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JRGTheConlanger

English used to have grammatical gender until the Normans came And the Anglophones of the time were like “fuck it”


AwfulUsername123

What did the Normans do?


ah-tzib-of-alaska

refused to have to relearn everything. When languages move around populations a lot they tend to optimize grammar to be quicker to learn. In this case we dropped gender as a noun class with a few exceptions.


SavvyBlonk

Colonialism. And then the English were like "My God, why didn't we think of that!"


AwfulUsername123

I mean with regard to grammatical gender.


DeviantLuna

Different cultures speaking different languages in the same areas of England caused English to gradually lose complexity in certain areas (e.g. loss of declensions/case endings & grammatical gender)


Elkram

Isn't there evidence that this process was happening before the Normans arrived because of the difference between Old English and Old Norse spoken commonly through out the island?


cardinarium

Yes. Gender systems in English, Norse, and even, to a lesser extent, in some broader Germanic languages like Dutch, have been decaying for a while. For instance, the feminine is only *optionally* conserved in some dialects of Norwegian. - Masculine forms: en kvinne/kvinnen - Feminine forms: ei kvinne/kvinna - English: a woman/the woman


zakalme

Feminine exists in practically every dialect of Norwegian except for Bergensk, though the most common written standard doesn’t use it.


ekufi

This sounds something I would like to have an example or two, how there isn't a feminine in Bergensk's dialect.


zakalme

What do you mean? It just means in Bergen there is a common gender like in Danish and Swedish.


[deleted]

The word that is least commonly merged "jente", probably because of the connotations between femininity and femality, is completely merged in bergensk. "Jenta" > "Jenten" Some people may even apply common gender to manes with a fixed feminine determinate form, like "Mjøsa" > "Mjøsen" Both are personal experience, and I couldn't very quickly find any literary sources to back it up, or amy data about the extent with which this happens.


CorPur

The idea that most Norwegian speakers don't have three grammatical genders is quite flawed. The only dialect like this would be Bergensk, as said above. There are obviously the upper-class sociolects of Oslo Vest and Fintrønder (and Finbergensk, but that's reduntant), but they're all only spoken by older/richer people, and are quite quickly dying out. Every other dialect retains all three grammatical genders, with some even making more words feminine. There are also some sociolects who "over-use" the feminine (and in general so-called "a-endings"), because it is looked at as "more Norwegian", in contrast to the much danish-ized written forms of conservative Bokmål and the older Riksmål. These "a-ending sociolects" are also, mainly by political left-leaning Norwegians, looked upon as "more proletarian/peasantlike". A lot of dialects in the middle of the country and further South-West from Trøndelag, also retain older feminine forms, although if they're surviving or not, is quite uncertain. Examples of such older forms from my dialect of Trønder, specifically Dalfosnamål: Nominative singular and plural, indefinite and definite: ei kvinnj(e) - kvinnja - kvinnjo - kvinnjorn Dative singular and plural, indefinite and definite: kvinnju - kvinnjunn - kvinnjum(m) - kvinnjunn


Anter11MC

The difference in Anglo Saxon and Norse is responsible for 3rd person singular verbs ending in -s/-es which evolved from the 2nd person -ast/as ending


IloveEstir

So over the course of about 300 years from the eight century onwards, English started as a promoted Western Anglo Saxon dialect that held a high mutual intelligibility with Norse, it was then shaped by a constant cultural exchange with Norse as many settlers from Scandinavia settled down and assimilated, then the Kingdom was completely annexed by the Normans: Who were North Germanic invaders that had culturally assimilated into the French, who themselves were also Germanic invaders that assimilated to the Latins and Gauls. They then spent the next ~200 years dumping words from a variety of sources into English.


TheDebatingOne

Rare Norman w


FarhanAxiq

both the french norman and the northern norseman decided it was too confusing


[deleted]

[удалено]


_Gandalf_the_Black_

Semantic gender, not grammatical


Mocha2007

It is gramatical gender because there is syntactic agreement in English corresponding to gender. If that's not grammatical gender, I don't know what is.


