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This brings up a slightly tangential thought I occasionally have. Is there as much of a gender "confusion" (for lack of a better word) in parts of the world tha

This brings up a slightly tangential thought I occasionally have. Is there as much of a gender "confusion" (for lack of a better word) in parts of the world that use languages that have gendered nouns? Over the past 40 years at least it seems that in the USA all of these new labels and identifiers have evolved for people who perceived their gender as not "masculine" or "feminine" but are something different altogether. I am curious if the language of the culture has anything to do with this, since English doesn't use gendered nouns so maybe we have less deeply entrenched ideas about gender and what is masculine or what is feminine and are more likely to explore that space.

2muchcoffeeman 5y ago
I’m really struggling to find the interview on YouTube. I don’t remember the interviewees name. It’s was a Chinese activist or historian. And she was basically saying that many Asian societies had queer people long before the westerners came. And while it wasn’t really out in the open as such, everyone lived how they liked and it was ok. The problems started when the westerners came and started having to label everything. I’m not going to try and mangle the reasons she gave why labels caused problems.
AutumnCurtain 5y ago
This would be an interesting exploration of a sort of Sapir-Whorf type question.
- Tagbert 5y ago
  Why is Sapir-Whorf so appealing? No one has been able to show more than a trivial effect on cognition from the language influences that that paper was promoting. Human thought is not rigidly channeled by vocabulary in the way that they described.
  - AutumnCurtain 5y ago
    Appealing in what way? A "strong" Sapir-Whorf is rejected completely by mainstream linguists, to my knowledge.
  - slibhb 5y ago
    It's appealing because it seems to lots of people, though not everyone, that we think in words. (I strongly disagree with Sapir-Whorf)
    - arp242 5y ago
      Years ago I had a conversation with my brother, when his son was a few months old. At some point I mentioned something along the lines of "he [the infant] thinks such-and-such", and he countered with "he doesn't think, he doesn't have any language". It's unlikely that this statement was informed on any sort of linguistic basis, as he's not the kind of person who would read such things (he's more of the artsy type, not the "hacker" type), it was just intuitive to him. I think it is for many people, including me, but the human sense of "intuition" on these things is not always equally accurate. This is kind of similar to how many people have an intuitive sense of dualism, that the mind and body are two separate things. This concept is highly unlikely, but for almost everyone – myself included – it's very natural, hence the gazillion stories about people swapping bodies and whatnot.
alexfrydl 5y ago
Old English has the same gender system as German. The reason English doesn't have gendered nouns now isn't because we are so progressive, but because language tends to lose all its excess features as it gets spoken and a LOT of people speak English. Basically, people can't be bothered to do grammar properly so eventually it just goes away (see: “whom”). Also, English is not the language of gender progressives. Many cultures had different conceptions of gender, including additional gender categories or even a total lack of concern for categorization. All of this was stamped out by English colonizers, who had extremely rigid ideas about gender (that they apparently still haven't gotten over in 2021 tbh).
- animal_spirits 5y ago
  I'm saying I think it might be the other way around. I'm thinking that maybe _because_ English lost it's gender system (due to the reasons you listed above) is why we see this "gender progressiveness" in our society. But I can only speak for the USA. I don't know if this same kind of gender progressiveness exists in other societies
- School-Cotton 5y ago
  > but because language tends to lose all its excess features as it gets spoken and a LOT of people speak English. Citation needed - this sounds like pop linguistics without a scientific basis, to be honest. English has plenty of “features”; what it lacks in morphology it makes up for in very complicated syntax. And it lost those morphological features well before the British colonial period, so it’s not really true that more people spoke it than, say, the Slavic languages which haven’t lost them.
- macdice 5y ago
  Edited: I guessed wrong, see Tagbert's answer. It was Norse contact (erm, the ones in the north, not the Normans who were French-speaking ethnic Norse people in the south). I thought it probably had more to do with the influence of Norman French. The Germanic gender and declension system couldn't survive the influx of French lexicon, as the two languages with completely incompatible grammar and genders coexisted and eventually merged into a new frankenlanguage. There was a recent article I can't locate right now claiming that for some period of time, English scribes writing late middle English (?) used to add an extra 'e' (and maybe more endings) to various words following old grammatical rules that involve knowing the gender and case, but began to forget the rules and eventually it decayed into randomly adding 'e' to sound smart, which is the basis of modern joke forms like 'ye olde shoppe'. As an English speaker it's interesting to compare with some of our closest cousins that have also lost a grammatical gender or two: I don't know too much about Dutch, but as far as I can tell they went from the 3-gender German system to the 2-gender common/neuter system (like Scandinavia, yellow in the diagram) in the last few hundreds years, but their language is still full of frozen phases from the 3-gender system. I wonder, can a modern Dutch speaker actually create new phases using the words 'ten', 'ter' (= German zum, zur, "to the"), 'des', 'der' and maybe more? You'd have