This post brought to you by English
It will forever annoy me that people decided to KEEP grammatical gender when making Esperanto. Like wtf why would you do that?!
English still has gendered personal pronouns, failing language and culture
Imagine not defaulting to they/them because it's grammatically correct, and allows for people to voice their preferred pronouns
Honestly, I'd prefer separate third person singular gender neutral pronouns and third person plural gender neutral pronouns.
But in practical terms, singular they/them/their makes sense.
Though, interestingly the singular reflexive third person gender neutral does exist in themself
we dont even have separate second person singular and plural pronoun. Maybe we ought to get rid of "I" also to finish the job.
That's the other route, but in that case I think you'd want exclusive and inclusive versions of we
Regarding "you", I strongly support y'all as 2nd person plural.
i don't experience gender but i've never really been happy with how singular they is conjugated, both the usual way and the agreeing way sound wrong to me. It's not the biggest deal but i'd much prefer we never had gendered pronouns in the first place. Sorry, people who like their pronouns i guess.
I've thought this too. In the past, I wanted to say "they is" if using singular they
exactly. and then "they is" is *plural * in some dialects of AAVE, there's no way for us to win. hopefully the zoomers are just used to it and this won't even be a topic of conversation in 50 years
Sanskrit is also gendered it probably goes back further than Europe and Latin
Sanskrit is an Indo-European language. They are all descended from a most recent common ancestor called Proto-Indo-European, which is thought to have been spoken in the late Neolithic by nomadic horse peoples of the Pontic-Caspian steppes (ie. southern Ukraine and Russia north of the Caucuses). The Romance languages, Slavic languages, Germanic languages, non-Dravidian Indic languages, Persian and many isolates all trace back to this common ancestor.
As for the evolution of grammatical gender within this family :
Research indicates that the earliest stages of Proto-Indo-European had two genders (animate and inanimate), as did Hittite, the earliest attested Indo-European language. The classification of nouns based on animacy and inanimacy and the lack of gender are today characteristic of Armenian. According to the theory, the animate gender, which (unlike the inanimate) had independent vocative and accusative forms, later split into masculine and feminine, thus originating the three-way classification into masculine, feminine and neuter.
Many Indo-European languages retained the three genders, including most Slavic languages, Latin, Sanskrit, Ancient and Modern Greek, German, Icelandic, Romanian and Asturian (two Romance language exceptions). In them, there is a high but not absolute correlation between grammatical gender and declensional class. Many linguists believe that to be true of the middle and late stages of Proto-Indo-European.
Maybe but imo honorifics and phrase endings barely count. There is nothing really stopping a man from e.g saying -wa ending except the cultural norms. Things like -chan can be applied to children of both sexes too.
A girl saying "boku" or calling a boy -chan are not grammatically wrong like calling a cis man a she in English.
I don't disagree in principle. But if we are talking specificaly about Japanese honorifics they are not just about seniority, it is culturally expected to add -san to any person you talk to, even friends, the only exception is close family. Age is not strictly related here. Dropping suffix is regarded as being extremely intimate.
Calling people -sama is strictly anime shit you never hear that IRL.
In German, i sometimes do just that and use the feminine gender as the grammatical default. It triggers the chuds like crazy, as German traditionally defaults to the masculine gender when it's not specified and the boomers always go "well, women are obviously included in that bEcAuSe iT's oNlY gRaMmAtiCaL gEnDeR".
But usually i prefer the : to attach the feminine suffix (the : is a placeholder and signifies that enbies are also included). So instead of saying "poster" to refer to someone who posts a lot, i'd write "Poster:in". This (or variants where you use the * instead of :) is a common way to make German gender inclusive in leftist and radlib circles and ofc also triggers the chuds. You can trigger them even more by pronouncing the : or * as a glottal stop. It's a huge culture war issue over here, and opposing it is tied more and more into mysogyny, transphobia and enbiephobia.
:yea:
The radical for 他 is 人 which means "person" and not "man" and it used to be the universal pronoun.
Yep, basically the only gendering in Chinese is due to exactly who you would expect.
Honestly, 普通话 is such a better language than English. Inflections are a fuck, I hate trying to learn other Indo-European languages.
everyone should learn the language i speak and don't bother to read because I apparently have a learning disability and me not being able to talk to somebody is ableism.
