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Native German speaker: Many people confuse the grammatical genus (as used in practice in contemporary German) of German words with the biological concept of se

by q-big 5y ago

Native German speaker: Many people confuse the grammatical genus (as used in practice in contemporary German) of German words with the biological concept of sex. This is made even more complicated by SJWs who confuse these two unrelated concepts (genus, sex) with their concept of gender. So, it is better to imagine the genus of German word as something like the "'color' of a word" ("color" in the sense of the "color charge" of quarks).

hprotagonist 5y ago
friend of mine went to live in germany and for a hot second tried to just use diminutives for everything so he didn’t have to learn gender forms. this lasted as long as it took for someone to tell him he sounded like a toddler. “do you have any mitten-wittens? my handsie-wandsies are coooooold” was i think what convinced him otherwise.
dragonwriter 5y ago
> This is made even more complicated by SJWs who confuse these two unrelated concepts (genus, sex) with their concept of gender. People described by their opponents as SJWs are more likely than, well, pretty much everyone else on the planet to distinguish biological sex, gender identity, socially ascribed gender, and grammatical gender. The people who use “SJW” as a dismissive epithet, on the other hand, are most likely to fail to distinguish those things.
- CRConrad 5y ago
  And people who see all non-praising use of "SJW" as "a dismissive epithet", on the gripping hand, are 100% likely to miss the odd case where it's just used as a handily descriptive piece of shorthand.
  - pseudalopex 5y ago
    It wasn't handily descriptive. They reversed the positions. People described by their opponents as SJWs don't describe themselves as SJWs except ironically occasionally. People who want a neutral or positive tone use other terms like social justice advocates.
pseudalopex 5y ago
It isn't coincidental most words for men and male animals are masculine and most words for women and female animals are feminine. It's the people who complain about "SJWs" who say sex and gender are the same.
- fpig 5y ago
  > It's the people who complain about "SJWs" who say sex and gender are the same. Ironically, you've just confirmed what GP said by confusing the concept of grammatical gender with the modern social studies concept of gender.
  - pseudalopex 5y ago
    How? They used gender to mean social gender. So did I.
- hprotagonist 5y ago
  https://www.etymonline.com/word/gender https://www.etymonline.com/word/gender still, the grammatical sense predates the sex sense by a bit, and has always been around to mean “genre”. So you always have to disambiguate usage
  - pseudalopex 5y ago
    Your point is unclear to me. Gender doesn't mean genre in contemporary English. And context is enough to distinguish grammatical gender from other meanings usually.
    - hprotagonist 5y ago
      except when context is not enough; i.e., when a grammatical gender form applies to nouns that describe persons with social genders. And then people usually get very huffy about which non-sentient nouns “share” “their” “gender”.
      - 5y ago
Tainnor 5y ago
I'm very skeptical about some of the attempts to change the German language to be more "gender-neutral" due to a number of reasons, but I feel it's not correct to frame this as a misunderstanding between "genus" and "sexus", as I've now read a number of times. If people really confused grammatical gender with "the biological concept of sex", then we'd have a lot more arguments about random nouns needing to have feminine gender instead of masculine (there's this famous joke about "die Salzstreuerin"). But that's not really what happens. Nobody seems to care about the table being masculine. What the argument is mostly about is that we use words that, by themselves, refer to masculine people and pluralise them to denote a possible mixed-gender group. This has everything to do with semantics (and so with how concrete biological/social gender expression is encoded in the words of a language), and isn't really that much concerned with grammatical gender, which after all disappears anyway as a distinctive feature once you're in the plural.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

by q-big 5y ago

hprotagonist 5y ago

friend of mine went to live in germany and for a hot second tried to just use diminutives for everything so he didn’t have to learn gender forms. this lasted as long as it took for someone to tell him he sounded like a toddler. “do you have any mitten-wittens? my handsie-wandsies are coooooold” was i think what convinced him otherwise.

dragonwriter 5y ago

> This is made even more complicated by SJWs who confuse these two unrelated concepts (genus, sex) with their concept of gender. People described by their opponents as SJWs are more likely than, well, pretty much everyone else on the planet to distinguish biological sex, gender identity, socially ascribed gender, and grammatical gender. The people who use “SJW” as a dismissive epithet, on the other hand, are most likely to fail to distinguish those things.

CRConrad 5y ago
And people who see all non-praising use of "SJW" as "a dismissive epithet", on the gripping hand, are 100% likely to miss the odd case where it's just used as a handily descriptive piece of shorthand.
- pseudalopex 5y ago
  It wasn't handily descriptive. They reversed the positions. People described by their opponents as SJWs don't describe themselves as SJWs except ironically occasionally. People who want a neutral or positive tone use other terms like social justice advocates.

pseudalopex 5y ago

It isn't coincidental most words for men and male animals are masculine and most words for women and female animals are feminine. It's the people who complain about "SJWs" who say sex and gender are the same.

fpig 5y ago
> It's the people who complain about "SJWs" who say sex and gender are the same. Ironically, you've just confirmed what GP said by confusing the concept of grammatical gender with the modern social studies concept of gender.
- pseudalopex 5y ago
  How? They used gender to mean social gender. So did I.
hprotagonist 5y ago
https://www.etymonline.com/word/gender https://www.etymonline.com/word/gender still, the grammatical sense predates the sex sense by a bit, and has always been around to mean “genre”. So you always have to disambiguate usage
- pseudalopex 5y ago
  Your point is unclear to me. Gender doesn't mean genre in contemporary English. And context is enough to distinguish grammatical gender from other meanings usually.
  - hprotagonist 5y ago
    except when context is not enough; i.e., when a grammatical gender form applies to nouns that describe persons with social genders. And then people usually get very huffy about which non-sentient nouns “share” “their” “gender”.
    - 5y ago

Tainnor 5y ago

I'm very skeptical about some of the attempts to change the German language to be more "gender-neutral" due to a number of reasons, but I feel it's not correct to frame this as a misunderstanding between "genus" and "sexus", as I've now read a number of times. If people really confused grammatical gender with "the biological concept of sex", then we'd have a lot more arguments about random nouns needing to have feminine gender instead of masculine (there's this famous joke about "die Salzstreuerin"). But that's not really what happens. Nobody seems to care about the table being masculine. What the argument is mostly about is that we use words that, by themselves, refer to masculine people and pluralise them to denote a possible mixed-gender group. This has everything to do with semantics (and so with how concrete biological/social gender expression is encoded in the words of a language), and isn't really that much concerned with grammatical gender, which after all disappears anyway as a distinctive feature once you're in the plural.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]