to know if a common gender noun was masculine or feminine, but I guess, unless you also know German, you won't be able to do it. I believe the Afrikaans language of South Africa, a dialect of Dutch, is down to just one gender. IIUC they had to give up using Dutch school books some time in the past century, because (vast over simplification, I'm sure) they couldn't remember if nouns were common or neuter. I wonder if they also have frozen phrases that reflect the 2-gender, and perhaps even 3-gender grammar of the ancestral language. The Scandinavians have a few pockets of dialects that still use 3 genders. I'm not sure how they maintain that, given that, as far as I know, the prestige forms and most literature are down to 2! AFAIK the last people to speak a cousin language with more than one gender in the British Isles were the Norn speakers, who maintained a 3-gendered Norse dialect up until the mid 19th century.
rvense 5y ago
I am a fairly militant, pronouns-in-my-bio (he/him, cishet) post-colonial feminazi and I think so-called politically correct language is generally a good thing. But I also have a degree in linguistics, and I have to say I don't think gendered grammatical categories (that is distinctions in pronouns, noun classes, verbal conjugations, etc. that align with cultural concepts of binary gender) have any effect on gender relations in a culture at all. The (Classical) Arabic language is fairly unique in the Muslim world in expressing gender grammatically in several ways. For instance, in addition to a he/she distinction, there are separate second-person pronouns ("you") for use when addressing men and women, as well as matching, gendered forms of the verb. That is, you can't speak to someone without encoding their gender grammatically, sometimes even several times in the sentence. Compare this to Turkish and Persian, where gender is not expressed at all except for some words. There are separate words for man and woman, and male and female family relations but that's about it. There's one third person pronoun, so you can write love poems that are completely gender-ambiguous (indeed, much classic Persian poetry can be read as being either about love of another person or about devotion to God). As far as I understand, Turkish even has many names that are gender-neutral. Bahasa Indonesian and its related languages are also free from grammaticalized gender. And while there are many differences between all aspects of society in the Islamic world, including gender relations, if gendered language was an important factor, I would expect them to be much more aligned with linguistic boundaries, and I have never seen even the tiniest shred of evidence for that. Bahasa Indonesian is quite interesting, by the way, in that it and languages of that family (that Austronesian languages) have interesting ways of encoding social information grammatically. You might have more than one first person pronoun ("I") that are appropriate in different contexts, and the relative social status between the speaker, the addressee, and the subject are encoded in various ways. I can only assume that Indonesian letters to the editor about the lack of respect that young people have for their elders are full of just-so linguistic argumentation, and that the inevitable clashes between generations have elements of linguistic reform. But at least when trans people gain recognition there, they won't have to argue about pronouns.
tsimionescu 5y ago
While I'd also be curious of the same, I'd like to also point out that the relationship between grammatical gender and biological sex is often strenuous, even in languages where these exist and are nominally tied. For example, in Romanian (a Romance language), the scientific words for 'penis' and 'vagina' are both neuter (which in Romanian means that they use masculine form for the singular, and feminine form for the plural). Conversely, the vulgar words for these are both feminine. The word for 'breast/breasts' is masculine. Basically only words that specifically refer to people and mammals&birds are guaranteed to have a meaningful relationship between grammatical gender and male/female sex. Even here it is not entirely guaranteed, as the words for 'child' and 'baby' are both masculine, even though they are used for both male and female (or intersex) babies and children - though there are of course specific words for 'boy' and 'girl' and those do have the expected gender. On the other hand, what is clear is that gendered languages with two genders have a huge problem with the idea of gender-neutral language, as it is simply impossible to refer to someone without implying a gender. For example, if I had a non-binary colleague and I wanted to say that they are smart, I have to choose between calling them 'deștept' (masculine) or 'deșteaptă' (feminine) - there is simply no other form of the word to use. Even if I were to artificially introduce a plural like with 'they/them' in English, I would have to choose between 'deștepți' (masculine) or 'deștepte' (feminine) - there is no getting away from this.
- UnpossibleJim 5y ago
  This comes into the forced language changes like "LatinX". On paper, changes like this are fine, but in use they only wok on paper. In use they still have to be identified as "Soy un LatinX" or "Soy una LatinX" (sorry if my Spanish is a little rusty), but the definitive article is still male or female. While in your example above, Americans (as I am) seem eager to change individual words in a language and culture to bend it to our will and white wash it (and no, I'm not on board with this. Deleting a cultural language won't fix a problem of oppression, which are not limited to cultures with gendered languages), it still does not remove the "gendered" aspects of the language in many cases.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
frenchyatwork 5y ago
I doubt it, except perhaps as some sort of re-analysis. See "The Awful German Language" (https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/texts/twain.german.html https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/texts/twain.german.html) starting from "To continue with the German genders:"
