alt Hacker NewsMy native language has no gender. Every time I see these conversations I wonder “why not do away with the gender?”
It often leaks information the speaker didn’t intend to share. e.g., “I met a friend. She was late.”
Did the speaker mean or care to share to gender of this friend? Is it relevant? I don’t think so.
And I find it especially interesting when people argue for gender-neutral plurals, but then happily use gendered noun. It sort of feels like “everyone must stay in their lane” type of expectation.
Even the patriarchy argument is weird. The patriarchy - along with religion - wanted this gender line and specification in every context. Wanna stick it to patriarchy? Nix the gender from all languages!
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I wonder how you would feel about, for example, Slavic languages. There, you leak information about the gender even about speaking about yourself in first person (at least in the ones I have some idea about). Example in Polish:
"Spotkałem kolegę" - "I [male] met a [male] friend."
"Spotkałam kolegę" - "I [female] met a [male] friend."
"Spotkałem koleżankę" - "I [male] met a [female] friend."
"Spotkałam koleżankę" - "I [female] met a [female] friend."
Notice the different ending (em/am) depending on whether a male or female is speaking.
Persian doesn't have gender and Iran is famously not patriarchal at all.
> My native language has no gender. Every time I see these conversations I wonder “why not do away with the gender?”
Yes, many languages have no gender or have a generic option besides genders.
I always find this very annoying in Roman languages, where every object has an arbitrary gender, and to make matters worse it's not always the same. A word that is female in Spanish could be male in Italian or Portuguese. It trips me up a lot and it's annoying because the gender is just some arbitrary thing there, it has no meaning because objects have no gender. If we're talking about people I can understand but things?
But languages are not very logical. They are something that melted together over centuries out of habit.
It adds real world flavor, instead of mashing everyone and everything into the same grey goo of genderlessness.
It’s no surprise that the strongest (mainstream) gendered languages are also known as the ‘Romance languages’.
Is it logically simpler in some ways to not have it? Of course. Let’s not even talk about how complex gendered verb conjugations are in Spanish or Portuguese, for example.
But it does allow a lot of beautiful flourishes that add a lot of color.
> The patriarchy - along with religion - wanted this gender line and specification in every context
Did they? English used to be gendered but lost it ~1000 years ago.
Languages evolve in odd ways and don’t think the patriarchy or religion have much to do with it.