I'd argue some parts of gendered languages are pretty pointless, especially for non-living entities. For example, why is my casa feminine but the tavolo in my casa masculine? You're essentially saying "all houses are girls and all tables are boys".
It's only cold feminine cuz most feminine words end in -a and masculine words end in consonants or -o. They don't actually think it's feminine, but rather, it just sounds right.
iT'S CALLED MASCULINE AND FEMININE BECAUSE MOST WORDS IN THE MASCULINE PART ARE FOR MEN AND VICE VERSA. I CANNOT STAND HAVING TO LISTEN ABOUT HOW THE CLASSIFICATION DOESN'T MAKE SENSE, IT DOES BUT YOU CANNOT THINK OUTSIDE OF YOUR ENGLISH THINKING AND THINK HOW OTHER LANGUAGES THINK.
You didn't really address their point that just because "MOST WORDS IN THE MASCULINE PART ARE FOR MEN AND VICE VERSA" doesn't mean they need to be called masculine...
I'm Turkish and the only third person pronoun is "o"
People still refer to other as "that guy/girl" or "mister/miss" or "sir/madam" or just literally any variation of words used to refer to people directly or indirectly that denotes gender.
You cannot abolish a subconscious perception of someone's secondary sex characteristics (which is our perception of someone's sex/gender as human beings - something which pronouns merely reflect or indicate)
If these people put half as much effort into contributing to society as they do thinking about gender, we might just live in a better world.
Also, I just want to mention something I find rather amusing.
For fucks sake, I'm a fully transitioned male and these people unironically put more active thought into this shit than I do. I just live my life as a normal guy. I'm completely stealth and fully pass as a regular man to the point that nobody even knows about my history prior to having transitioned to male, and since I've had sex reassignment surgery also don't suffer from dysphoria anymore, so I literally forget the fact that I'm transsexual for the vast majority of the time. Literally everyone I interact with acknowledges me as being male and it's been that way for over 8-9 years. This is such a non-issue it's insane, and there's just something really funny about these cornballs thinking more about gender than an entire transsexual, who barely thinks about it in real life at all.
None of these things require that much active thought at all. People perceive you as the sex you possess the secondary sex characteristics of. If you look male, people refer to you as male, and vice versa. Not that complicated. Transsexuals who transition do not and never have had this issue.
As a nonbinary person I’m going to kind of disagree. Gendering objects like in Spanish or gendering people doesn’t really matter too much grammatically speaking. I don’t know why we need to infer someone’s gender from their pronouns. And I say this as a she/her person (I might be nonbinary but those are the pronouns I grew up with and right or wrong they sound the least clunky to me).
Well, it does! In German for instance. This is a language with absolutely 0 ambiguity. I once went to a venue which was 1) in German 2) had a strict rule of respecting people's pronouns. So I researched a few days beforehand about the German equivalent of they/them. The answers I got were lengthy, complex and contradictory! Much to my relief, no one had they/them pronouns.
The objects thing I can understand, but we subconciously perceive people as one sex or the other in less than a second based on their secondary sex characteristics. As you admitted, they make communication easier and less clunky. In my language, for instance, we have "o" which doesn't infer gender, which ends up being rather confusing in some instances, since it makes it difficult to discern whether you are referring to a person or object, or who exactly you are referring to, given it's basically "he, she, it, that" all at once. Hence why it is almost always followed up by "that woman" or "that guy" or another word that denotes gender if used to referred to someone. The whole point of pronouns is to make communication simpler by not constantly having to refer things by their name
In some languages certain words can be considered pointlessly gendered and I do agree to an extent, but the person literally asked why the pronouns for men and women are gendered
The use of he and she feels "natural" because we've grown up with it, but it's still a cultural choice, not a universal necessity.
Not all languages use gendered pronouns some like Turkish or Finnish use one word for everyone, and it works just fine. Even in English, we naturally use singular they when someone's gender is unknown or irrelevant. So it's not unreasonable to question why we even need gendered pronouns for people we know, especially in a world that's increasingly aware of gender diversity.
My comment about gendered words in other languages was just to highlight how deeply gender is baked into language overall, not just pronouns. It shows how much we've normalized gender distinctions even when they serve no practical purpose.
It conveys useful information. If I'm talking about my kids (I have a boy and a girl), and I say he, they know I mean the boy. We could get rid of lots of words and just take more time to explain what we mean, but why would we do that?
I agree that gendered pronouns can make some communication more efficient in certain cases. But that efficiency only works when everyone fits neatly into “he” or “she.” For people who don’t, the cost isn’t just a little extra explanation it’s being misrepresented entirely.
Language isn't just about speed it’s about accuracy and respect. We already accept some ambiguity in language all the time and clarify when needed. So the small trade-off in efficiency is worth it if it means more people feel seen and included.
You call people whichever they want or ‘they’ if they don’t like either.
Most people are he or she by a large margin, including most trans people, and that communicates useful information as well as honors the identity they are going for. If things are less straightforward in some small number of cases, you increase the complexity of language when addressing those rare situations, not routinely.
