6 ms·

I have always found gender in German confusing. This gives a little more context. Of course in English we have a tiny bit of gendered nouns where we append "ma

by maire 5y ago

I have always found gender in German confusing. This gives a little more context. Of course in English we have a tiny bit of gendered nouns where we append "man" or "woman" to some job titles based on the gender of the person holding the title (policeman, congressman, etc). This has become problematic when we use the plural. Also in English we have gendered pronouns which has become a hot topic in the last couple of years. I wonder what people who speak languages without gendered pronouns think of the current kerfuffle.

iammisc 5y ago
> This has become problematic when we use the plural. Grammatically, it's not problematic at all. Some people with new ideas completely out of line with the culture at large make a big deal of it.
- space_fountain 5y ago
  It embeds assumptions about what the societal defaults are, nothing more and nothing less. Like you maybe I'm skeptical that it does harm itself, but certainly societal defaults are problematic. Maybe and probably, there are bigger problems, but whatever.
  - iammisc 5y ago
    Why are societal defaults problematic? Providing clear guidance for young people is a good thing.
  - soundnote 5y ago
    They have problems, but only insofar as any imperfect solution does. Having societal defaults itself is really good: If someone's confused as to what theyb should do with their life, bam. Here's a recipe that worked for your ancestors for ages, following it is unlikely to fuck you up badly. (This is, of course, a far bigger phenomenon than simply what jobs are called) The freedom to define yourself is a good thing, but most people neither need nor want it, and for many who want it undertaking the excercise is a mistake, because it's more flippant wishy-washyness or deliberate, willful ignorance than self-building, per se. Consider the classic case of the Starbucks barista with a degree in postmodern dance theory.
    - maire 5y ago
      I have to disagree with this. Many women want to have a family and will avoid careers that are not family friendly. This is still true today. But fixing those careers to be family friendly will benefit men as well as women. I went to an all girl college prep high school in the early 1970s. All the girls on college track took an aptitude test. We were told to take both the boys and girls test. There were two tests back then. I scored very high in engineering and math on the boys test, but those options did not even exist on the girls test. I found the girls test ridiculous. This will sound silly but I didn't even consider engineering until after I read The Menace from Earth by Heinlein. I thought engineering meant I wouldn't have a husband and family. I didn't even consider math until after I took this test. I ended up double majoring in Math and Computer Science. This was in the early days before Comp Sci was gendered. 30% of my Comp Sci class was female. Compare that to my daughter's experience. Her Comp Sci classes were about 15% female until she took a Human Factors class which was 50% female. Sometime in the 1980s women enrolling in Comp Sci dramatically declined.
- tshaddox 5y ago
  Not sure what you mean. It's certainly grammar that is causing the problem. And yes, it's a problem because some people think it's a problem—that's true of all problems by definition.
  - iammisc 5y ago
    Most people don't think it's a problem at all.
- kennywinker 5y ago
  “Completely out of line with the culture” firefighter, for a moment, was an exclusively male job. Fireman made sense. As more women took on that job during the past 50-ish years, calling them “firemen” makes less and less sense. So to say it’s people out of step with culture isn’t quite right. It’s more like entrenched language in conflict with shifting culture. A non-gendered example of this would be something like xerox vs photocopier. There was a time when all photocopiers were xeroxes, but now odds are very low that your xerox machine is a xerox branded photocopier. There are still a few people out there who haven’t bothered to update their language, but largely that shift happened over the past 30 years - and because it’s not very political it was largely a silent shift. “Firemen” is, unfortunately, wrapped up in people’s beliefs about what gender roles SHOULD be - so it’s not going so quietly
  - frenchyatwork 5y ago
    The problem here is not that "fireman" couldn't in theory be used to refer to both men and women; but that in English it doesn't, or at least not anymore. Historically, the masculine noun class has been used in gender-indeterminate places, but about 100 years ago that usage stared to disappear from the language, or at least become argot. The phrase "I am no man" in the Lord or the Rings is a play on this disappearance. In English, this disappearance happened alongside a similar change in gender roles; however, in a lot of European languages the social changes occurred, but the linguistic changes did not (and non-European languages often have quite different kinds of noun classes).
    - kennywinker 5y ago
      Interesting. I was aware of the shift... In university I would cringe every time a prof said "man" to refer to human or humanity, which seemed to me to indicate a very recent change. It's a surprising thing to hear it started as far back as Tolkien's time - I remembered that line as a Peter Jackson addition. It would be interesting to hear how women who speak other European languages that didn't make those changes feel about it - they seem so inherently linked to my ear.
  - arp242 5y ago
ZeroGravitas 5y ago
I always liked this take on the "policeman, congressman" issue (back when that was the thing that people got upset about in newspaper columns): http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.html http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.html 25 years old, and probably the most striking thing from this distance is the implicit assumption that all the readers would believe in racism, but not sexism.