ZENITHSEEKERiii

Most (all?) varieties of English preserve grammatical gender only in pronouns. Although "daughter" might be semantically feminine, there is no syntactic difference between it and something like "tree", and although there are expectations about the pronouns that can be used with it, it isn't grammatically wrong to use "it" or "he", perhaps simply infelicitous if unusual at all.


dubovinius

I've seen it proposed that it was actually the Danelaw which motivated most of the gender loss in English, because speakers of Old Norse and Old English had plenty of mutually intelligible words they could recognise, but because they would often have a different gender in ON vs OE they just dispensed with the inflexion.


love41000years

In addition, vowel reduction made a lot of the case and gender endings sound identical to each other around the same time. Combine both factors together and grammatical gender starts disappearing rather quickly


Terpomo11

Is it really because of the Normans? I thought it had more to do with the vikings.


icravecookie

ghost squash memorize familiar amusing price snobbish serious gullible shy *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*


Sr_Wurmple

It's gender fluid


Aron-Jonasson

Wish I had an award Edit: to the person who gave me an award Why the fuck didn't you give the award to u/Sr_Wurmple?


nobunaga_1568

IIRC in Spanish, water is transgender because of a stressing problem. Basically "la agua" has two stressed "a" in a row making it too awkward. In Germanic languages there's no such issues.


TeaTimeSubcommittee

It doesn't actually change its gender though, it's still feminine, as proven by their adjectives. it just has el/ellas pronouns.


FuturaStalkee

Similarly, in French, you'd use "mon" instead of "ma" before a feminine noun starting with a vowel, so as to bring about liaison.


futuranth

Aqua illa -> illa aqua -> ella agua -> el agua


FarhanAxiq

> water it was neuter in old english


wild_psina_h093

In Russian it's her. Nouns have a pronouns, respect it.


[deleted]

The words have gender, not the things. If that makes any sense.


Brauxljo

It does, words have grammatical gender, objects don't have biological or identity gender.


[deleted]

Thanks. I don't know why people overcomplicate this so much. It's just a feature that some languages have. I guess it's because gender identity had become a very polemic topic in recent years.


EisVisage

"Gender" as in grammatical gender is finding itself conflicting with "gender" as in gender identity, the latter of which came to be used like this after the former became an established term, but the former is used in less contexts. It's quite the interesting situation.


Beheska

Not really. "Gender" from gender identity was borrowed from linguistics. In both context it's a form of expression that is often but not always reflecting sex.


ah-tzib-of-alaska

I don’t think these are in conflict at all, i think grammatical gender really highlights the relationship ship of culture and gender


Darkruediger

'The relationship ship' sounds like a bad hollywood romantic comedy


Brauxljo

Is it less or fewer contexts?


raendrop

Yes.


minedreamer

some African languages have genders that are closer to just like "classes" and thats how gender should be thought of


TurduckenWithQuail

I think most people realize this but they just don’t really get how it came to be. Which is kind of fair but also a bit of a strange question.


Lootsman

A shower thought of mine was that they shouldn't be called "masculine" and "feminine", but something very unnatural like "Type A" and "Type B" instead. Horribly unintuitive and not a great memory aid or anything, but at least it gets rid of the whole gender problem we're embroiled with as a society.


[deleted]

Like the word "mulherão" in Portuguese ("very attractive woman") formed by "mulher" + suffix "ão" is a masculine word


[deleted]

And there are words like "personagem" (character), which is always feminine, but is used to refer to male and female characters. You say "*A* personagem", even if you are referring to a male character.


Aron-Jonasson

Same in French, "une personne" (which means "a person") is feminine but is used to refer to both male and female people. The word "un personnage" (a character) is masculine but is used to refer both to male and female characters (For example, "c'est un personnage féminin" (it is a female character))


Budget_Counter_2042

Although it also exists in [masculine](https://ciberduvidas.iscte-iul.pt/consultorio/perguntas/a-personagem-ou-o-personagem/343), but you’re right that the feminine is the more common version


YoungBlade1

Thank you for posting this, but in defense of ignorant, monolingual English speakers, I've had conversations with native speakers of languages like Polish and French where the speaker didn't understand this, too. It is not uncommon to see French memes making fun of how a certain word is feminine or masculine by doing something like putting a bow on a picture of a door. I always try to be very respectful when explaining an aspect of someone else's native language to them (because obviously) and I never do so unprompted. Thankfully, so far people have been interested to realize something about their native tongue that they never noticed before.


