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My native language doesn't have gendered pronouns, and it is surprisingly difficult to learn to fluently and effortlessly use 'he' (or 'she') in English in situ

by sampo 11y ago

My native language doesn't have gendered pronouns, and it is surprisingly difficult to learn to fluently and effortlessly use 'he' (or 'she') in English in situations when there is no need to specify the gender, or when the gender is not known ("After the user clicks the button, he/she receives ..."). My brain is just not wired that way, I feel like I am forced to create information when there is none, and potentially incorrect information, lies. Almost as if a language didn't have a construct to talk about cars without specifying their color at the same time, so you all the time have to create random colors in order to talk about cars in the abstract. I was very happy when I learned that 'they' is a mostly acceptable solution. I understand gendered nouns can also be a politically loaded topic, but I only meant this as a perspective from someone who learned English as a second language.

kibwen 11y ago
I don't think anyone would dispute that gendered pronouns make learning a language harder. Here in the US most kids will learn a rudimentary amount of a foreign language in school, at which point they realize just how lucky they are that most nouns in their native language use gender-neutral pronouns (I distinctly remember wondering just what made tables female when we were required to say la mesa). There's even a famous Mark Twain essay where he laments at length the chaos of German's genders: https://www.cs.utah.edu/~gback/awfgrmlg.html https://www.cs.utah.edu/~gback/awfgrmlg.html
gyardley 11y ago
This is pretty close to how I, as a native English speaker, feel about gendered inanimate objects. I have no idea why so many other languages force you to stick a gender on something without any genitals. I would've preferred not to have to learn that something as simple as 'milk' is feminine in Spanish, masculine in Italian, and neuter in Russian - that hunk of my brain could surely be put to better use.
- mitchty 11y ago
  The first thing you need to do is realize that grammatical gender has nothing to do with actual gender or lack thereof. Unless you really think a turnip is feminine, and a little girl has no gender like in German. All they're doing is describing a category of like nouns. The term for the grouping happens to be the word gender. The word is overloaded in this case to mean multiple things and is at best a false cognate. The fact that the same thing can have multiple genders or lack thereof as you noted should be the biggest clue that grammatical gender has nothing to do with genitals.
  - SilasX 11y ago
    It doesn't matter whether it's related to biological gender[1]; the fact remains that these languages force you to remember extra information that serves no semantic purpose, which causes the same problem as English does/did when forcing you to pick a gender for the pronoun of a generic person. Whether you call it "grammatical gender" or "gender" or "noun class" is irrelevant; it all burns down the same cigarette butt. [1] Although it pretty clearly is, since languages consistently lump in the female version of a human noun (cartera) with the grammatical gender of woman, and male (cartero) with man; the little-girl exception you mention from German is because that diminutive suffix (-chen in Mädchen) takes the neuter case with higher priority. The (fact that this is such a predictable, rare) exception proves the (general validity of the) rule.
    - dragonwriter 11y ago
      > Although it pretty clearly is, since languages consistently lump in the female version of a human noun (cartera) with the grammatical gender of woman Languages with grammatical gender don't even consistently have "masculine" and "feminine" categories (though certainly that's the most common distinction, with or without a "neuter" category, in a grammatical gender system.) E.g., several have the grammatical genders of "animate" and "inanimate" (or something similar), but not "masculine" and "feminine".
      - SilasX 11y ago
        I know -- I perhaps should have clarified that I meant "languages with [something commonly referred to as grammatical] gender for nouns", although I feel it was clear from context, since the footnote was referred to after "these languages" (not languages in general).
- sampo 11y ago
  > I have no idea why so many other languages force you to stick a gender on something without any genitals. Btw, Swedish has a nice version of this, the masculine and feminine genders have merged together into the common gender, and then the other is the neutral gender. For example: en katt (a cat, common) ett hus (a house, neutral) You are still burdened by having to memorize the gender for each noun, but at least you are spared from having to think the words as masculine or feminine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_grammar#Nouns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_grammar#Nouns
- warfangle 11y ago
  What'll really blow your mind is that gender only tangentially has to do with genitals in the first place ;)
ctdonath 11y ago
The perspective from someone who learned English as a first language is that it's just as annoying a linguistic issue as it is to those who learned English later. Those of us raised on English likewise have a bad time with ambiguous gender situations ("he/she"). Used to be just "he" when ambiguous/irrelevant, but sociopolitical outrage over possible misapplication of the pronoun discourages such use, so our choice is either the obnoxious "he/she" (raising the issue of alternate applicability in a context where it really doesn't matter) or the now-common but still irritating singular "they" (ignoring the plural definition, and implying attempted reconciliation for the originating sociopolitical angst).
- SilasX 11y ago
  Agree about it being annoying for native English speakers as well, but I don't think you have to be PC to balk at the use of "he" for the ambiguous case. Brains work by association, and forcing "he" to do double-duty is simply confusing. For example, let's say you tell a story and refer to a generic surgeon as "he", when some patient's father is known to be far away. Later, you have the surgeon saying "I can't operate on this patient; he's my son!" People will feel deceived if it turns out the surgeon was a woman after you used "he" to refer to her, and no amount of lecturing about how "'he' is a perfectly fine for ambiguous cases" is going to change this. Btw, Douglas Hofstadter (somewhere in Metamagical Themas) made a great point that the use of "they" vs "he" for the generic singular being an issue of whether people are more offended at being called a man when a woman or multiple when singular. There are fewer interest groups looking out for the latter...
  - SamReidHughes 11y ago
    > I don't think you have to be PC to balk at the use of "he" for the ambiguous case. You're right. When I was a kid, I'd go with "they" for both ambiguous and the generic case, simply because it's illogical to have an arbitrary assumption, which is maybe a post-hoc justification that I made as a teenager. Eventually I ended up trying to train myself to use "he" in the generic case, because it seemed to me like my habit was just super-semantic nerdiness. But for the ambiguous case, if it's talking about a specific person, but whose sex you don't know, it'd still be very weird to not use "they".