- iammisc 5y ago
  > 25 years old, and probably the most striking thing from this distance is the implicit assumption that all the readers would believe in racism, but not sexism. Sex and race are not two equivalent classes. There are material differences between the sexes. These are obvious differences in even my one year old noticed. On the other hand, it is unclear if there are any differences in ability by race, and it looks like if there are, they're mainly not material to success. But I mean, I do wonder what percentage of income white people in the south and southwest spend on sunblock and sunscreen. Seems like a lot. (this is a joke, for those wanting to downvote me)
  - rovolo 5y ago
    > These are obvious differences in even my one year old noticed. My friend who worked in elementary schools (I think they were a substitute teacher, but maybe they were an assistant for after-school) would be asked "are you a boy or a girl?" in practically every new group they watched. What differences should the K-3 kids have picked up on to sex them? Why would it have been important to sex them?
  - soundnote 5y ago
    > Sex and race are not two equivalent classes. There are material differences between the sexes. These are obvious differences in even my one year old noticed. On the other hand, it is unclear if there are any differences in ability by race, and it looks like if there are, they're mainly not material to success. There definitely are, and there probably are depending on what traits are in question. But the difference is still not at all of a similar sort. The crucial difference between men and women is one of two completely different mechanisms. Within each mechanism, there is variation of course, like the length of the... thing and other variables like that. Insofar as there are differences in race, they are much more like height or eye color: Same system, different historically separated populations just have different distributions along the variation of that trait. Asian people are generally shorter than white or black people, for example: This doesn't mean you won't find a short white or black man, for example, or a tall East Asian one. The Asian man being really tall is just less common. Insofar as these things exist, they are a matter of count in a pile of people, and a difference in degree. Men and women are truly a difference in kind, the same way goats and weasels have different digestive systems. It's not a matter of more or less of this or that between the two.
hodgesrm 5y ago
Gender in German is an incredible pain. There are rules for about 50% of the words, e.g., a word that ends in "ung" like Beleuchtung is always feminine. The other 50%? It's a guess. After a while I concluded it must be a defensive mechanism designed to detect and repel foreigners. As evidence I adduce the fact that some words change genders between regions. Well-known example: die Butter and der Butter depending on where you are from. [0] [0] https://de.wiktionary.org/wiki/Butter https://de.wiktionary.org/wiki/Butter
- kgeist 5y ago
  >After a while I concluded it must be a defensive mechanism designed to detect and repel foreigners. As evidence I adduce the fact that some words change genders between regions. Well-known example: die Butter and der Butter depending on where you are from. It's not uncommon for a noun to change their gender at some point in history. As far as I know, it's often analogical changes. For example, feminine noun X describes an item of a larger class Y, and it just happens that most items of class Y are masculine. So the noun X, being feminine, is an exception, which is "fixed", and it becomes masculine. An example from Russian language: most words denoting shoes and related items were masculine: boot, shoe, sock etc. Then there was the word for "slippers", feminine. I and my family still use the word in the feminine form, because the change is very recent. Today most speakers (especially younger ones) use the masculine form. It's expectable that a change can happen in some dialects, but not in others.
- bmn__ 5y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27714868 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27714868
soundnote 5y ago
> Also in English we have gendered pronouns which has become a hot topic in the last couple of years. I wonder what people who speak languages without gendered pronouns think of the current kerfuffle. Upper class wokelets are being silly as usual. In part they're seeking identity, to belong. In another, they're terminally online and live in a world of words where speech defines the world. If you can make a sentence and replace one word with another of the same class, you should just treat them as equal because you grammatically can. Whether the real-world things the words point at are remotely similar enough is irrelevant, since to the woke, the real world isn't primary. You could go to forums about unscientific personality typologies and see the exact behaviors of the gender-nonconformists on display in a completely different medium, and before they escaped tumblr into the world at large. It's just people grabbing self-definitions to build an identity - a special one - in a way that's cheap and doesn't require the real work that living an actually interesting life or even reading widely. Why do you think there's stuff like genderqueer etc.? It's low-cost, you don't have to change anything about yourself, just make the claim. And it's high status, unlike being normal and heterosexual. If high status things are cheap to do, people will do them. > Of course in English we have a tiny bit of gendered nouns where we append "man" or "woman" to some job titles based on the gender of the person holding the title (policeman, congressman, etc). This has become problematic when we use the plural. This is a 'problem' in my native language as well. Otherwise, we're civilized and just call everyone 'it'.

