4 ms·
I don't disagree with you, but I think it's worth pointing out that there is a pragmatic benefit to gendered pronouns. You can think of pronouns as sort of lik
by munificent 5y ago
I don't disagree with you, but I think it's worth pointing out that there is a pragmatic benefit to gendered pronouns.
You can think of pronouns as sort of like `$?` in bash or `_` in Python's interactive shell. They give you a short way to refer to a previously mentioned noun. When you have more than one of these "special variables", you can use them more often as long as they conveniently get uniformly distributed across the previously mentioned nouns.
So, in English, you can say:
"Blaine Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenbergerdorff Sr. gave Rhoshandiatellyneshiaunneveshenk Koyaanisquatsiuth Williams a sweater for Christmas. She liked his gift."
The second sentence can use two pronouns because they happen to be unambiguous. With only a single pronoun, that sentence ends up like:
"Rhoshandiatellyneshiaunneveshenk liked Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenbergerdorff's gift."
(This is obviously an extreme example for comedic effect.)
This is also why Romance languages have noun gender for inanimate objects where actual biological gender isn't meaningful. It's not about genitals, it's about scattering a few pronouns uniformly across the noun space.
Of course, one might rightly argue that gender is not a good mechanism to use for your pronoun distribution. We could do something like shells do where we assign pronouns based on recency of the mentioned noun. Or some other system.
But my point is that gendered pronouns aren't completely bananas. They serve a pragmatic function.
- billforsternz 5y agoInteresting rationalisation for gendered inanimate nouns in romance languages, thanks. Also used in many/most other Germanic (and other language families?) right? Is your explanation a personal inspiration or established theory? For it to make sense they would need to (for example) refer to (say) a table as 'he' later in a sentence. Do they do that?
- uj8efdkjfdshf 5y agoIMO grammatical gender in Indo European languages (of which the Germanic and Romance language families are a part of) reflect how nouns and their references (pronouns, adjectives etc) are semantically linked by modifying the word endings of the latter to better reflect those of the original noun - I like to think of it as the equivalent of type suffixes in assembly language.
- munificent 5y agoDefinitely not a personal inspiration, but I can't recall where I first heard the idea. > For it to make sense they would need to (for example) refer to (say) a table as 'he' later in a sentence. Do they do that? I don't speak any Romance languages beyond high school Spanish, but I assume that's the case.
- frutiger 5y ago> So, in English, you can say: "Blaine Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenbergerdorff Sr. gave Rhoshandiatellyneshiaunneveshenk Koyaanisquatsiuth Williams a sweater for Christmas. She liked his gift." Actually in that example, you still don’t need gendered pronouns to resolve ambiguity: “they enjoyed the gift”.