by sampo 11y ago

kibwen 11y ago

I don't think anyone would dispute that gendered pronouns make learning a language harder. Here in the US most kids will learn a rudimentary amount of a foreign language in school, at which point they realize just how lucky they are that most nouns in their native language use gender-neutral pronouns (I distinctly remember wondering just what made tables female when we were required to say la mesa). There's even a famous Mark Twain essay where he laments at length the chaos of German's genders: https://www.cs.utah.edu/~gback/awfgrmlg.html https://www.cs.utah.edu/~gback/awfgrmlg.html

gyardley 11y ago

This is pretty close to how I, as a native English speaker, feel about gendered inanimate objects. I have no idea why so many other languages force you to stick a gender on something without any genitals. I would've preferred not to have to learn that something as simple as 'milk' is feminine in Spanish, masculine in Italian, and neuter in Russian - that hunk of my brain could surely be put to better use.

mitchty 11y ago
The first thing you need to do is realize that grammatical gender has nothing to do with actual gender or lack thereof. Unless you really think a turnip is feminine, and a little girl has no gender like in German. All they're doing is describing a category of like nouns. The term for the grouping happens to be the word gender. The word is overloaded in this case to mean multiple things and is at best a false cognate. The fact that the same thing can have multiple genders or lack thereof as you noted should be the biggest clue that grammatical gender has nothing to do with genitals.
- SilasX 11y ago
  It doesn't matter whether it's related to biological gender[1]; the fact remains that these languages force you to remember extra information that serves no semantic purpose, which causes the same problem as English does/did when forcing you to pick a gender for the pronoun of a generic person. Whether you call it "grammatical gender" or "gender" or "noun class" is irrelevant; it all burns down the same cigarette butt. [1] Although it pretty clearly is, since languages consistently lump in the female version of a human noun (cartera) with the grammatical gender of woman, and male (cartero) with man; the little-girl exception you mention from German is because that diminutive suffix (-chen in Mädchen) takes the neuter case with higher priority. The (fact that this is such a predictable, rare) exception proves the (general validity of the) rule.
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
    > Although it pretty clearly is, since languages consistently lump in the female version of a human noun (cartera) with the grammatical gender of woman Languages with grammatical gender don't even consistently have "masculine" and "feminine" categories (though certainly that's the most common distinction, with or without a "neuter" category, in a grammatical gender system.) E.g., several have the grammatical genders of "animate" and "inanimate" (or something similar), but not "masculine" and "feminine".
    - SilasX 11y ago
      I know -- I perhaps should have clarified that I meant "languages with [something commonly referred to as grammatical] gender for nouns", although I feel it was clear from context, since the footnote was referred to after "these languages" (not languages in general).
sampo 11y ago
> I have no idea why so many other languages force you to stick a gender on something without any genitals. Btw, Swedish has a nice version of this, the masculine and feminine genders have merged together into the common gender, and then the other is the neutral gender. For example: en katt (a cat, common) ett hus (a house, neutral) You are still burdened by having to memorize the gender for each noun, but at least you are spared from having to think the words as masculine or feminine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_grammar#Nouns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_grammar#Nouns
warfangle 11y ago
What'll really blow your mind is that gender only tangentially has to do with genitals in the first place ;)

ctdonath 11y ago

The perspective from someone who learned English as a first language is that it's just as annoying a linguistic issue as it is to those who learned English later. Those of us raised on English likewise have a bad time with ambiguous gender situations ("he/she"). Used to be just "he" when ambiguous/irrelevant, but sociopolitical outrage over possible misapplication of the pronoun discourages such use, so our choice is either the obnoxious "he/she" (raising the issue of alternate applicability in a context where it really doesn't matter) or the now-common but still irritating singular "they" (ignoring the plural definition, and implying attempted reconciliation for the originating sociopolitical angst).

SilasX 11y ago
Agree about it being annoying for native English speakers as well, but I don't think you have to be PC to balk at the use of "he" for the ambiguous case. Brains work by association, and forcing "he" to do double-duty is simply confusing. For example, let's say you tell a story and refer to a generic surgeon as "he", when some patient's father is known to be far away. Later, you have the surgeon saying "I can't operate on this patient; he's my son!" People will feel deceived if it turns out the surgeon was a woman after you used "he" to refer to her, and no amount of lecturing about how "'he' is a perfectly fine for ambiguous cases" is going to change this. Btw, Douglas Hofstadter (somewhere in Metamagical Themas) made a great point that the use of "they" vs "he" for the generic singular being an issue of whether people are more offended at being called a man when a woman or multiple when singular. There are fewer interest groups looking out for the latter...
- SamReidHughes 11y ago
  > I don't think you have to be PC to balk at the use of "he" for the ambiguous case. You're right. When I was a kid, I'd go with "they" for both ambiguous and the generic case, simply because it's illogical to have an arbitrary assumption, which is maybe a post-hoc justification that I made as a teenager. Eventually I ended up trying to train myself to use "he" in the generic case, because it seemed to me like my habit was just super-semantic nerdiness. But for the ambiguous case, if it's talking about a specific person, but whose sex you don't know, it'd still be very weird to not use "they".