2 ms·

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/

by 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.

by mitchty 11y ago

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.