I am sorry you are disabled it is very hard por me too, I have been told I am also disabled
:guaido-despair:
English does have grammatical gender, except it's just pronouns. That still counts. It does sometimes extend to inanimate objects, like boats are feminine. Languages with no grammatical gender whatsoever would be like Finnish, Hungarian, and Bahasa Indonesian, which have no pronouns indicating gender.
The reigning hypothesis back when I was in school learning Anglo-Saxon was that Middle English lost its gendered articles because people in the north and south parts of England were speaking a more streamlined dialect with one another. The northern English had dialects more influenced by Danish and Norwegian, while the south spoke with more Norman French influence. That meant not everyone agreed on which object had which gender and it could get weird talking to your northern relatives, especially because it's my understanding Danish doesn't have genders that exactly correlate with masculine and feminine.
Eventually people starting using "Þe" (the) for every noun to ease communication and genders just sort of drifted out of Middle English.
That one case isn't inherent to the language, but i think it is a property of English that you can selectively apply gendered pronouns to otherwise non-gendered things and people can understand when you do it. Like if I started calling planet Earth "she" or a big tall tree "he" people aren't gonna stop me and ask why I'm speaking so strangely.
Some languages have animacy as a semantic feature, designating if something is alive/animate or not, and breaking animacy in English is done through gendered pronouns usually. It's done differently in other languages, like the Sinhala language in Sri Lanka has two completely different verbs for "to be" if something is alive or not.
big tall tree “he” people aren’t gonna stop me and ask why I’m speaking so strangely.
My friends do exactly that with random nouns as a bit, and it has been pointed out before.
As a boat, John McCain uses She/Her pronouns and I find this hilarious.
grammatical gender and thing-chuds-think-is-sex2 aren't automatically the same. languages that have piles of linguistic genders generally don't have that many social roles, but "it's unfortunate we use the word gender for both of these things" is the limit of my knowledge here.
Yeah grammatical gender is just a way to categorize nouns and it just happens to be called gender, at least according to a quick google search.
Yeah, the term "gender" used to mean just like a category, but narrowed in meaning to be specifically about all the stuff we think about these days when we hear it. It makes a lot more sense when you realize it's historically from the same root as "genus" and "genre".
hungarian not having grammatical gender works out almost the same in practice tho... eg, we ended up with two words for comrade, one for women. just terminally stupid shit.
English does have grammatical gender, except it’s just pronouns. That still counts.
Hard disagree. There's a vast difference between a special category of nouns (i.e., pronouns) being gendered and every noun being gendered.
English lacks gendered noun classes and doesn't require agreement between separate words, you're right. But pronouns are still reflective of grammatical gender and they're artifacts from the Anglo-Saxon language, which did have arbitrary gendered noun classes. There are other nouns that indicate gender too, also artifacts from earlier forms of English, like waitress or actress. The feminine suffix -ess comes from Middle English, and the feminine suffix -en comes from Anglo-Saxon, like in the words maiden or chicken.
Maybe a distinction could be made between abstract, arbitrary gendered nouns (like a lamp is feminine) and gendered nouns specifically for describing people.
But pronouns are still reflective of grammatical gender and they’re artifacts from the Anglo-Saxon language, which did have arbitrary gendered noun classes.
Sure, but there’s a vast difference between a special category of nouns (i.e., pronouns) being gendered and every noun being gendered.
Maybe a distinction could be made between abstract, arbitrary gendered nouns (like a lamp is feminine) and gendered nouns specifically for describing people.
The latter is called gendered pronouns, she made that exact distinction. No "maybe" about it
Spanish is pretty gendered too and the alternatives have varied mileage that really depend more on where you live. Latinx and even Latine is going to either get you beat up in parts of Central America or accused of being brainwashed by American wokeism.
latinx for writing, latine for speaking is the vibe i get from all the way over here and not being fluent.
todes :maduro-katana-2:
It has more usage in Southern South America from what I've seen.
You think English is gendered? Welcome to German: Chair, that's feminine. Toilet, most definitely feminine. Stool, that is masculine. A pen, oh, you better believe that is masculine!
Ahh but chair is masculine in Icelandic while toilet is neuter. Seriously, why put gender in the grammar? Who did this?
Can't gender language if you don't speak to anyone :think-about-it:
Any chuds reading this should know that Shakespeare used "they/them" as a gender nonspecific pronoun
Also,
spoiler
:countdown:
When referring to an "actor" which form of the word "the" would you- oh wait...
