Word gender is easy as fuck to learn. Only anglophones seem to have their minds blown BY A FEATURE WHICH DID EXIST IN ENGLISH (and still does in fringe cases)
Yet the English speaking countries are the one pushing for a far-left gender ideology that is centered around “gender neutral” language and other crap. lol
Why are you so hung up on “gender”? Just replace it with “group” and you’ll find the exact same situation in almost all languages.
In Swedish words are not gendered. But to specify the singular we use one of two groups. En or ett. It can be a word before what you want to specify. Or a suffix.
En banan, (a banana) Banan-en, (the banana)
Or perhaps.
Ett körsbär, (a cherry) Körsbär-et, (the cherry)
It’s just one if two groups. Has nothing to do with gender. But if you really want to, we can pretend it’s gendered because it doesn’t matter. It’s gonna be one or the other regardless.
Now tell me. How is this different from “gendered” languages? And as a bonus. There is NO rule regarding which to use when. You just have to know.
I think the point is that it’s annoying to memorize regardless of language and it’s not like genders always make sense in other languages either. It is funnier with genders though.
It’s like this in almost every language. You don’t have to memorize it. You have to learn it. You will learn it by speaking the language.
I think it’s mostly native English speakers that complain because everything is just “the” and the rule to a and an is very simple.
You can tell me a word in Swedish I’ve never heard before. But i will instinctively know if it’s an “en” or “ett” word. How? I don’t even know. One just feels more right than the other.
I’m used to it from German but having to learn which is which was still annoying. Luckily Latin has its genders built in to its nouns which makes it easier.
I think it’s the fact that those groups are the gender groups that is causing the frustration. If it’s arbitrary, why did it have to be the same system we use to classify organisms and personal identities?
The question remains, why does there need to be two groups? Why can’t everything just be “en” or “ett”? What does having both get you in Swedish that having only one does not?
Because äpplet means “the apple” while äpplen means “apples”.
Because it’s how the language works. Why do we have many, lots, large ammonts of words that all mean the same thing? Me myself and I don’t really care because they are ways to express ourselves in different ways depending on what we want to convey, and how we choose to do so.
Gender often comes along with cases, which basically show you what role a noun is playing in a sentence. For example, is someone doing something, or is something being done to them. That lets you change the word order and keep the same meaning. You can emphasize different parts of the sentence, or just be more flexible with how you say things.
Here’s an example from German:
Der Hund (subject) hat den Mann (object) gebissen. / The dog bit the man.
Den Mann (object) hat der Hund (subject) gebissen. / The dog bit the man. (Implied: That guy, and not someone else.)
In English, the meaning changes when you change the word order.
The dog bit the man.
The man bit the dog.
Languages do fine with genders and without. They’re just different systems that happened to evolve over time. And languages can even change. English used to have 3 genders, but they disappeared hundreds of years ago. Instead of having like 12 different ways to say “the,” we just have one, thanks to the Vikings and the Norman invaders.
The word “machine” in French is… “machine”, yeah it’s spelled exactly the same. Just pronounce it a lot more like French (stress falls on the 1st syllable instead of the 2nd). Oh, and it’s feminine, which gives you “une machine”.
Washing in French is “laver”. In French, there’s this thing called “complément de nom”, where you add a noun to another noun to make a compound noun. However, there must be a preposition in between, and each compound noun has its own preposition, which means, you gotta learn them by heart (like the phrasal verbs in English except the meaning is actually related to the word).
In the case of this word, you’d use the preposition “à”. You will end up with “une machine à laver”, which translates literally to “a machine to wash”.
It’s a thing in many languages. My first language has it too and it’s not hard to speak it (though I still make a lot of mistakes lol) because if you’re a native, you just remember the gender of every single word. But English is still undoubtedly much much easier to learn
But at least pronunciation is mostly consistent.
In English two words can be written almost exactly the same but sound wildly different.
Looking at you, words with “ough”
I’m trying to figure out why I keep having dreams where I find out I somehow accidentally didn’t finish high school and have to go back to finish it to validate my college degree, but I didn’t go to class all year and I’m trying to figure out how I can pass.
It’s been a while, but I used to have a dream where I was in high school like I didn’t finish, but I would realize I had already graduated and gone to college. I was extra confused until my mind said I could just fuck with those high school classes and do whatever.
I think that’s how the dreams started, but then my mind tried to rationalize why I was there and then decided that I must have missed some credits and needed to make them up
Not the worst example for Japanese. The verb kakeru 掛ける is very common and has ~25 different meanings. This is before you count the other verbs also pronounced as kakeru such as 翔ける、賭ける etc
It can be argued that most of the different meanings arise from different contexts and how the speakers associate that particular word to different uses. When an English speaker uses the word save, it can mean either “save a person from danger”, “save a computer file”, and many others, which can have different meaning-translations to other languages.
In Italian too “la lavatrice”. And the dishwasher too, “la lavastoviglie”. btw we have gender fluid nouns like “the table” = “il tavolo” / “la tavola” with slightly different usage patterns.
