I understand that not all languages have gendered pronouns, but am curious if Hexbear's pronoun tags could be repurposed for other gender-equity uses in any other languages

For example, maybe some communities list different word suffixes or just list their gender explicitly?

  • Ho_Chi_Chungus [she/her]
    ·
    2 years ago

    I don't know if they lack grammatical gender, but the Finno-Ugric languages as well as Turkish only have a single, gender neutral pronoun which they use for everyone

    • doublepepperoni [none/use name]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Nope, grammatical gender nonsense isn't a thing in Finnish. How did you Indo-European types even come up with that shit

        • doublepepperoni [none/use name]
          ·
          2 years ago

          Yeah, but that doesn't explain languages that have three or four genders. That's just being sadistic to people who are trying to learn them

          • AcidSmiley [she/her]
            ·
            2 years ago

            grammatical gender can get really weird once you're at categories for non-human stuff. Most indo-european languages stick to one gender for all inanimate objects, but there's languages with different genders for animals, plants, tools, even for differentiating between wild and domesticated animals and stuff like that. if you hear "that language has 7 genders", it doesn't necessarily mean they have any grammatical gender for nonbinary folx. it may just be that a chair uses different suffixes than a corncob.

            • doublepepperoni [none/use name]
              ·
              2 years ago

              Most indo-european languages stick to one gender for all inanimate objects

              German certainly doesn't, neither does French AFAIK. Some things are just randomly male or female

              • silent_water [she/her]
                ·
                2 years ago

                they both started from a system that assigned grammatical categories based on animacy, added a category to split male and female, and usually dropped the inanimate category (or started calling it neuter). why this happened has never made any sense to me.

              • AcidSmiley [she/her]
                ·
                2 years ago

                yeah, they don't apply these genders consistently at all to further complicate things.

            • TerminalEncounter [she/her]
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              2 years ago

              Cree splits it into animate and inanimate, which makes way more sense to me. Although it isn't clear cut, lol, while all people and animals are animate some stuff is considered also to be animate like feathers. Just gotta memorize which is which.

            • GreenTeaRedFlag [any]
              ·
              2 years ago

              Yeah most of them. Except every romance language and every germanic language.

      • Ho_Chi_Chungus [she/her]
        ·
        2 years ago

        At least English got rid of grammatical gender, although unfortunately still kept gendered pronouns

        • TrashCompact [none/use name]
          ·
          2 years ago

          I think that still counts as grammatical gender, just an extremely truncated version even compared to German.

      • silent_water [she/her]
        ·
        2 years ago

        it started as a way to track animacy or inanimacy of objects. then for some reason a bunch of groups decided that it wasn't just important if things were animate or not but also gender. a lot of these languages then dropped the inanimate category after or began to refer to it as neuter. I don't know why this division happened. I just know linguists study this and that the genders rarely correspond to the actual sexes of any animals.