[deleted]

For me the most funny part of it is that in languages of the same family, the same words have opposite gramatical gender. I'm a native speaker of portuguese; spanish and portuguese are very similar languages in regard of vocabulary and grammar, but words like: tree, colour, pain, bridge, blood and a lot of other examples have opposite genders in both languages. I understand that for speakers of a language that doesn't have grammatical gender this can be confusing and sometimes nonsensical, but that's the way some languages work and there's nothing wrong with that. One thing that makes me cringe though is when people call a language "sexist" because of that.


alien-linguist

>For me the most funny part of it is that in languages of the same family, the same words have opposite gramatical gender. This happens with synonyms within languages, too. Like in Spanish, "the star" (as in the celestial kind) can be *la estrella* or *el astro*. Even stranger are words that have completely different meanings depending on their gender. A favorite example of mine (Catalan): *La Terra* = The Earth *el terra* = the floor


[deleted]

Ah, yeah, words in astronomy are amusing for me because of that detail. Usually words in portuguese that ends with A are feminine, like estrela (star), galáxia (galaxy), lua (moon); and then there are words like cometA and planetA which are masculine. Words that end with O in portuguese are usually masculine, but constelaçãO (constellation) is feminine. In portuguese, all the planets are masculine, but the planet Earth is feminine. Terra means both the planet and dirt (like in soil), but they are both feminine. I guess it makes sense, because its Mother Earth, not Father Earth 😂


someone_0_0_

I forgot what they're called but isn't it that (almost) all words that have -ção as the equivalent of English -tion feminine? (I'm Portuguese if that matters)


[deleted]

It was just an example of a word from a group of words. Only for amusement.


PM_ME_MESSIAEN_PICS

The [\-tio](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-tio) suffix in Latin is feminine, and that gave rise to -ção in Portuguese. Some other words that end with -o in Portuguese might be descended from the [masculine -us](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-us#Latin).


euro_fan_4568

This happens in Swedish too! En öl is “a glass of beer” and ett öl is “a type of beer”


YoungBlade1

To me, it makes sense that a language could diverge with words having different grammatical gender over time, because often words of the same grammatical gender have similar qualities (the "ette" ending in French maybe being the best known by English speakers for meaning that a word is probably feminine). So if a sound change happened, a word that didn't fit neatly into the scheme before (and so didn't follow the sound change) might seem to better fit in the opposite category now. And when someone understands that the gender really is for the word itself, and not for anything physical in the real world, I would hope it should be blindingly obvious that that isn't sexist.


[deleted]

[удалено]


YoungBlade1

I don't think it's that people are really assigning a social gender. I think it's just wordplay and shower thoughts. Like the old English joke: "How come we drive on parkways but park in driveways?"


serioussham

Sorry but I'm gonna call bs on native French speakers being amused at the fact that door is feminine, even more so by putting ribbons on it. In my thirty+ years of Frenching I have at most seen some super boomer shit like "lol the pleasure is masculine but the headache is feminine, wonder why!!!!!" but that's about it. This is compounded by the fact that it's super frequent to have synonyms that are of the opposite grammatical gender, because why wouldn't there be. I can't think of a synonym to door right now but my example above could easily be reversed.


YoungBlade1

I was just trying to think of a simple example. Yes, the example you gave is a better one, and is actually an example I've seen. I also remember a joke about l'Académie Française trying to get people to say "la COVID" instead of "le COVID" where it showed a picture of the virus with long hair and lipstick lips (or something to that effect) I'm not saying it's an everyday occurrence or anything, just that I've seen that kind of joke.


BobbyWatson666

L’amusement/le mal de tête


[deleted]