Italian and Spanish are easier than French because the final -o (masculine) or -a (feminine) usually give a hint, with a few expections you have to learn by heart (“la mano” meaning “the hand” in both languages for example)…
tavolo and tavola aren’t the same nor are they “gender fluid nouns” (wtf?). Maybe this is some terronia region’s lang quirk, but in italian there is nothing like that
Due to the increased acceptance of non-conforming identities, it’s become more prevalent to either ask for pronouns, tell them to a person you meet, or have them somewhere visible in things like gameshows.
That’s quite as silly to me as this whole “what gender is this washing machine” nonsense is to English-speaking people.
Here in Finland, we don’t have gendered language. Even with third person pronouns, we usually default to “it” instead of “him/her/they”. Except for pets. They always get the proper pronoun “hän”. It’s just respectful.
So yeah, just like the English wonder why they have to learn different words for something needlessly gendered in France, I too, as a Finn, wonder why I have to learn different words for something needlessly gendered in English.
First, I’d like to identify Finnish as a Finno-Ugric language, more than a uralic one, because “uralic” is very broad, just like, say, “Indo-European languages”. There’s several distinction within both groups.
But yeah, there are quite a lot of grammatical cases, I can see that yeah. I wouldn’t bother learning Finnish if I wasn’t born with it, lol.
My point is rather that English calling French out on something linguistic. English is three languages in a trenchcoat masquerading as one.
But also, getting the conjugation wrong won’t really be offensive to anyone, whereas confusing he/she just because your brain is unused to having to specify such things and your mouth is unused to the “sh” sound in she, and ending up misgendering someone, could be. Even accidentally.
“She sells seashells on the seashore” is a very challenging tongue twister for Finns.
Also, note how I can write a sentence like “hän menee kirjastoon”, meaning “[3rd person nongendered singular] goes to the library”, but if you run that through a translator to English, the translator will have to make up a gender. And not surprisingly, the default is the masculine one. (Down with the patriarchy and all that.)
Although this also means you’ll lose information when translating to Finnish. Ups and downs.
This is one of those things that, if translated directly, would be really, really bad.
Now I’ve spoken English for more than a quarter century, so my mouths used to it already, but I remember when learning the language, it was rather hard for the brain to keep switching between “he” and “she”, as it was not a distinction my brain had to make before using English.
I mean obviously I could differentiate women and men, but having to use different pronouns for both?
I do mean that we Finns use “se” very often in everyday speech to refer yo other human beings, and “se” would translate as “it.”
Ofc I’m aware how horrible using “it” when referring yo people would be in English.
But if someone asked me to translate a sentence like “mihin se [a person] meni”, I would ofc not use a direct translation because of how offensive and wrong it would be.
I respect the distinctions languages have for genders, but I’m happy I grew up with one which didn’t have them. Language shapes thought. We don’t think of people as “it”, it’s just the colloquial form of the language.
In Finnish, if you had to give a formal speech or something, most people realise to default to “hän”, the 3rd person singular.
And if you’re doing customer service or addressing someone with the sort of respect you’d use titles with in English. Then you’d address the person in the second person plural instead of the second person singular.
Just like English did hundreds of years ago, and it worked so well that in the end, English left the second person singular out of the language altogether. It still exists, but isn’t really used unless thou wants to pretend being from Elizabethan Britain.
We could do with something though. ‘Them’ doesn’t really cut it as it’s not clear if it’s plural or singular. ‘It’ is insulting.
If there was a good one, I’d just use it all the time for everyone. Why should gender be so important to identity? Isn’t it a regression to be so hungup on gender?
It’s not. Context provides you all the needed info in 99.9% of cases.
“Alex is coming over after school, I haven’t seen them in forever.” Obviously means a single person.
“There’s construction going on? When will they be done?” Honestly doesn’t matter but obviously means a group of people.
Sure, you need to provide context, but you’d need to with a pronoun anyway.
“Where is she?” Who the heck is “she”?
“What time is he finished with work?” Who are we talking about?…
You’re essentially looking at the words singular and plural definitions and coming up with a reason they don’t work. (Hey, another “they” and I’m sure you picked up on the fact that I’m not talking about a singular human.)
Can you even think of a situation that has ambiguity, which would actually come up in natural language?
“Get who wrote this rubbish in here.” “I’ve message them. They are coming to the meeting now.” “You mean a team or an individual did this?”
It does depend how pedantic you want to be. I’ll dyslexic and I don’t process language like others and so I don’t like ambiguous. My default interpretation is frequently different. Human language has enough ambiguousness as it is. I’d like it reduced ideally.
“Who wrote this rubbish” is already ambiguous from the start, since it can be a singular author, or multiple. I admit they/them didn’t help resolve that ambiguity, but it isn’t the cause.
I agree ‘who’ is ambiguous and ‘they/them’ tells you nothing further. If we had a ‘xhe’ or whatever, you could narrow it down to a single person, without having to get into gender needlessly. I don’t need to know/care about gender.
The ambiguity doesn’t lie in they, it lies in the way the writer constructed that sentence, as the person you responded to already stated.