by maire 5y ago

iammisc 5y ago

> This has become problematic when we use the plural. Grammatically, it's not problematic at all. Some people with new ideas completely out of line with the culture at large make a big deal of it.

space_fountain 5y ago
It embeds assumptions about what the societal defaults are, nothing more and nothing less. Like you maybe I'm skeptical that it does harm itself, but certainly societal defaults are problematic. Maybe and probably, there are bigger problems, but whatever.
- iammisc 5y ago
  Why are societal defaults problematic? Providing clear guidance for young people is a good thing.
- soundnote 5y ago
  They have problems, but only insofar as any imperfect solution does. Having societal defaults itself is really good: If someone's confused as to what theyb should do with their life, bam. Here's a recipe that worked for your ancestors for ages, following it is unlikely to fuck you up badly. (This is, of course, a far bigger phenomenon than simply what jobs are called) The freedom to define yourself is a good thing, but most people neither need nor want it, and for many who want it undertaking the excercise is a mistake, because it's more flippant wishy-washyness or deliberate, willful ignorance than self-building, per se. Consider the classic case of the Starbucks barista with a degree in postmodern dance theory.
  - maire 5y ago
    I have to disagree with this. Many women want to have a family and will avoid careers that are not family friendly. This is still true today. But fixing those careers to be family friendly will benefit men as well as women. I went to an all girl college prep high school in the early 1970s. All the girls on college track took an aptitude test. We were told to take both the boys and girls test. There were two tests back then. I scored very high in engineering and math on the boys test, but those options did not even exist on the girls test. I found the girls test ridiculous. This will sound silly but I didn't even consider engineering until after I read The Menace from Earth by Heinlein. I thought engineering meant I wouldn't have a husband and family. I didn't even consider math until after I took this test. I ended up double majoring in Math and Computer Science. This was in the early days before Comp Sci was gendered. 30% of my Comp Sci class was female. Compare that to my daughter's experience. Her Comp Sci classes were about 15% female until she took a Human Factors class which was 50% female. Sometime in the 1980s women enrolling in Comp Sci dramatically declined.
tshaddox 5y ago
Not sure what you mean. It's certainly grammar that is causing the problem. And yes, it's a problem because some people think it's a problem—that's true of all problems by definition.
- iammisc 5y ago
  Most people don't think it's a problem at all.
kennywinker 5y ago
“Completely out of line with the culture” firefighter, for a moment, was an exclusively male job. Fireman made sense. As more women took on that job during the past 50-ish years, calling them “firemen” makes less and less sense. So to say it’s people out of step with culture isn’t quite right. It’s more like entrenched language in conflict with shifting culture. A non-gendered example of this would be something like xerox vs photocopier. There was a time when all photocopiers were xeroxes, but now odds are very low that your xerox machine is a xerox branded photocopier. There are still a few people out there who haven’t bothered to update their language, but largely that shift happened over the past 30 years - and because it’s not very political it was largely a silent shift. “Firemen” is, unfortunately, wrapped up in people’s beliefs about what gender roles SHOULD be - so it’s not going so quietly
- frenchyatwork 5y ago
  The problem here is not that "fireman" couldn't in theory be used to refer to both men and women; but that in English it doesn't, or at least not anymore. Historically, the masculine noun class has been used in gender-indeterminate places, but about 100 years ago that usage stared to disappear from the language, or at least become argot. The phrase "I am no man" in the Lord or the Rings is a play on this disappearance. In English, this disappearance happened alongside a similar change in gender roles; however, in a lot of European languages the social changes occurred, but the linguistic changes did not (and non-European languages often have quite different kinds of noun classes).
  - kennywinker 5y ago
    Interesting. I was aware of the shift... In university I would cringe every time a prof said "man" to refer to human or humanity, which seemed to me to indicate a very recent change. It's a surprising thing to hear it started as far back as Tolkien's time - I remembered that line as a Peter Jackson addition. It would be interesting to hear how women who speak other European languages that didn't make those changes feel about it - they seem so inherently linked to my ear.
- arp242 5y ago

ZeroGravitas 5y ago

I always liked this take on the "policeman, congressman" issue (back when that was the thing that people got upset about in newspaper columns): http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.html http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.html 25 years old, and probably the most striking thing from this distance is the implicit assumption that all the readers would believe in racism, but not sexism.

