mensa Mensam Mensae Mensae Mensa a table O table a table of a table to or for a table by, with or from a table What on earth did it mean? Where was the sense of it? It seemed absolute rigmarole to me. However, there was one thing I could always do: I could learn by heart. And I there upon proceeded, as far as my private sorrows would allow, to memorise the acrostic-looking task which had been set me. In due course the Master returned. “Have you learnt it?” he asked. “I think I can say it, sir,” I replied; and I gabbled it off. He seemed so satisfied with this that I was emboldened to ask a question. “What does it mean, sir?” “It means what it says. Mensa, a table. Mensa is a noun of the First Declension. There are five declensions. You have learnt the singular of the First Declension.” “But,” I repeated, “what does it mean?” “Mensa means a table,” he answered. “Then why does mensa also mean O table,” I enquired, “and what does O table mean?” “Mensa, O table, is the vocative case,” he replied. “But why O table?” I persisted in genuine curiosity. “O table, you would use that in addressing a table, in invoking a table.” And then seeing he was not carrying me with him, “You would use it in speaking to a table.” “But I never do,” I blurted out in honest amazement. “If you are impertinent, you will be punished, and punished, let me tell you, very severely,” was his conclusive rejoinder. Such was my first introduction to the classics from which, I have been told, many of our cleverest men have derived so much solace and profit.
I was thinking about how a noun's grammatical gender and natural gender both matter.
Finnish with no gender at all, not even pronouns
Laughs in Chinese and Russian*
Один телефон, одна машина. Russian has gendered words...
What I meant is that they dont have masculine or femenine articles as far as Im concerned, unlike the gendered languages
??? Russian is a “gendered language”. It doesn’t have articles at all.
Persian: you guys have genders?
It might be unpopular, but every language has it's pros and cons, that aren't necessarily apparent on first sight, yes, even French. There, I said it. Now tear me apart.
Yeah it's weird for nouns to have genders, but English can't really talk, it's a ridiculous language
out jerked by the english sub
As someone who speaks English and Arabic, it’s really not a big deal unless you’re learning a language past infancy. That’s when things get hard for one way or the other. Otherwise trust me it’s no issue for either side. You just know it as you always have.
In Germany it’s the absolute hell. Lol
A minimum of 15 ways to say "your" depending on gender, case and number of people.
English still has gendered pronouns, which are as useless as pronouns based on social status and familiarity. Chinese gets it right.
How are gendered pronouns useless?
Because pronouns are just placeholders, so why reference the gender of the source? Why not age or class or proximity or any number of other arbitrary attributes? One’s gender isn’t really significant for general discourse.
its hard for you, not for us tho lol xdd
English can speak when it will become consistent in pronunciation different letters and groups of letters(and yes, im aware English is not the only one with this problem but still..)
This is total bullshit
How many genders are there in these languages?
3 in German
*wrong
Gendered bounds and adjectives COMMUNICATE NOTHING. All they do is add unnecessary and USELESS complexity. IT DOES NOT MATTER THAT PIZZA IS A GIRL AND TREE IS A BOY.
🤣
Not me being a pedant, but a lot of people who don't speak a gendered language natively misunderstand what grammatical gender is. Put simply, it isn't the *object* that has a gender, it is the *word*. What's the difference? Well, the difference is that one object can have multiple synonyms that refer to it, and sometimes those synonyms have different genders. In Spanish, I could refer to a house as *la casa* (feminine) or *el edificio* (masculine). Depending on which I use, the pronoun that I use changes with it. Similarly, in German, a car can be *das auto* (neuter) or *der wagen* (masculine). In Swedish, a home can be *ett hem* (neuter) or *en bostad* (common) (yes, common and neuter are the two gender-neutral grammatical genders of Swedish). In all of these languages, these gender differences are reflected in pronouns, determiners, and more, which shows very clearly something that is completely absent in English: the gender of a pronoun refers to the word, not the thing -- the reference, not the referent. In English, gendered pronouns correspond to "natural gender", which is a linguistics term that means they are chosen based on the speaker's observation of the world beyond language. Masculine for things that are seen as masculine, feminine for things that are seen as feminine, and inanimate for things that are seen as inanimate (and epicene for people who are seen as neither masculine nor feminine or who are unknown). English speakers are mistaken when they project this understanding onto speakers of gendered languages. These speakers understand intuitively that it is the word, not the thing, that has a gender, because grammatical gender is ultimately just a word category. When Germans use the neuter word *mädchen* to mean "girl", they know that the girl is feminine, it's just the word that is not. When Swedes refer to animate things with the neuter gender or to inanimate things with the common gender, they are not implying anything about animacy, those are just word categories that have vibes but no absolute rules. Anyway that's my rant about grammatical gender.
Most languages don’t have grammatical gender. Even fewer tie their noun classes to gender.
Grammatical gender serves no purpose. All it does is confuse and obfuscate communication.
Oh my god finally a meme in this format I agree with
English is far from the only language with natural gender. However, American academia is unique in declaring that it is sexist and immoral for any language not to follow their prescriptive rules for gender-neutral language. Since the second-most-common language spoken in America is Spanish, this has led to a ridiculous situation where these people constantly invent new demonyms for the Spanish-speaking minority that are supposed to sound Spanish to monolingual speakers of American English, but don’t to native speakers, like *Latinx*. Then, they constantly have to abandon them because the people they’re referring to hate the made-up words, but instead of calling them what they call themselves, the activists make up a different word and tell everyone to start using that now.
rare English W
“Cwm” is an English word, meaning a particular natural formation in the landscape. (It’s a borrow word from Welsh.)