9 ms·

While e.g. Nüshu (a secret women's only writing system) is a rather extreme example, Japanese with its various first-person pronouns and gendered patterns to ve

• Metacelsus 5y ago
  >gendered patterns to verb conjugations Polish does this too.
• TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
  This seems to be conflating grammatical gender - which includes differences in pronouns, adjectives, sometimes verbs, and pronunciation, but is still based on relatively minor variations in a common vocabulary - with full dialects, which can have very distinct vocabularies and may include words with unique meanings. English is at the de-grammarised end of the spectrum. There are gendered clues in English, but they're (mostly) not baked into the grammar. The differences are more about specific idioms and expressions that one gender is more likely to use, and they're really a kind of variation on other subgroup slangs - like teen slang, other age-related indicators. Most languages have far more obvious grammatical distinctions. The Romance languages have obvious gender in the grammar, but it's... just there. It doesn't do much except to indicate that the subject or object is male or female. Beyond that, there are some rather random associations of gender to specific nouns. Fully distinct dialects/languages are incredibly rare and are often artificial and/or more likely to be created by a subculture than as a direct result of gender differences. Example: English has Polari, which was entertainer/street slang and often used in gay subcultures. It also has Cockney, Estuary, Northern, Scottish, Urban, and others - all differentiated by culture.
  • the_af 5y ago
    > Most languages have far more obvious grammatical distinctions. The Romance languages have obvious gender in the grammar, but it's... just there. It doesn't do much except to indicate that the subject or object is male or female. Beyond that, there are some rather random associations of gender to specific nouns. I can't speak for all Romance languages but my native Spanish: it's true that we have gendered nouns (most if not all of them, I think) but it has nothing to do with the speaker, so it's not a language for men or women. For example, a chair ("silla") is always female, regardless of whether it's me saying it (a male) or my mother. It's a bit like how ships in English are a "she" regardless of who's speaking, only more enforced and for all nouns.
    • okal 5y ago
      An interesting Romance counter-example is "Obrigado" vs "Obrigada" ("thank you", in Portuguese). I'm not even remotely fluent, but if I recall correctly, the gender is dependent on the speaker, not the person being addressed.
      • the_af 5y ago
        Oh, yes, but those aren't nouns. I didn't mean Spanish isn't gendered -- it obviously is -- but that gendered nouns aren't indicative of the gender of the speaker, so that particular observation was unrelated to the topic under discussion. Your example is indeed an example of gendered language depending on the speaker, and has similar examples in Spanish (e.g. "contento" / "contenta" for "happy").
      • codethief 5y ago
        Well, practically all adjectives in Spanish/Portuguese/French/Italian change depending on the grammatical gender of the noun they refer to. And, of course, if the noun in question is "I" (as in your case), then they reveal the (physical) gender of the speaker because usually grammatical gender of a person == physical gender of that person But compared to the differences in, e.g., Japanese that some people here are discussing, this seems rather minor.