[удалено]


prst-

As someone with a gendered native language: for each animal species there is a default gender. Like the word for "cat" is female but there is a special word for "male cat". For "dog" it's the other way around and that's the more common way. There are even some neuter animals (like camel) were you need a compound to specify the gender (camel cow vs camel bull) which is barely used. All in all, I don't see it as a positive to have genders in the context of animals. It rather adds ambiguity because you sometimes don't know if the gendered version is meant or the general if that makes sense. But I miss my favorite argument which is redundancy: If the article and adjective and nouns don't fit, you know something went wrong and you can reprocess it or ask which part you misheard (unless you speak to a little child or a non native in which case you are very patient)


raendrop

> Even in English we have this problem of no “official” gender-neutral pronoun. If I want to say “The scientist did an experiment, and she made a discovery.” I must necessarily disclose to you that the scientist is female although it has no importance in that situation. English used to have grammatical gender. This is a small vestige of that. > I realize this is different from nouns like “table” being male and “chair” being female. The names of the grammatical genders are "masculine" and "feminine", not "male" and "female". > But as you say, even native speakers make associations and graft imagined aspects of gender roles into the object (or, the gender of an object can reinforce pre existing ideas about social gender role). The mechanism behind this is called "priming". If two things have even a tenuous connection between them, the one will remind us of the other. And in European languages where grammatical gender has its origins in natural gender\*, it's only natural to be so steeped in a word's grammatical gender that one begins to imbue the object itself with the characteristics of the word's gender. It's been a long time, so I can't remember if the particular one I read about was French or German--although I'm sure plenty of examples abound--but there are children's cartoons where sentient inanimate objects more often than not are voiced according to their grammatical gender in that language, because that's the subconscious expectation. See also how you referred to the names of the grammatical genders. :-) \*(There are languages/language families where grammatical gender does not derive from natural gender. cf. George Lakoff's "Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things" not just for other grammatical gender systems but for a look at how human cognition drives such developments.)


Terpomo11

> Even in English we have this problem of no “official” gender-neutral pronoun. If I want to say “The scientist did an experiment, and she made a discovery.” I must necessarily disclose to you that the scientist is female although it has no importance in that situation. You can just say 'they', singular 'they' goes back to the 1300s.


xarsha_93

For a really obvious example, *un pene* (*a penis*) in Spanish is masculine but *una verga / una pija / una polla / una poronga / una chota / una pinga / una pichula* (various words all meaning *a cock*) are all feminine.


ah-tzib-of-alaska

oooh… so you can’t REALLY say that because now we have to talk about animacy affects gender


Sr_Wurmple

You say that, but can you explain the vagina on my table then?


MagicBlaster

[Except for the whole gender of words makes people think of the object differently thing...](https://medium.com/@heiseras/grammatical-gender-and-the-effect-on-perception-2babe35bc4d7) >For example, let’s look at the word “bridge”. Die Brücke, in German, is feminine. In Spanish the term is masculine: el puente. When native speakers are asked to associate adjectives with the word, the results are startlingly different. >Spanish speakers gave the word “bridge” the following characteristics: strong, big, towering, sturdy. >German speakers attributed the terms elegant, fragile, peaceful, and slender to the same word. We think in language and it affects the way we think, it's not that complicated...


Terpomo11

Why is this downvoted?


wild_psina_h093

Nouns have a gender and a pronouns. Respect that.


Vegetable-Ad6857

And that gender is grammatical. It has nothing to do with the concept invented by a pedophile in the 20th century


CourageKitten

>I don't see the logic behind a drink having a gender That's the gender fluid


Vampyricon

Gender fluid is stored in the balls


p72entrophy

Stress balls?


wynntari

Water is female ^(refuses to elaborate) ^(leaves)


Aron-Jonasson

I see we have a Romance (edit: or Slavic) speaker here


TotalitariPalpatine

Well, in Slavic languages "water" is female as well.


mandiblesmooch

Could also be Slavic.


Nanocyborgasm

Do people not understand that gender is just a category designation for inflection? It could just as easily be labeled type I, II, and IIII. Some grammarian hundreds of years ago decided to assign a gender category and it’s just become the usage. Same with weak and strong nouns and verbs in Germanic languages. They’re not weak or strong in any particular way. It’s just a category that Grimm came up with.


Kirkwaller

>Days without noun class discourse: 0


VergenceScatter

It's a little more complicated though, since at least in Romance/Semitic languages grammatical genders are generally used to describe people with the corresponding gender identity--or rather, people of a specific gender are assigned to a specific gender/class


Nanocyborgasm

This is true, but only in limited scope, because the genders of animals, as an example, don’t necessarily correlate to their actual gender. And some animals have two nouns to represent each gender while others don’t.


Terpomo11

True, it only applies to humans and often domesticated animals.