soundnote 5y ago
The language being gendered doesn't really matter: Wokeness is primarily a cultural fashion of American baizuo, and as such woke ideas are prevalent in places where people try to fashion themselves as baizuo. Even inside America, it's the domain of terminally online upper-class whites and little else. A far more fundamental correlation than the genderedness of language is, I think, abstraction. The classic baizuo type is terminally online, and sees words as defining 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. They live in the world of words. Most people in the world, of course, inhabit a precisely opposite situation: Physical reality is primary, and words are first and foremost pointers to things in that physical world. To people more bound in reality, woke fashions are by and large absurd. You can see it within the States too.
kgeist 5y ago
In Russian, gender confusion is mostly about professions (the rest of the gender system makes no sense, like a car is "she" but the plane is "he" -- so no one bothers with it). For example, the word for "doctor" is, well, "doktor". But the word is masculine. There's a feminine derivation, "doctorsha" - "female doctor" -- but it sounds somewhat condenscending to me, like you doubt her competence. "Oh this doktorsha prescribed me wrong pills again". So the neutral, respectful way to refer to a female doctor is to refer to her using the "neutral" masculine form "doktor". And it doesn't sound odd to me at all. But here's where the fun starts: adjectives need to agree in gender with their noun. And the correct grammar is "good (masc.) doctor (masc)". However, there's a recent trend to have it like "good (fem.) doctor (masc)". I.e. the grammar is completely bonkers but somehow it sounds acceptable to my ear.
- mnl 5y ago
  In Spain's Spanish we ended up with "new" feminine forms for professionals. Now it's commonplace but some of them sounded pretty strange back then. For instance you talked about female doctors using "la médico". It's perfectly natural to change that to "la médica", yet you referred to the guard as "el/la guardia" and we still do, we don't talk about a masculine "el guardio". Here's the funny thing: we had/have "juez" for judge, and albeit is was ordinarily masculine it's not an obvious masculine form according to phonological conventions, so "el/la juez" was common and sounded very right. Then female judges started to prefer the new form "jueza" that sounded awful (it still does), but we ended up adopting it because it's their prerogative anyway, who can argue about that? It's interesting to compare this with the deprecation in English of the term actress. Well, in Spanish the non-sexist attitude is to preserve the feminine forms (actriz for actress) and to come up with new explicit ones, exactly the opposite that is. So nope, there isn't a universal sociolinguistics that you can extract from the use of contemporary English and I don't understand how come anybody might expect such a thing.
  - kgeist 5y ago
    >It's interesting to compare this with the deprecation in English of the term actress. Well, in Spanish the non-sexist attitude is to preserve the feminine forms (actriz for actress) and to come up with new explicit ones, exactly the opposite that is. So nope, there isn't a universal sociolinguistics that you can extract from the use of contemporary English and I don't understand how come anybody might expect such a thing. Exactly. Now that I think about it more, it's not so black-and-white in Russian. As I said above, the female form of "doctor" doesn't sound acceptable/neutral, but the female form of "football player" sounds completely neutral. So go figure.
filiphorvat 5y ago
>Is there as much of a gender "confusion" (for lack of a better word) in parts of the world that use languages that have gendered nouns? As someone who speaks a Slavic language with masculine, feminine and neuter genders (Croatian), I've never heard of anyone identifying as non-binary in my language. It'd be extremely difficult because all adjectives and verbs in some tenses change based on the gender of the person in question. Singular they wouldn't work because it's already used to formally refer to someone (similar to German Sie). You'd have to rethink half of the language to not gender someone, which no one is going to do for such a niche problem. One thing I see Anglophones do when talking about other languages is confuse neuter gender for gender neutral, which equates to calling someone an "it". >...English doesn't use gendered nouns so maybe we have less deeply entrenched ideas about gender and what is masculine or what is feminine... That's another thing Anglophones get wrong. At least in my language, when not talking about people, 99% of the time the gender is determined by the ending (suffix?) of the word it's referring to, not some mystical gender role we imbue that object with. When using the word human, the rest of the sentence refers to them as male, whereas if you're using the word person, it'd be female even if you're using them to talk about the same guy. One other thing is, when referring to a mixed group of people, you use a masculine form of plural, same as "latinos". It REALLY doesn't matter and it only bothers people who don't speak gendered languages.
- ravishi 5y ago
  That resonates a lot with my observations as a native brazilian portuguese speaker. The gender of a thing has to do with how the word ends (o for male, a for female, e and r are a bit more tricky). Yet we have imported the whole gender neutral language agenda. I find it interesting, because the changes to the language would be way more drastic.
- graeme 5y ago
  > It REALLY doesn't matter and it only bothers people who don't speak gendered languages. May depend on place and culture. I recall my French teacher in 4th grade got snide about this while explaining that even a single man in a group will turn the group masculine. She was francophone. This certainly bothers anglos much much more though.