      • 5y ago
• eesmith 5y ago
  Is Turing's Imitation Game - in its original formulation to identify which of players A and B is the woman and the man - so easily solved? I don't think so. It's clear that many factors contribute to one's choice of language. In the mid-1950s people studied the differences between the English spoken by the upper class ("U") and middle-class ("non-U") in the UK - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U_and_non-U_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U_and_non-U_English . In the US, a Black American may grow up with speaking African-American Vernacular English (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-American_Vernacular_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-American_Vernacular_En...), and code switch to speak a more general American dialect. My freshman year roommate spoke more "Southern" when on the phone to family than when talking to others in the dorm. The language of a scientific monograph is quite different than the language of an HN comment, and being able to write in that style suggests an academic training. So I'm not surprised that gender can also be a factor in word choice. Indeed, a friend of mine who reads romance novels claims a common difference between male and female authors is how they describe clothing. If you want to describe all of those as different languages ... I've long given up trying to understand the differences between 'dialect' and 'language' (much less 'sociolect', 'ethnolect', 'stylistic register', etc) so go right ahead. But I'm hesitant to believe that "Any significant text" predicts a specific author's gender "with considerable confidence." I know of several cases where people tried and failed to guess an author's gender. Robert Silverberg, for example, found "something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree's writing"; James Tiptree, Jr. was the male pseudonym of a female author. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Tiptree_Jr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Tiptree_Jr.) Searching Google Scholar, I find articles like https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2109/2109.13890.pdf https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2109/2109.13890.pdf saying: > However, other gaps need to be addressed as well, including that no method of classifying age or gender—both of which are aspects of author profiling—that also considers the genre or nature of the analyzed text has been widely endorsed. Beyond that, to the best of our knowledge, no research has involved surveying or comparing the different approaches used in author profiling. In fact, current knowledge about the task is largely based on small-scale experiments conducted to find a reliable classification method with a near-zero error rate. In order to use forensic authorship profiling as admissible evidence in courts, the proposed methods must have about 100% accuracy. The average accuracy of good proposed methods are ranging from 70-85% [5]–[9]. However, the proposed methods still suffer from low accuracy. That suggests that the "with considerable confidence" you refer to is on a population level, and not a per-person level. Rather like how, with considerable confidence, I can say that in general men are taller than women, even though many women are taller than many men.
• dudeinjapan 5y ago
  > Japanese with its various first-person pronouns and gendered patterns to verb conjugations is not that odd Japanese does have gendered first-person pronouns, though the textbook standard one "watashi" is neutral. In Japanese, pronouns in general (including fp) are used less than English; they are only used when there is ambiguity, names are often preferred to pronouns, and in casual speech it is even OK to refer to yourself by your name (like Jimmy from Seinfeld.) In the textbook, Japanese doesn't really have gendered patterns to verb conjugations. Verbs are rather conjugated based on level of formality, for example "itte-ru", "itte-imasu", "itte-orimasu" all mean "I am going" in ascending degree of politeness. There are also impolite/brash-sounding forms "iku-zo", "ikou-ze", "ike", etc. which tend to be said more by men (or teenage boys) but women can use them too, it's just not "lady-like". That said--it is fair to observe that in film for example samurai and geishas speak essentially two different sounding languages, more so than a knight versus a princess. Men are expected to be rugged and use "rugged" words; women are expected to be beautiful and use "beautiful" words. There are definitely words, speech, and tonal patterns which are more masculine and feminine, but in anime for example these differences are exaggerated far beyond real-world conversational norms.
  • kemayo 5y ago
    I always thought the pronouns were fascinating, just because of the level of intentionality implied in picking one. It's like if in English I deliberately chose to say "I, a tough guy, did X" (which I gather is the approximate equivalent of saying "ore wa X"...).
  • numpad0 5y ago
    An explanation that I find very fitting to Japanese is it’s a “topic prominent” language with topic-comment structure rather than being subject prominent like English is. The concept of topic explains frequent absence of explicit subjects better, I think.
