English is gender neutral. You have to deliberately apply a gender to something unless that word is gender specific, like cow or bitch referring to female animals.
In my brief forays learning other languages one of the more frustrating things to learn is that you can have female refrigerators, male buses, and gender neutral roofs. That is not gender neutrality.
So I don’t get your issue with genders, seeing as they have nothing to do with English language neutrality and everything to do with how you address a specific individual at their request.
In one of the languages I know, there isn’t a different pronoun for each gender; there’s just one pronoun to indicate ‘they’ in the singular form.
Maybe that’s what they meant.
In Persian we don’t have genders for anything. No words, no pronouns, nothing. So having gendered pronouns for me is not gender neutral. I would rather call everyone equally “they” than get into this game of what are you identifying yourself because it makes the language more complex for me.
How is it more difficult? If someone’s name is Joe Smith, you would commonly expect to refer to them as Joe. But say they ask you to refer to them as Mr. Smith. Ok, no big deal, right?
Referring to someone by their preferred pronoun is no different. If Joe wants to be “they”, it’s no big deal.
The apparent issue is with gender and people’s personal hang ups with it. People change how they address others all the time, formally, informally, professionally, familiar, marriage name change, etc. So all I’m getting here is resistance to what…? LBGTQ people?
The thing about grammatical gender is that it doesn’t really have much to do with sex or gender identity. In German, for instance, ‘mädchen’ (girl) is neuter. Gender in French is 98% assigned based on the pronunciation of the three final syllables. In Danish, living things tend to be ‘common gender’ and inanimate objects tend to be ‘neuter’.
It’d be more accurate to call it ‘noun classes’ than gender.
Well, yes. But not for Indo-European languages which is… mostly a historical artifact. But we’re still sticking to teaching traditional grammar using traditional terminology, which is super frustrating. Imagine if you kept teaching maths in a manner which you knew was fundamentally wrong, but it was just too much work to reeducate all maths teachers.
Well, as a German, I wouldn’t agree. Generally, nouns describing men are masculine and nouns describing women are feminine. “Das Mädchen” is just an odd one out because it’s the diminutive (always neuter in German) of “die Maid”, which in turn is feminine.
Yes, this doesn’t really apply to objects, but it mostly does for people.
Well, you’re arguing terminology. But the original commenter’s point was about the association of grammatical gender with gender, and that is definitely a thing in German.
Der Arzt (Male doctor) -> die Ärztin (female doctor) is an example where the grammatical gender changes with the gender of the person, and that’s almost always the case.
Child - das Kind - grammatical gender: neuter. Referred to in context using the gender-neutral pronoun ‘es’ (it). The pronoun used correlates with the grammatical gender of the noun used, not the gender of the person referred to.
Eg Ein Kind lacht. Es hat etwas gesehen. (transl: A child laughs. He/she/they saw something.)
Ok but my point is that when it doesn’t correlate, it becomes clear how grammatical gender is independent from the person’s gender.
It becomes even clearer when you consider all nouns by definition have a grammatical gender - inanimate objects, abstract concepts, etc, even though the thing described clearly doesn’t have a gender. Eg die Tür ist offen. Ich schliesse sie. (transl.: the door is open. I close it.) ‘Sie’ being the female pronoun used to refer to the grammatically female door.
Honestly biggest reason I list they/them is just because I don’t think we should gender language in general. Any pronouns are fine, as long as you aren’t trying to be dehumanizing with it. I use they/them a lot when referring to other people and most people don’t care, but a few cissies thought a hissy fit over singular they.
As a person who learned English as a 2nd language, I would like it if you could transform the language into gender neutral and end this insanity.
I still get classic genders wrong, this whole LGBTQ movement is confusing me even more when I’m trying to type/speak.
English is gender neutral. You have to deliberately apply a gender to something unless that word is gender specific, like cow or bitch referring to female animals.