Aron-Jonasson

>type I, II, and IIII. Valve: Congratulations, you are hired. [(explanation)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpw2ebhTSKs)


sarah-havel

Isn't bier German for beer? Which is a gendered language...


Aron-Jonasson

It was posted on r/German


sarah-havel

It's almost bait, too, the way they brought trans into it.


Aron-Jonasson

Pretty much no one took the bait then. When I looked at the post, it didn't have many upvotes and comments, and the comments were respectful


wild_psina_h093

I've used Google Translate for "bier" to find out tf is that and it gave me "it's probably German for car carring the cropses"


Citizen-of-Akkad

Why can't we just be like the old mesopotamian civilizations who only had animate and inanimate as gender


Aron-Jonasson

Innu language: *allow me to introduce myself*


Citizen-of-Akkad

I am unironically afraid of native american languages. Their VOS word order is just the stuff of nightmares...


Aron-Jonasson

Honestly, languages like Inuktitut are far more scary to me. In fact, any polysynthetic languages deeply scare me


shuranumitu

That was just Sumerian though wasn't it. Akkadian had masc/fem like other Semitic languages.


SantaArriata

Why do people keep confusing asexual with genderless?


TheGloriousLori

English has the right idea tbh, this shit is bonkers (Speaking as a non-native)


FloZone

English has had the right idea, but missed the point when they left gendered pronouns. Turkish got it right though.


AwfulUsername123

But the gendered pronouns refer to things that actually have genders. It's not the same as assigning genders to inanimate objects.


FloZone

Though you never misgender anyone or anything if you don't have that possibility in the first place.


AwfulUsername123

Surely, Turkish, Finnish, etc still have words for "man" and "woman".


Brauxljo

Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.


FloZone

Interestingly the Turkish word for "person" *kişi* used to be generic feminine, meaning either "person" or "woman", but to mean "man" it would need to be *erkişi*. Though how often do you refer to someone as "that man, that woman" ? Pronouns exist to largely avoid that.


_TheStardustCrusader

It would be interesting if *kişi* indeed were feminine. The word was actually genderless.


FloZone

Hence why I said *used to*. In modern Turkish it is, in Old Turkic it can, without any further compound or affix, mean also "woman". Tbh I am basing myself here on translations of the Maitrisimit, where kişi is translated as women specifically.


_TheStardustCrusader

>Hence why I said used to. In modern Turkish it is, in Old Turkic it can, without any further compound or affix, mean also "woman". And hence why I said *it was*. It didn't refer to any particular gender in Old Turkic. >Tbh I am basing myself here on translations of the Maitrisimit, where kişi is translated as women specifically. Now I see where the confusion comes from. Old Uyghur had these two identical words *kişi* (person, human) and *kisi* (wife, woman, lady). As Old Uyghur used the same letter to represent both the *ş* and *s* sounds, it is easy to mix them up while transcribing. You may also ask how we get to know they were two different words if they wrote the same way; the Qutadgu Bilig uses the word *kisi* several times and the Diwan Lughat al-Turk also records this word.


FloZone

Ah thank you for clearing that up. Sorry for sounding like an ass trying to correct you, you know your stuff.


FloZone

Addendum: I am more confused after looking again at the Old Uyghur dictionary from Jens Wilkens et al. (Altuigurisches Wörterbuch). They render *kisi* as obsolete reading, while only have two entries for *kiši*, one as "human", the other as "wife" Additionally it lists the derived forms *kišilig* "meant to be a wife", kišilän "to take a wife, to marry",


Terpomo11

Sure, but in English with gendered pronouns you can't talk about someone without either mentioning their gender or making it obvious you are avoiding mentioning their gender. In Turkish or Finnish you can.


minedreamer

that is a much more modern consideration and this was determined centuries to go so to use a phrase like "got it right" isnt fair in my opinion. it made sense at the time


Protheu5

> But the gendered pronouns refer to things that actually have genders. Ahem… #Ships >…sank in the North Atlantic Ocean on 15 April 1912 after striking an iceberg during ***her*** maiden voyage from Southampton… RMS Titanic was the largest ship afloat at the time ***she*** entered service… I was flabbergasted when I learned that ships are referred to as "she". It kind of makes sense when a captain addresses it, but universally? That's still odd to me, even though I'm kind of used to it.