  • tkgally 5y ago
    > ...in anime for example these differences are exaggerated far beyond real-world conversational norms. Yes, and not only in anime. The stereotyping of language by gender, occupation, social class, etc. is pervasive in Japanese popular culture. The linguist Satoshi Kinsui calls this practice yakuwarigo [1]. It also exists in translations into Japanese from English and other languages, with dialogue in novels being rendered into stereotyped forms, even though the original dialogue was not marked for gender and Japanese people often do not speak that way in real life, either. I worked as a Japanese-to-English translator for many years, and those gendered translations in the other direction always felt strange to me. I’ve discussed this issue with Japanese translators several times over the years. Most of them said that they were uncomfortable about using those stereotyped forms but that their publishers and, they presumed, the readers expected it. Times are changing, though. Just last month, the Asahi Shimbun ran a series of articles [2, 3, 4; paywalled and in Japanese] about changing attitudes toward gender stereotyping in translations into Japanese. In real language use, sociolinguistic differences often vary by the individual and the situation. I’ve known Japanese women who never—except maybe when being sarcastic—use the pronouns or sentence-ending forms that are typical of female characters in manga and anime. The faculty meetings at the university where I now teach are conducted in very formal Japanese, and I have never noticed anyone use an expression in those meetings that seemed typically masculine or feminine. Real-life professors don’t talk like professors in manga, either. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakuwarigo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakuwarigo [2] https://digital.asahi.com/articles/ASPCB6KD1PBTUPQJ009.html https://digital.asahi.com/articles/ASPCB6KD1PBTUPQJ009.html [3] https://digital.asahi.com/articles/DA3S15110092.html https://digital.asahi.com/articles/DA3S15110092.html [4] https://digital.asahi.com/articles/ASPCD3FPHPBPUPQJ014.html https://digital.asahi.com/articles/ASPCD3FPHPBPUPQJ014.html
• wodenokoto 5y ago
  There's a great, and almost impossible to translate, scene in the movie "Your name", where, after the female protagonist character finds herself in the body of the protagonist male characters, almost gets in trouble for using the wrong "I". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iowh6UxahKs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iowh6UxahKs
  • ncpa-cpl 5y ago
    I was going to mention this same example :)
• bruce343434 5y ago
  do you have a source/more info on your last paragraph?
  • fxtentacle 5y ago
    I do :) "We analyzed 700 million words, phrases, and topic instances collected from the Facebook messages of 75,000 volunteers, who also took standard personality tests, and found striking variations in language with personality, gender, and age." https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0073791 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
    • xioxox 5y ago
      Is it just me, or are most of the results in that paper rather obvious and not very useful in general, outside of social media posts. In Facebook posts, it's not surprising that men talk more about computer games and sport, and swear more. Women using more emotion words and men more object words, is again fairly obvious. If one took an academic text, a short story, a novel, a blog post, or some other more careful piece of writing, it is unclear whether this kind of classifier would work as well.
      • jrochkind1 5y ago
        > If one took an academic text, a short story, a novel, a blog post, or some other more careful piece of writing, it is unclear whether this kind of classifier would work as well. It should be a pretty easy test to do, for those with the trained classifier; I wonder why they haven't reported on doing it.
      • bruce343434 5y ago
        > Women using more emotion words and men more object words, is again fairly obvious. Is it? I think it's rather interesting. Though not really as much of a language dialect rather than a perspective shift, as if the men and women on average interpret the world differently.
    • yorwba 5y ago
• qsort 5y ago
  > Any significant text (just a few paragraphs) has enough clues to predict a speaker or writer's gender with considerable confidence. Do you have any examples of this? Not saying I don't believe you, but unless the text contains something very obvious (e.g. "my wife"), I often can't tell if the writer is a man or a woman. It's much easier to tell in Italian, French or Spanish, for example, all languages where the gender of the speaker is baked into most sentences.
  • jameshart 5y ago
    While you can certainly use statements like that to adjust your priors, be careful not to make absolute assumptions - in the US approximately 1% of people who have a wife are women.
    • CoastalCoder 5y ago
      Just to clarify to help avoid some awkward moments... In the U.S., the normalization of gay marriage has involved a lot of cultural strife over the past few decades. One may still encounter cliques in the U.S. that refuse to accept grammatical constructs such as "her wife" for various reasons.
    • namelessoracle 5y ago
      If your machine learning model had a indicator that could point to something with 99 percent accuracy, you would tell it to ignore that?
      • jameshart 5y ago
        Well, no. And that isn’t what I said, is it?
    • LudwigNagasena 5y ago
      I would say that an assumption with 99% accuracy is a pretty good one.
  • retrac 5y ago
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• throwaway472927 5y ago
  I imagine to some extent men and women choose different words because they express different ideas? That can still be a for societal reasons if you like but at a "level lower" than language. This kind of question reminds me of "if a lion could speak, we could not understand him"