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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

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).
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  > The first thing you need to do is realize that grammatical gender has nothing to do with actual gender or lack thereof. And, more fully, realize that none of these four things are different axis of variation: grammatical gender, biological sex, socially-ascribed gender, personal gender identity. Most importantly, the first two things are different kinds of things from each other and the last two things (the last two are closely related, and there is very good reason to try to align them; alignment between grammatical gender and gender identity can be important instrumentally to that goal, however, especially in contexts where there is an established expectation of alignment between socially-ascribed gender and grammatical gender, since then a divergence between gender identity and grammatical gender used communicates and reinforces the divergence between ascribed gender and gender identity.)
  - mitchty 11y ago
    What you're saying is true as well and goes much further in the use of gender itself. But it has a bit of a snag for some languages if you were to try to "fix/correct/whatever" the genders of certain nouns to fit a social context. Take German with das Mädchen (das being neuter gender), the plural of this is die Mädchen, aka all plurals in German are feminine gender. Changing the gender of this noun in its singular state is... problematic at best and grammatically would amount to almost a new language. You would also have to tackle do you make all plurals not feminine gender? Additionally you'd have to handle/tackle use of er/es/sie/Sie/usw... I think I can speak for the Germans here and say changing the language to suit these social constructs would be ludicrous. I know other languages and their grammar would also have issues with revisions along these lines akin to not being the same language. Aligning gender like people are want to do in English lately is problematic and possibly misguided grammatically.
    - dragonwriter 11y ago
      > But it has a bit of a snag for some languages if you were to try to "fix/correct/whatever" the genders of certain nouns to fit a social context. Take German with das Mädchen (das being neuter gender), the plural of this is die Mädchen, aka all plurals in German are feminine gender. This is a complicated area and I'm not sure that the issues in German occur in the same places as in English: in English, for people, the exclusive dual grammatical gender has been paired with and directly mapped to (but for the use of the masculine grammatical gender to include generic ascribed gender) the exclusively dual socially ascribed gender, to which personal gender identity has been generally expected to conform. With languages with a more complex gender structure and where the mapping between grammatical gender and socially ascribed gender of persons is more complex, the particular problem areas (if any) where grammatical gender is problematic in terms of interfering with the desire to encourage socially ascribed gender to align with gender identity and, also, to avoid communicating gender(-identity/ascription) biased norms, may be different than in English. It may be different, for that matter, even within a single language, based on the history and expectations around the use words and their associations in different places and cultures using the same language.
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 ;)

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).
dragonwriter 11y ago
> The first thing you need to do is realize that grammatical gender has nothing to do with actual gender or lack thereof. And, more fully, realize that none of these four things are different axis of variation: grammatical gender, biological sex, socially-ascribed gender, personal gender identity. Most importantly, the first two things are different kinds of things from each other and the last two things (the last two are closely related, and there is very good reason to try to align them; alignment between grammatical gender and gender identity can be important instrumentally to that goal, however, especially in contexts where there is an established expectation of alignment between socially-ascribed gender and grammatical gender, since then a divergence between gender identity and grammatical gender used communicates and reinforces the divergence between ascribed gender and gender identity.)
- mitchty 11y ago
  What you're saying is true as well and goes much further in the use of gender itself. But it has a bit of a snag for some languages if you were to try to "fix/correct/whatever" the genders of certain nouns to fit a social context. Take German with das Mädchen (das being neuter gender), the plural of this is die Mädchen, aka all plurals in German are feminine gender. Changing the gender of this noun in its singular state is... problematic at best and grammatically would amount to almost a new language. You would also have to tackle do you make all plurals not feminine gender? Additionally you'd have to handle/tackle use of er/es/sie/Sie/usw... I think I can speak for the Germans here and say changing the language to suit these social constructs would be ludicrous. I know other languages and their grammar would also have issues with revisions along these lines akin to not being the same language. Aligning gender like people are want to do in English lately is problematic and possibly misguided grammatically.
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
    > But it has a bit of a snag for some languages if you were to try to "fix/correct/whatever" the genders of certain nouns to fit a social context. Take German with das Mädchen (das being neuter gender), the plural of this is die Mädchen, aka all plurals in German are feminine gender. This is a complicated area and I'm not sure that the issues in German occur in the same places as in English: in English, for people, the exclusive dual grammatical gender has been paired with and directly mapped to (but for the use of the masculine grammatical gender to include generic ascribed gender) the exclusively dual socially ascribed gender, to which personal gender identity has been generally expected to conform. With languages with a more complex gender structure and where the mapping between grammatical gender and socially ascribed gender of persons is more complex, the particular problem areas (if any) where grammatical gender is problematic in terms of interfering with the desire to encourage socially ascribed gender to align with gender identity and, also, to avoid communicating gender(-identity/ascription) biased norms, may be different than in English. It may be different, for that matter, even within a single language, based on the history and expectations around the use words and their associations in different places and cultures using the same language.

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 ;)