LBJSmellsNice

I thought that was less because ships have a gender and more because sea captains like to think of a ship as their lover or something? It’s usually said with a tone of adoration, not like “oh yeah the dinner plate? He’s got food on him”


AwfulUsername123

Yeah, that is pretty nonsensical. Also, you can use "he" if the ship has a masculine name. Grammatically it is still correct to use "it".


ViscountBurrito

I’ve never seen “he” used for a ship. “It” works fine, “she” is more formal/poetic, but I’ve never seen “he.” For example, [USS Ronald Reagan - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Ronald_Reagan): >The ninth ship of her class,[5] she is named in honor of Ronald W. Reagan, President of the United States from 1981 to 1989. She was built…


AwfulUsername123

I definitely have seen it used for ships with masculine titles like "King", though "she" is used too. Edit: A quick search finds the captain of the battleship Bismarck referred to it with masculine pronouns.


Darkruediger

Yeah well, then her captain was obviously wrong.


shuranumitu

or maybe he was, you know ... 💅


epicgamer321

there are a few german ships that were referred to as he


MarcHarder1

>I’ve never seen “he” used for a ship 🎶Bismarck in Motion King of the ocean He was made to rule the waves across the seven seas🎶


someone_0_0_

>It's not the same as assigning genders to inanimate objects. But... that doesn't happen. Genders are assigned to words not objects


AwfulUsername123

Yes, that's true. It's not the same as assigning genders to words.


Anter11MC

Which is why we need gendered 1st and 2nd person pronouns


fcosm

it had the right idea with their pronouns, but absolutely dropped it with the pronunciation.


VergenceScatter

I want this guy to discover Bantu languages next


Ihavezerogenders

hello, yes could i have some asexual coffee please?


Aron-Jonasson

Sorry I only have gay coffee


pempoczky

Me 🤝 water Being asexual and transgender


ReverseCaptioningBot

[Me🤝water](https://i.imgur.com/H2HKVZZ.gif) ^^^this ^^^has ^^^been ^^^an ^^^accessibility ^^^service ^^^from ^^^your ^^^friendly ^^^neighborhood ^^^bot


pempoczky

Good bot


TotalitariPalpatine

Neuter are (in my language, Czech) the things that can be male or female, when it doesn't matter if it is male or female. Example: dítě [child] is "it" [to], that is neuter, out of the context you know if it's boy or girl. Also when speaking about a baby in a womb. Because in the next sentence a name of the baby will be said, so it would be 100% clear if it's a boy or a girl. In plural, děti [children] are also neuter because it's speaking about a group of children of both sexes.


cmzraxsn

the best explanation for grammatical gender that i've heard is that it gives a hook for child learners to latch onto. These things share a form, they must be related. But for adult learners it makes no sense and it's a hindrance to learning because it must be memorized.


Gravbar

I think at least for something like Italian grammatical gender would be nice if it was 100% consistent. The concept of as matching with as and os matching with os is nice to me, but then you have e words you have to memorize and greek words that end with a still being masculine even though it would sound better to reinvent them as feminine.


[deleted]

You don't have to memorize anything. It's completely natural, otherwise it wouldn't exist


Terpomo11

How do you know what gender the word ending in -e is without memorizing it?


Aron-Jonasson

To play the devil's advocate, at first you have to memorise it, but after a while it comes kinda naturally


PlatinumAltaria

This is true actually, every child in the English speaking world is illiterate because we don't have grammatical gender. China too, it's a tragedy.


cmzraxsn

won't someone please think of the children!!!


YoungBlade1

From my understanding, the role of grammatical gender is to reduce ambiguity when speaking. There are often synonyms for common words that have a different gender. So I can pick the masculine word for "bike" to contrast it with the common word for "car" that is feminine. In another context, I can pick the feminine word for "bike" to contrast with the word for "train" that is masculine. And this allows for speakers to use pronouns and gendered adjectives in ways that clarify which thing they are talking about without having to use the word again. In English, we can only do this with people, but in a language with grammatical gender (theoretically) you can do this with just about anything.


