alt Hacker NewsI’m curious on people’s opinions here cause I have seen this both ways. I have seen people say gender in the language at all is bad. And have said Spanish is sexist.
I’ve also seen people argue that we should learn to not see vocabulary gender as gender at all, just start associating some words as “la” and some as “el” with no boy/girl idea behind it.
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> I’ve also seen people argue that we should learn to not see vocabulary gender as gender at all, just start associating some words as “la” and some as “el” with no boy/girl idea behind it.
If you look up the list of exceptions to the whole "-a = feminine, -o = masculine" in Spanish, it's incredibly long (and covers many of the most common words). Similarly there are a whole bunch where the gender is correct, but the article is swapped because it sounds better. The gender of specific words is also arbitrary, and doesn't agree between the various Romance languages.
This whole thing is just the leftover pieces of Latin's 3x linguistic genders hanging around in our languages, and ceased to be related to actual gender centuries ago.
Old English for “wife” was masculine. “Maiden” in German is neutral. In Italian, the formal “you” is the same as “she” (written capitalized).
Grammatical gender is not intrinsically sexist and doesn’t really make a lot of sense if you try to analyze it to tease out what patriarchs were thinking when they added these forms, because largely they never thought about it at all. The forms evolved over hundreds of years.