2muchcoffeeman 5y ago

I’m really struggling to find the interview on YouTube. I don’t remember the interviewees name. It’s was a Chinese activist or historian. And she was basically saying that many Asian societies had queer people long before the westerners came. And while it wasn’t really out in the open as such, everyone lived how they liked and it was ok. The problems started when the westerners came and started having to label everything. I’m not going to try and mangle the reasons she gave why labels caused problems.

AutumnCurtain 5y ago

This would be an interesting exploration of a sort of Sapir-Whorf type question.

Tagbert 5y ago
Why is Sapir-Whorf so appealing? No one has been able to show more than a trivial effect on cognition from the language influences that that paper was promoting. Human thought is not rigidly channeled by vocabulary in the way that they described.
- AutumnCurtain 5y ago
  Appealing in what way? A "strong" Sapir-Whorf is rejected completely by mainstream linguists, to my knowledge.
- slibhb 5y ago
  It's appealing because it seems to lots of people, though not everyone, that we think in words. (I strongly disagree with Sapir-Whorf)
  - arp242 5y ago
    Years ago I had a conversation with my brother, when his son was a few months old. At some point I mentioned something along the lines of "he [the infant] thinks such-and-such", and he countered with "he doesn't think, he doesn't have any language". It's unlikely that this statement was informed on any sort of linguistic basis, as he's not the kind of person who would read such things (he's more of the artsy type, not the "hacker" type), it was just intuitive to him. I think it is for many people, including me, but the human sense of "intuition" on these things is not always equally accurate. This is kind of similar to how many people have an intuitive sense of dualism, that the mind and body are two separate things. This concept is highly unlikely, but for almost everyone – myself included – it's very natural, hence the gazillion stories about people swapping bodies and whatnot.