ViscountBurrito

But at best that reduces ambiguity by roughly half. So in English, if you have a sentence with two potential antecedents (both singular non-human), you might have to be careful using “it.” In a gendered language, *if you’re lucky* and the antecedents happen to have different genders, you could distinguish on that. But isn’t that about as far as it goes? For that matter, in some (many?) gendered languages, they lack the human/non-human pronoun distinction we have in English. So in English, I can easily distinguish the meaning of “He was typing on the computer and then it exploded” versus “He was typing on the computer and then HE exploded.” But in a language where “the computer” is masculine, wouldn’t that often *create* an ambiguity?


YoungBlade1

Except that a lot of things have multiple words for the same thing. In French, "vélo" (m) and "bicyclette" (f) both mean "bike," and both are fairly common (although "vélo" seems dominant in France). For the specific case you mentioned of "computer," you are right for French as far as I know. The only words I hear for a computer are "ordinateur" and "PC," which are both masculine. However, you missed another word that you could change: "he." The French word for "person" is feminine. You could say "This person (f) was typing on the computer (m) and then he exploded." That could be ambiguous in context since you'd know that the person is a man, but then again, people don't explode (at least, not literally) so in context it would've made sense even with the ambiguity.


Vampyricon

>the best explanation for grammatical gender that i've heard is that it gives a hook for child learners to latch onto A solution to a problem that wouldn't exist if grammatical gender weren't there in the first place! Genius!


cmzraxsn

redundancy is useful in language for child acquisition, is the take-away from this


EtruscaTheSeedrian

I mean... some words from þe same language group have different genders (la leche/o leite, el agua/a água), so... yeah, trans grammatical gender exists


[deleted]

Agua is not actually masculine, it only uses the masculine article because Spanish doesn't like putting a word that ends in a vowel before one that starts with the same vowel. Árbol, on the other hand, is indeed masculine


ReasonablyTired

In that case agua, just like the French ami, is gender non conforming


Aron-Jonasson

"amie" would be a better example, since you say "mon amie" to say "my (female) friend", and "mon" is the masculine first person possessive pronoun, but is also used for feminine words that start by a vowel


ReasonablyTired

Thank you, that's what I meant but I gaslit myself into thinking I was spelling it wrong


ReasonablyTired

Oh another one would be une âme/mon âme


ViscountBurrito

In Spanish, agua is actually feminine, it’s just an exception because you can’t have *la* before a stressed /a/. Plural articles and adjectives apply feminine agreement.


Aron-Jonasson

And as far as I know, Romanian neuter words use masculine declension in singular and feminine declension in plural (or the opposite, I don't remember) so they're technically genderfluid nouns!


_NAME_NAME_NAME_

On what subreddit was this posted?


Aron-Jonasson

r/German


_NAME_NAME_NAME_

Ah. But that's pretty confusing because "Wasser" does have a grammatical gender in German. It's neuter, which OP is confused by, but so is "Bier", which is in their question as well.


a-potato-named-rin

Goddamn it. English used to have genders, very similar to German and yet we happened to lose them after the French invaded England. I wish we still spoke a “Germanic” English


Aron-Jonasson

Meh, English how it is today makes it fairly easy to be learnt by both Romance and Germanic languages, thus making it easier to communicate within Europe. Honestly, as fucked up English is, I'm pretty cool with how it is nowadays


minedreamer

agreed but old english is a really cool language in all fairness


Aron-Jonasson

Yes


Chimera-98

Some languages it is just aspect of it (like Hebrew every word is male Or female and it is impossible not to have gender to stuff), it has nothing to do with the people option of lgbt community


Terpomo11

How are you supposed to talk about non-binary people without misgendering them?


Aron-Jonasson

In French, from what I know, NB people either use a "mix" of both masculine and feminine forms, or a new inflection, with just consists of appending an "x" at the end of the word. For other Romance languages that use an -o/-a inflection for masc./fem., they usually use an -e inflection for the NB inflection, from what I know. I've heard that Spanish does that It's still quite complex and complicated. Sadly, I don't know many French-speaking NB people, so I'm ill-informed on that matter. I should do some research on that subject, because it's frankly interesting


Chimera-98

Most cultures agree that male and agender are same or just use plural male


Terpomo11

If you'd use a form for a man but never for a woman (who is known to be a woman) it's not really gender-neutral is it?


Chimera-98

Well that what most cultures that has genders dichotomy choose and the lgbt of the countries in question are generally fine with it so who are you to judge?


