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I used Japanese, like the article did, as an example for this reason. Japanese has no grammatical gender like French. But Japanese is gendered. There are pat
by retrac 5y ago
I used Japanese, like the article did, as an example for this reason. Japanese has no grammatical gender like French. But Japanese is gendered. There are patterns in Japanese, where men and women use pronouns differently, and have slightly different patterns to which grammatical forms they use, and when. Women tend to use polite forms, in pronoun and noun choice as well as verb conjugation, more than men do. Small differences in sentence final particles, and so on. In practice the standard language becomes nearly gender-neutral in formal, polite contexts. Still, there's a real effect in Japanese, where men and women do speak and even write slightly differently. Male students of Japanese can even suffer a problem where they sound effeminate because they have modelled themselves on teachers who are mostly women.
I was just observing this general effect is probably true, to some degree, big or small, for most languages. It's probably a little more pronounced in Japanese than English. In neither case is it anywhere distinct enough to call it a separate dialect for men and women.
> Most languages have far more obvious grammatical distinctions.
Grammatical gender like French or Arabic is pretty unusual, really. It's common in the Indo-European and Semitic languages, which are prominent by number of speakers, but grammatical gender is fairly rare when surveying the world's language families as a whole. It's completely absent from many of them. The whole Sino-Tibetan language family (including modern Chinese), for example. They get along fine with a single third person pronoun (in speech) and no grammatical gender.
- emteycz 5y agoI don't see how is grammatical gender relevant to this. Czech has it, and both males and females speak it the same. Different suffixes are used to refer to yourself but nobody would think of that as "men/women language" as it's exactly what the others use when speaking about men/women.
- ggrrhh_ta 5y agoTurkish, an indoeuropean language, has no grammatical gender markers.
- cmrdporcupine 5y agoTurkish is not Indo-European
- ggrrhh_ta 5y agoOh, is Altaic, it's grammar and structure is so similar in many other regards to indoeuropean languages that I did not reliazed it wasn't. Thanks.
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- eatplayrove 5y agoIf you took any Indo-European language and created a new language completely contradicting it with respect to any aspect of the language, you'd get something pretty close to Turkish :-) I am really surprised you think Turkish is similar to any Indo-European language. Btw, the Altaic language family is also disputed. The most accepted theory is that Turkic languages are an isolated language family by themselves.
- ggrrhh_ta 5y agoI am sure I had learned (long in the past) that they were in different families; but my little exposure to Turkish led me to believe (having forgotten what I had learned) that they were related; why? because the conjugations and tense modalities evoked to me an analogy to those of romance languages, and the declination cases and flexible word order evoked to me those of Easter European languages; while at the same time dismissing the greatest difference: it's agglutinative character.
- vincentmarle 5y agoThat’s correct, grammar wise Turkish is closer to Japanese and Korean than to Indo-European languages, but there’s an incredible amount of French loanwords (partly because of Ataturk’s obsession with French).
- cmrdporcupine 5y agoInteresting fact is that very early Indo-European likely didn't have grammatical gender. The (extinct) Anatolian languages (Hittite, Luwian) split off before Indo-European really gelled, and they didn't have gender but instead a system of animate/inanimate.
- jhgb 5y ago> and they didn't have gender but instead a system of animate/inanimate But...that's gender, linguistically speaking.
- cmrdporcupine 5y agoYes, it's gender, technically -- not but not in the way other Indo-European languages practice it.
- ecpottinger 5y agoThis has shown up in the responses to my fan-fic. More than once I have been told I used suffixes wrong because I have someone of the wrong sex used -chan -kun to the other sex.
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- geraneum 5y agoIn Persian (an Indo-European language), not only is there no grammatical gender, but also there are no gender pronouns [1]. You can write text that is technically gender-neutral. [1] http://sites.la.utexas.edu/persian_online_resources/pronouns/ http://sites.la.utexas.edu/persian_online_resources/pronouns...
- brnt 5y agoSounds like cannot possibly write a nonneutral text!
- geraneum 5y agoIt’s still possible to explicitly mention the gender. For example say “that woman” or “the man”. The reader also might get some clues from the context, for example, saying “my dad said…” will reveal some clues about the gender of the subject. It’s optional.
- devilbunny 5y agoInterestingly, I heard a podcast or read a book not long ago (I'd guess John McWhorter, but don't quote me on that) that touched on this, and the author attributed this simplification from the Indo-European norm of heavy grammatical gender to the fact that both Persian and English achieved their modern forms largely as languages learned by adults - the Vikings mixing with Saxons, the various subjects of the Persian Empire - and thus they tended to simplify endings.
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