alexfrydl 5y ago

Old English has the same gender system as German. The reason English doesn't have gendered nouns now isn't because we are so progressive, but because language tends to lose all its excess features as it gets spoken and a LOT of people speak English. Basically, people can't be bothered to do grammar properly so eventually it just goes away (see: “whom”). Also, English is not the language of gender progressives. Many cultures had different conceptions of gender, including additional gender categories or even a total lack of concern for categorization. All of this was stamped out by English colonizers, who had extremely rigid ideas about gender (that they apparently still haven't gotten over in 2021 tbh).

animal_spirits 5y ago
I'm saying I think it might be the other way around. I'm thinking that maybe _because_ English lost it's gender system (due to the reasons you listed above) is why we see this "gender progressiveness" in our society. But I can only speak for the USA. I don't know if this same kind of gender progressiveness exists in other societies
School-Cotton 5y ago
> but because language tends to lose all its excess features as it gets spoken and a LOT of people speak English. Citation needed - this sounds like pop linguistics without a scientific basis, to be honest. English has plenty of “features”; what it lacks in morphology it makes up for in very complicated syntax. And it lost those morphological features well before the British colonial period, so it’s not really true that more people spoke it than, say, the Slavic languages which haven’t lost them.
macdice 5y ago
Edited: I guessed wrong, see Tagbert's answer. It was Norse contact (erm, the ones in the north, not the Normans who were French-speaking ethnic Norse people in the south). I thought it probably had more to do with the influence of Norman French. The Germanic gender and declension system couldn't survive the influx of French lexicon, as the two languages with completely incompatible grammar and genders coexisted and eventually merged into a new frankenlanguage. There was a recent article I can't locate right now claiming that for some period of time, English scribes writing late middle English (?) used to add an extra 'e' (and maybe more endings) to various words following old grammatical rules that involve knowing the gender and case, but began to forget the rules and eventually it decayed into randomly adding 'e' to sound smart, which is the basis of modern joke forms like 'ye olde shoppe'. As an English speaker it's interesting to compare with some of our closest cousins that have also lost a grammatical gender or two: I don't know too much about Dutch, but as far as I can tell they went from the 3-gender German system to the 2-gender common/neuter system (like Scandinavia, yellow in the diagram) in the last few hundreds years, but their language is still full of frozen phases from the 3-gender system. I wonder, can a modern Dutch speaker actually create new phases using the words 'ten', 'ter' (= German zum, zur, "to the"), 'des', 'der' and maybe more? You'd have to know if a common gender noun was masculine or feminine, but I guess, unless you also know German, you won't be able to do it. I believe the Afrikaans language of South Africa, a dialect of Dutch, is down to just one gender. IIUC they had to give up using Dutch school books some time in the past century, because (vast over simplification, I'm sure) they couldn't remember if nouns were common or neuter. I wonder if they also have frozen phrases that reflect the 2-gender, and perhaps even 3-gender grammar of the ancestral language. The Scandinavians have a few pockets of dialects that still use 3 genders. I'm not sure how they maintain that, given that, as far as I know, the prestige forms and most literature are down to 2! AFAIK the last people to speak a cousin language with more than one gender in the British Isles were the Norn speakers, who maintained a 3-gendered Norse dialect up until the mid 19th century.