The writer (and the person they are communicating with) knows the plurality of the “who”, an outside observer (us, the readers) aren’t privy to that information. Clarification on the part of the writer would provide that context. But the sentence isn’t written to be read to a 3rd party, but the other party (the person the writer is communicating with).
99.99% of people understand this intuitively, but this is the way you’d parse the understanding of that sentence.
And if you’ll note, in my second sentence, “they” is understood to be singular—the writer.
E: and for Shits n’ giggles: if neither party (the writer nor the person being communicated to) knows the plurality of the “who” they are referring to, then it’s irrelevant information. They will discover who wrote it when they go searching.
And if you’ll note, in that previous sentence, it’s understood that I am using the plural they (the writer and the person being communicated to) in both uses of the last sentence.
As a dyslexic I don’t parse sentences like others. I’ve also been programming since childhood, I’m sure it’s made that worse in some ways. I read unclear ambiguity when other don’t.
I’ve literally had it were multiple people are sure of the same interpretation but could not explain why. They didn’t even see ambiguity until I pointed it.
I’m not arguing everyone should have a gender. Only that I wish we had another thing to use. Well constructed writing can use them just fine, but there is a lot of writing not well constructed. Not least of which is mine! I’d rather be going the other way in language. I’d like language to be compilable. 😉
I’d be happy with ‘xe’ for gender neutral single-person pronoun. And for awhile I was using that from time to time - but because its rare and people aren’t use to it, using it is a distraction from what you actually are trying to talk about. I’ve stopped using it because I don’t really want to talk about it over and over. Sometimes people find it confusing. Sometime people are just curious. And some people find aggravating (because they don’t like the idea of degendering or changing genders).
I don’t mind the concept of a degendeted pronoun, but I would vote against “xe”. Just find it unpleasant to use the “x” sound so much. Don’t know what I would like, just x makes it extra weird on top of the “weirdness” of trying to explicitly evolve language.
Sure. And as with a lot of English, it isn’t totally clear has ‘xe’ is even meant to be pronounced. (I assume like ‘ze’).
Perhaps a nicer sounding version would be ‘ce’. Or whatever. To be honest, it really doesn’t matter to me. I’d be happy to just call literally everyone “she” or “he” or whatever. I’d suggest that we just use “he” for all genders, because many people on the internet seem to be doing that anyway; but obviously that would be upsetting to people who have been fighting for gender recognition. Pushing for “she” might be a bit better, but not by a lot. … So we’re probably in this mess for a long time. But I reckon if we just shake it up just a little bit as individuals, using different words and such, we’ll eventually start to see something change more widely.
If you get aggravated being degendering, or of others changing gender, it makes me think you are insecure about your gender. They should get over it. ‘xe’ would be good, but I don’t see it taking off with being popularizied some how. Some popular TV show or something.
I’m a native English speaker and I’ve used “they” as a singular third person neutral pronoun since before I even knew anything about trans or nonbinary people. It’s commonly accepted and not at all unusual usage, at least in American English where I grew up.
’Them’ doesn’t really cut it as it’s not clear if it’s plural or singular.
Beyond the other reply about the history of the singular “they,” we also have another prominent plural pronoun we use in the singular all the time. So often we don’t even think about it as being plural anymore. So much so that we’ve created new plural versions of this already plural pronoun.
“You.”
“You” was originally the objective case plural 2nd person pronoun in English, with “ye” being the nominative.
But “thou” was considered informal, like the German “du” or the Spanish “tú,” and the plural 2nd person was used as the formal. And this eventually supplanted “thou” completely.
And now we think of “you” as singular to the point where we make slang words like “y’all” and “yous” to have a plural.
Yeah I don’t see anyone accepting being called “it” in English; that’s how you refer to farm animals bound for slaughter or undesirable ethnicities you’re going to exterminate.
Why would anyone ever want to try using “it” for people in English unless they’re purposefully trying to demean someone… ?
Sorry, I wasn’t trying to say that’s what English should do. I was describing what Finnish does.
I’m pointing out that lots of languages have less gender distinctions than English, so English calling French out on gendered nouns is rather silly.
My point is that despite Finland having a perfectly good third person singular for people, we usually use the even more general one, which is just for anything. Except when talking to and about pets, because then somehow everyone uses less colloquial language.
While English has a perfectly good second person singular, but doesn’t even use it anymore.
You can’t have more third person singulars before you finish your second person singulars, that’s the rule. Now open up!
My point is that despite Finland having a perfectly good third person singular for people we usually use the even more general one
The reason for that is because “se” as strictly a “thing” pronoun is artificial “book language”. When standard literary Finnish was being developed in the 19th century, its inventors wanted to have a person/thing distinction in pronouns like the “civilized” languages had, so they arbitrarily assigned “hän” as a person pronoun and “se” as a thing pronoun. That distinction is artificial, and has never stuck in spoken Finnish.
Originally there was a difference between “hän” and “se”, but it was grammatical: se was the general third person pronoun, hän referred back to the speaker (logophoric pronoun). Compare:
Antti sanoi, että se tulee. (Antti said that someone else will come.)
Antti sanoi, että hän tulee. (Antti said that he himself will come.)
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