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As an aside, many languages (like Hungarian) lack grammatical gender and gendered pronouns entirely. Having learned English afterward, it took conscious effort
by crabl 8y ago
As an aside, many languages (like Hungarian) lack grammatical gender and gendered pronouns entirely. Having learned English afterward, it took conscious effort on my part to remember to include the correct gender when talking about people in English, so I chose to use the singular "they" pronoun to avoid that unnecessary thought.
- cmiller1 8y agoMust be like when we as english speakers try to learn languages with gendered nouns and have to consciously try to remember if a chair or table is male or female.
- crabl 8y agoHaving learned French in school as well, I can confirm that it is the same feeling!
- Tobani 8y agoEnglish at least applies gendered pronouns primarily to living things that have a sex. There are odd exceptions that don't matter much. Sailors will refer to their boats as female. You look at something like german and dogs (Hund) are neuter, unless you use a female version (Hundin). Boys (Jünge) are male. Girls(Mädchen) are neuter. Fork(Gabel) is female.
- szemet 8y agoSame with me (hungarian too), I always fail to use the proper pronoun, but using "they" sound weird to my ears. In speech I mostly use "he" automatically, then I recognise my fault after a few sentence, then correct. Sometimes it feels so embarassing to recognise that I have just told a story about my wife refering her as he. (of course most of the time, I only mention her to people who know her already - so usually I don't have to explain myself)