rvense 5y ago

I am a fairly militant, pronouns-in-my-bio (he/him, cishet) post-colonial feminazi and I think so-called politically correct language is generally a good thing. But I also have a degree in linguistics, and I have to say I don't think gendered grammatical categories (that is distinctions in pronouns, noun classes, verbal conjugations, etc. that align with cultural concepts of binary gender) have any effect on gender relations in a culture at all. The (Classical) Arabic language is fairly unique in the Muslim world in expressing gender grammatically in several ways. For instance, in addition to a he/she distinction, there are separate second-person pronouns ("you") for use when addressing men and women, as well as matching, gendered forms of the verb. That is, you can't speak to someone without encoding their gender grammatically, sometimes even several times in the sentence. Compare this to Turkish and Persian, where gender is not expressed at all except for some words. There are separate words for man and woman, and male and female family relations but that's about it. There's one third person pronoun, so you can write love poems that are completely gender-ambiguous (indeed, much classic Persian poetry can be read as being either about love of another person or about devotion to God). As far as I understand, Turkish even has many names that are gender-neutral. Bahasa Indonesian and its related languages are also free from grammaticalized gender. And while there are many differences between all aspects of society in the Islamic world, including gender relations, if gendered language was an important factor, I would expect them to be much more aligned with linguistic boundaries, and I have never seen even the tiniest shred of evidence for that. Bahasa Indonesian is quite interesting, by the way, in that it and languages of that family (that Austronesian languages) have interesting ways of encoding social information grammatically. You might have more than one first person pronoun ("I") that are appropriate in different contexts, and the relative social status between the speaker, the addressee, and the subject are encoded in various ways. I can only assume that Indonesian letters to the editor about the lack of respect that young people have for their elders are full of just-so linguistic argumentation, and that the inevitable clashes between generations have elements of linguistic reform. But at least when trans people gain recognition there, they won't have to argue about pronouns.

tsimionescu 5y ago

While I'd also be curious of the same, I'd like to also point out that the relationship between grammatical gender and biological sex is often strenuous, even in languages where these exist and are nominally tied. For example, in Romanian (a Romance language), the scientific words for 'penis' and 'vagina' are both neuter (which in Romanian means that they use masculine form for the singular, and feminine form for the plural). Conversely, the vulgar words for these are both feminine. The word for 'breast/breasts' is masculine. Basically only words that specifically refer to people and mammals&birds are guaranteed to have a meaningful relationship between grammatical gender and male/female sex. Even here it is not entirely guaranteed, as the words for 'child' and 'baby' are both masculine, even though they are used for both male and female (or intersex) babies and children - though there are of course specific words for 'boy' and 'girl' and those do have the expected gender. On the other hand, what is clear is that gendered languages with two genders have a huge problem with the idea of gender-neutral language, as it is simply impossible to refer to someone without implying a gender. For example, if I had a non-binary colleague and I wanted to say that they are smart, I have to choose between calling them 'deștept' (masculine) or 'deșteaptă' (feminine) - there is simply no other form of the word to use. Even if I were to artificially introduce a plural like with 'they/them' in English, I would have to choose between 'deștepți' (masculine) or 'deștepte' (feminine) - there is no getting away from this.

UnpossibleJim 5y ago
This comes into the forced language changes like "LatinX". On paper, changes like this are fine, but in use they only wok on paper. In use they still have to be identified as "Soy un LatinX" or "Soy una LatinX" (sorry if my Spanish is a little rusty), but the definitive article is still male or female. While in your example above, Americans (as I am) seem eager to change individual words in a language and culture to bend it to our will and white wash it (and no, I'm not on board with this. Deleting a cultural language won't fix a problem of oppression, which are not limited to cultures with gendered languages), it still does not remove the "gendered" aspects of the language in many cases.
- dragonwriter 5y ago

frenchyatwork 5y ago

I doubt it, except perhaps as some sort of re-analysis. See "The Awful German Language" (https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/texts/twain.german.html https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/texts/twain.german.html) starting from "To continue with the German genders:"

soundnote 5y ago

The language being gendered doesn't really matter: Wokeness is primarily a cultural fashion of American baizuo, and as such woke ideas are prevalent in places where people try to fashion themselves as baizuo. Even inside America, it's the domain of terminally online upper-class whites and little else. A far more fundamental correlation than the genderedness of language is, I think, abstraction. The classic baizuo type is terminally online, and sees words as defining 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. They live in the world of words. Most people in the world, of course, inhabit a precisely opposite situation: Physical reality is primary, and words are first and foremost pointers to things in that physical world. To people more bound in reality, woke fashions are by and large absurd. You can see it within the States too.