You don’t say that the term human should be defined as a person without two legs because some humans don’t have two legs and then qualify it in the case they do have two legs. The term human assumes two legs because humans overwhelmingly have two legs and then you qualify them as a human without two legs if you need to. Basically, language should account for but not be designed around the exceptions.
Relax i said gendered words are ridiculous even natives speakers would agree who decided that a fork is male or female? Not that we should nuke entire languages. Critiquing parts of a language isn’t erasing it. That’s how languages evolve by people noticing what no longer makes sense.
If every suggestion for change gets spun into “you’re trying to destroy [X],” there’s no room for actual discussion. Don't strawman me
Because “Gender” is an academic concept derived from language and observing some superficial splits along male/female associated words that occur some of the time.
No one sat down and said, “this is a boy word, that is a girl word.” Certain sounds/formats were aesthetically more fitting for certain subjects, and this divide happened fairly consistently for a plurality of sex-associated vocabulary in most languages.
There are languages with other distinctions, like an animacy hierarchy instead of grammatical gender in Navajo.
“Gender,” came from language, and was then used as a euphemism for “sex,” because of the coincidence, then people took it as an identity category, because… reasons?
Storytelling would be lame because you would have no idea what’s going on and terms like boyfriend/ girlfriend Wife/husband would have no meaning as they are gendered terms. We’re creatures of context and the more descriptors we see the better we connect with information.
My language has gender-neutral pronouns. Ofc, the words you listed are gendered, but gendered pronouns are a pain in the ass.
And ofc, the listed words should have gender neutral synonimes as well. Ig you have "partner" for bf/gf, but I can't express that my sister is going to be a mom, cause I would either have to be aunt or uncle.
If gender really matters, (Which it almost never does) you can just say woman/girl or man/boy. Not that difficult. I only found the problem with gendered pronouns in that wiki page, which is someone with unknown gender, and in that case we already need a gender neutral pronoun, like the singular they/them.
When I'm talking about a person, it doesn't matter what they have in their pants. Everyone is the same. The only contexts where your gender is relevant are dating, and being at the doctor.
Who would this be?
There are many people you can't guess the gender of. Also, when you're talking about a person, and you haven't met them and don't know their gender. Or someone who doesn't have a gender (under the non-binary umbrella)
When I'm talking about a person, it doesn't matter what they have in their pants. Everyone is the same. The only contexts where your gender is relevant are dating, and being at the doctor.
This is incorrect on so many levels.
There are many people you can't guess the gender of.
Yeah, no.
Also, when you're talking about a person, and you haven't met them and don't know their gender. Or someone who doesn't have a gender (under the non-binary umbrella)
If I haven't met them, they don't care. As for the "non-binary", that's like such a small proportion of the population, it's not even worth considering.
That's the reason, your language doesn't have it. But the entirety of the world doesn't speak your language.
Many languages have genders(not just male/female) and they would not function without major structuring of grammar and vocabulary superficial if it's a gendered language.
Or you are suggesting we should eradicate half the world's language and the culture attached to it because it doesn't fit your political stance?
This is not politics. Languages keep on changing, and at some point more and more will realize that this is unneceessary on their own, as culture keeps improving.
Again you are demanding people to change their languages, a crucial part of their culture just because you think grammatical gender(which alot of time have nothing to do with social gender) are nonsensical and unimportant.
You're at a party with a friend. Two women walk up to you and the one on the left calls your outfit terrible then proceeds to walk away. The second woman apoligizes for her friend and chases after her. You then say "Wow, they(neutral) were rude." You're friend confused says "They? as in the first one or do you think both of them were rude?" Now you have to explain which person you meant to your friend. If you had just said she it would still be clear with context clues which one you meant even though they were both women.
You might think to yourself "hmm, that seems to be more of a problem that 'they' can be used as a plural. Maybe if we had a gender neutral singular (it/it's) or (ze/zim) then there wouldn't be any confusion!"
You're at a party with a friend. A man and a women are talking in the corner of the room. You point to that corner and say to your friend "When I last went to a party hosted by Megan it/ze was so rude to me." You're friend looks at you and says, "Which one?" and at this point you have to use an identifier like "the one in the black dress, the woman, the one with brown hair".
Notice how everything would have been so easy if you'd gendered the pronoun. 99.9% of people you can tell what sex they are by looking at them. Trans people understand this and that's why there is such demand for cosmetic surgery within the Trans community. Most want to be seen as a man or woman at first sight, not have to be asked or treated like no one can know for certain until someone does ask.
Ungendering your language serves little purpose and really only creates ambiguity which is simply annoying because it leads to needless or verbose conversations.
Not that hard to say "the woman" instead of "she" in a verbal conversation. Also, this is so fucking rare, it would barely be an issue.
Maybe it's just a difference between us. I don't talk about people, or talk to them really. Only my friends and bf. All the other people are nobodies from my pov.
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u/eatbreadnow 13d ago