In my brief forays learning other languages one of the more frustrating things to learn is that you can have female refrigerators, male buses, and gender neutral roofs. That is not gender neutrality.
So I don’t get your issue with genders, seeing as they have nothing to do with English language neutrality and everything to do with how you address a specific individual at their request.
In one of the languages I know, there isn’t a different pronoun for each gender; there’s just one pronoun to indicate ‘they’ in the singular form. Maybe that’s what they meant.
In what fucked up language are refrigerators female? They’re obviously male.
Heresy! They are neuter!
you put things in them
Spanish and mayB Italian iirc?
In Persian we don’t have genders for anything. No words, no pronouns, nothing. So having gendered pronouns for me is not gender neutral. I would rather call everyone equally “they” than get into this game of what are you identifying yourself because it makes the language more complex for me.
How is it more difficult? If someone’s name is Joe Smith, you would commonly expect to refer to them as Joe. But say they ask you to refer to them as Mr. Smith. Ok, no big deal, right?
Referring to someone by their preferred pronoun is no different. If Joe wants to be “they”, it’s no big deal.
The apparent issue is with gender and people’s personal hang ups with it. People change how they address others all the time, formally, informally, professionally, familiar, marriage name change, etc. So all I’m getting here is resistance to what…? LBGTQ people?
Wait until you learn languages with gendered articles
The thing about grammatical gender is that it doesn’t really have much to do with sex or gender identity. In German, for instance, ‘mädchen’ (girl) is neuter. Gender in French is 98% assigned based on the pronunciation of the three final syllables. In Danish, living things tend to be ‘common gender’ and inanimate objects tend to be ‘neuter’.
It’d be more accurate to call it ‘noun classes’ than gender.
And that’s exactly what they’re called in other languages like Hawaiian and Swahili.
Well, yes. But not for Indo-European languages which is… mostly a historical artifact. But we’re still sticking to teaching traditional grammar using traditional terminology, which is super frustrating. Imagine if you kept teaching maths in a manner which you knew was fundamentally wrong, but it was just too much work to reeducate all maths teachers.
Well, as a German, I wouldn’t agree. Generally, nouns describing men are masculine and nouns describing women are feminine. “Das Mädchen” is just an odd one out because it’s the diminutive (always neuter in German) of “die Maid”, which in turn is feminine.
Yes, this doesn’t really apply to objects, but it mostly does for people.
Sure, there’s some correlation - but when 99% of words in a noun class can’t have a biological gender it seems weird to name it after the 1%.
Well, you’re arguing terminology. But the original commenter’s point was about the association of grammatical gender with gender, and that is definitely a thing in German.
Der Arzt (Male doctor) -> die Ärztin (female doctor) is an example where the grammatical gender changes with the gender of the person, and that’s almost always the case.
Child - das Kind - grammatical gender: neuter. Referred to in context using the gender-neutral pronoun ‘es’ (it). The pronoun used correlates with the grammatical gender of the noun used, not the gender of the person referred to.
Eg Ein Kind lacht. Es hat etwas gesehen. (transl: A child laughs. He/she/they saw something.)
I know. But generally, the gender of the noun describing a person correlates with the gender of the person described strongly.
Ok but my point is that when it doesn’t correlate, it becomes clear how grammatical gender is independent from the person’s gender.
It becomes even clearer when you consider all nouns by definition have a grammatical gender - inanimate objects, abstract concepts, etc, even though the thing described clearly doesn’t have a gender. Eg die Tür ist offen. Ich schliesse sie. (transl.: the door is open. I close it.) ‘Sie’ being the female pronoun used to refer to the grammatically female door.
Honestly biggest reason I list they/them is just because I don’t think we should gender language in general. Any pronouns are fine, as long as you aren’t trying to be dehumanizing with it. I use they/them a lot when referring to other people and most people don’t care, but a few cissies thought a hissy fit over singular they.
bro, there are folks out there who think spanish/french and other gendered languages are wrong and bad.