kgeist 5y ago

In Russian, gender confusion is mostly about professions (the rest of the gender system makes no sense, like a car is "she" but the plane is "he" -- so no one bothers with it). For example, the word for "doctor" is, well, "doktor". But the word is masculine. There's a feminine derivation, "doctorsha" - "female doctor" -- but it sounds somewhat condenscending to me, like you doubt her competence. "Oh this doktorsha prescribed me wrong pills again". So the neutral, respectful way to refer to a female doctor is to refer to her using the "neutral" masculine form "doktor". And it doesn't sound odd to me at all. But here's where the fun starts: adjectives need to agree in gender with their noun. And the correct grammar is "good (masc.) doctor (masc)". However, there's a recent trend to have it like "good (fem.) doctor (masc)". I.e. the grammar is completely bonkers but somehow it sounds acceptable to my ear.

mnl 5y ago
In Spain's Spanish we ended up with "new" feminine forms for professionals. Now it's commonplace but some of them sounded pretty strange back then. For instance you talked about female doctors using "la médico". It's perfectly natural to change that to "la médica", yet you referred to the guard as "el/la guardia" and we still do, we don't talk about a masculine "el guardio". Here's the funny thing: we had/have "juez" for judge, and albeit is was ordinarily masculine it's not an obvious masculine form according to phonological conventions, so "el/la juez" was common and sounded very right. Then female judges started to prefer the new form "jueza" that sounded awful (it still does), but we ended up adopting it because it's their prerogative anyway, who can argue about that? It's interesting to compare this with the deprecation in English of the term actress. Well, in Spanish the non-sexist attitude is to preserve the feminine forms (actriz for actress) and to come up with new explicit ones, exactly the opposite that is. So nope, there isn't a universal sociolinguistics that you can extract from the use of contemporary English and I don't understand how come anybody might expect such a thing.
- kgeist 5y ago
  >It's interesting to compare this with the deprecation in English of the term actress. Well, in Spanish the non-sexist attitude is to preserve the feminine forms (actriz for actress) and to come up with new explicit ones, exactly the opposite that is. So nope, there isn't a universal sociolinguistics that you can extract from the use of contemporary English and I don't understand how come anybody might expect such a thing. Exactly. Now that I think about it more, it's not so black-and-white in Russian. As I said above, the female form of "doctor" doesn't sound acceptable/neutral, but the female form of "football player" sounds completely neutral. So go figure.

filiphorvat 5y ago

>Is there as much of a gender "confusion" (for lack of a better word) in parts of the world that use languages that have gendered nouns? As someone who speaks a Slavic language with masculine, feminine and neuter genders (Croatian), I've never heard of anyone identifying as non-binary in my language. It'd be extremely difficult because all adjectives and verbs in some tenses change based on the gender of the person in question. Singular they wouldn't work because it's already used to formally refer to someone (similar to German Sie). You'd have to rethink half of the language to not gender someone, which no one is going to do for such a niche problem. One thing I see Anglophones do when talking about other languages is confuse neuter gender for gender neutral, which equates to calling someone an "it". >...English doesn't use gendered nouns so maybe we have less deeply entrenched ideas about gender and what is masculine or what is feminine... That's another thing Anglophones get wrong. At least in my language, when not talking about people, 99% of the time the gender is determined by the ending (suffix?) of the word it's referring to, not some mystical gender role we imbue that object with. When using the word human, the rest of the sentence refers to them as male, whereas if you're using the word person, it'd be female even if you're using them to talk about the same guy. One other thing is, when referring to a mixed group of people, you use a masculine form of plural, same as "latinos". It REALLY doesn't matter and it only bothers people who don't speak gendered languages.

ravishi 5y ago
That resonates a lot with my observations as a native brazilian portuguese speaker. The gender of a thing has to do with how the word ends (o for male, a for female, e and r are a bit more tricky). Yet we have imported the whole gender neutral language agenda. I find it interesting, because the changes to the language would be way more drastic.
graeme 5y ago
> It REALLY doesn't matter and it only bothers people who don't speak gendered languages. May depend on place and culture. I recall my French teacher in 4th grade got snide about this while explaining that even a single man in a group will turn the group masculine. She was francophone. This certainly bothers anglos much much more though.