iammisc 5y ago
> 25 years old, and probably the most striking thing from this distance is the implicit assumption that all the readers would believe in racism, but not sexism. Sex and race are not two equivalent classes. There are material differences between the sexes. These are obvious differences in even my one year old noticed. On the other hand, it is unclear if there are any differences in ability by race, and it looks like if there are, they're mainly not material to success. But I mean, I do wonder what percentage of income white people in the south and southwest spend on sunblock and sunscreen. Seems like a lot. (this is a joke, for those wanting to downvote me)
- rovolo 5y ago
  > These are obvious differences in even my one year old noticed. My friend who worked in elementary schools (I think they were a substitute teacher, but maybe they were an assistant for after-school) would be asked "are you a boy or a girl?" in practically every new group they watched. What differences should the K-3 kids have picked up on to sex them? Why would it have been important to sex them?
- soundnote 5y ago
  > Sex and race are not two equivalent classes. There are material differences between the sexes. These are obvious differences in even my one year old noticed. On the other hand, it is unclear if there are any differences in ability by race, and it looks like if there are, they're mainly not material to success. There definitely are, and there probably are depending on what traits are in question. But the difference is still not at all of a similar sort. The crucial difference between men and women is one of two completely different mechanisms. Within each mechanism, there is variation of course, like the length of the... thing and other variables like that. Insofar as there are differences in race, they are much more like height or eye color: Same system, different historically separated populations just have different distributions along the variation of that trait. Asian people are generally shorter than white or black people, for example: This doesn't mean you won't find a short white or black man, for example, or a tall East Asian one. The Asian man being really tall is just less common. Insofar as these things exist, they are a matter of count in a pile of people, and a difference in degree. Men and women are truly a difference in kind, the same way goats and weasels have different digestive systems. It's not a matter of more or less of this or that between the two.

hodgesrm 5y ago

Gender in German is an incredible pain. There are rules for about 50% of the words, e.g., a word that ends in "ung" like Beleuchtung is always feminine. The other 50%? It's a guess. After a while I concluded it must be a defensive mechanism designed to detect and repel foreigners. As evidence I adduce the fact that some words change genders between regions. Well-known example: die Butter and der Butter depending on where you are from. [0] [0] https://de.wiktionary.org/wiki/Butter https://de.wiktionary.org/wiki/Butter

kgeist 5y ago
>After a while I concluded it must be a defensive mechanism designed to detect and repel foreigners. As evidence I adduce the fact that some words change genders between regions. Well-known example: die Butter and der Butter depending on where you are from. It's not uncommon for a noun to change their gender at some point in history. As far as I know, it's often analogical changes. For example, feminine noun X describes an item of a larger class Y, and it just happens that most items of class Y are masculine. So the noun X, being feminine, is an exception, which is "fixed", and it becomes masculine. An example from Russian language: most words denoting shoes and related items were masculine: boot, shoe, sock etc. Then there was the word for "slippers", feminine. I and my family still use the word in the feminine form, because the change is very recent. Today most speakers (especially younger ones) use the masculine form. It's expectable that a change can happen in some dialects, but not in others.
bmn__ 5y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27714868 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27714868

soundnote 5y ago

> Also in English we have gendered pronouns which has become a hot topic in the last couple of years. I wonder what people who speak languages without gendered pronouns think of the current kerfuffle. Upper class wokelets are being silly as usual. In part they're seeking identity, to belong. In another, they're terminally online and live in a world of words where speech defines the world. If you can make a sentence and replace one word with another of the same class, you should just treat them as equal because you grammatically can. Whether the real-world things the words point at are remotely similar enough is irrelevant, since to the woke, the real world isn't primary. You could go to forums about unscientific personality typologies and see the exact behaviors of the gender-nonconformists on display in a completely different medium, and before they escaped tumblr into the world at large. It's just people grabbing self-definitions to build an identity - a special one - in a way that's cheap and doesn't require the real work that living an actually interesting life or even reading widely. Why do you think there's stuff like genderqueer etc.? It's low-cost, you don't have to change anything about yourself, just make the claim. And it's high status, unlike being normal and heterosexual. If high status things are cheap to do, people will do them. > Of course in English we have a tiny bit of gendered nouns where we append "man" or "woman" to some job titles based on the gender of the person holding the title (policeman, congressman, etc). This has become problematic when we use the plural. This is a 'problem' in my native language as well. Otherwise, we're civilized and just call everyone 'it'.