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"Tommy, Frank, and Susan burned their homework and fed it to the dog." "Who fed it to the dog?" "That person." Overhearing this conversation, you don't kno
by peterwwillis 8y ago
"Tommy, Frank, and Susan burned their homework and fed it to the dog."
"Who fed it to the dog?"
"That person."
Overhearing this conversation, you don't know who they were pointing at. If they said "She did.", you know who they were pointing at. There are many other situations where gender provides extra data, which is convenient.
Our languages keep having gender, so it's clearly been advantageous from an evolutionary perspective. The problem is when we let gender become more important than the data it's trying to express, like when a society lets gender dictate your social class. That shit needs to stop.
- DFHippie 8y agoNoun classes are advantageous. Gender happens to be a useful way to categorize nouns because mostly we like to talk about other people. Gender (and animacy -- "it" versus "s/he") split things up efficiently for many conversations, where, say, paper versus non-paper wouldn't.
- atombender 8y agoBut that's human gender, not noun gender. In grammar, gender is a class of noun and generally unrelated to human gender. In German, words like "library" (Bibliothek) and "street" (Strasse/Straße) are feminine, for example. It's true that some feminine words, such as "woman" (Frau) and "mother" (Mutter), are feminine. But then you have words like "girl" (Mädchen), which are not. Your example ("she did") could actually have ambiguity in languages that extends the noun gender to pronouns, such as French. "She" doesn't need to refer to a woman, just a feminine noun. For example, "car" (voiture) is feminine, and you can refer to "it" as "elle" (she).