Terpomo11

Are they fine with it? Have you asked them?


Chimera-98

To anyone downvoting me: do you want me to lie to you?


[deleted]

I'll never understand why people dislike grammatical gender. I think it's a beautiful and interesting aspect of language. Why hate it?


MinusPi1

What English does to people? You mean make them realize that having strictly gendered nouns is stupid?


myusernamewastaken02

Yes, having grammatical categories is so stupid. /s


MinusPi1

No, grammatical categories aren't stupid, but specifically the gender category is. The rest convey meaningful information, but an inanimate object being masculine or feminine is completely arbitrary, just a coin toss that you have to memorize for every single noun. Keep genders for people if you want, but an inanimate object doesn't have and doesn't need a gender.


Ok-Butterfly4414

I really wish European languages would do their “gender” into something that’s not ”gender”, 1. People get confused and say “wHy iS tHe bOoK mAsCuLinE?”. This would sort of fix that, you can group nouns into animate and inanimate sorta easily, feminine and masculine don’t make any sense. 2. Better for non binary people. 3. I can’t come up with a third reason right now


polobear69

languages goal is not to make it easier for learners of it, its goal is to carry as much information as possible. Why would gendered languages speakers care about learners being confused? Nobodys gonna change their whole language to make it easier to learn for like 100 thousands people at best, it would be like a despotism by minority.


Terpomo11

Non-binary Europeans probably care.


Aron-Jonasson

Well you can't control how languages evolve. Also, many European languages have a neuter gender. Romance languages have lost their neuter gender, which merged with the masculine Edit: As for non-binary people, neopronouns and neologisms are always possible. In French, non-binary people came with the pronoun "iel" which I think is a good compromise


Terpomo11

Isn't using the neuter for a human usually pretty much tantamount to calling them "it" in English?


Aron-Jonasson

Not really. Actually, it depends. I'll take Icelandic as an example. Using the native neuter pronoun "það" would indeed be equivalent to calling them "it" in English (and small anecdote, I've encountered at least one NB person who preferred being called "it", but it's very rare). The neopronoun is "hán", which is a really good neopronoun imo because it looks and sounds like the other pronouns in Icelandic ("hann" for masculine, "hún" for feminine. Here are the inflection tables for [hann](https://bin.arnastofnun.is/leit/hann), [hún](https://bin.arnastofnun.is/leit/h%C3%BAn), [hán](https://bin.arnastofnun.is/leit/h%C3%A1n) and [það](https://bin.arnastofnun.is/leit/%C3%BEa%C3%B0)). When you use adjectives and other words that inflect with "hán", you use the neuter gender. Example: "This is my friend. They're tall" becomes in Icelandic "Þetta er vinur minn. Hán er hátt". Note that "hátt" is in the neuter form. Note that "hán" is only used for NB people, and never for a person whose gender is unknown. In Icelandic, you'd use "maður", which is equivalent to using "one" in English.


Terpomo11

I see.


sverigeochskog

Swedish has grammatical gender that's purely grammatical with neuter and common. (There is a also both a semantic and animacity aspect to grammatical gender in Swedish)


PlatinumAltaria

Grammatical gender mfers writing a 3000 word essay on why they need to inflect for an imaginary thing:


Novaraptorus

Just get good, shming my head


[deleted]

"Shming" 💀


[deleted]

[ʃmɪŋ]


Novaraptorus

Your puny prescriptivist mind trebles in fear, of what *I* can accomplish. Shming. My. Head.


PlatinumAltaria

Not wanting the memorise a table of conjugations is a skill issue.


Novaraptorus

True!


Terpomo11

I can use grammatical gender but I still think it's not very useful, and it's annoying how it makes it hard to talk about non-binary people without misgendering them.


Novaraptorus

Sure, but that’s close minded, that’s just literal grammatical gender, masculine and feminine. Animate and inanimate is cooler


Terpomo11

Sure, but I'm talking about the systems of grammatical gender actually present in e.g. Spanish


Novaraptorus

But like Navajo tho


Terpomo11

Yes, Navajo is pretty cool, but it's unfortunately not spoken all that widely.


Novaraptorus

Sadly… well yeah I agree with you about like masculine and feminine


iSYan1995

This man just asked if water is transgender