2 ms·

I remember being shocked in the 90s when I heard people applying a grammatical term, gender, to people's social/sexual expression. What's next, I thought, call

I remember being shocked in the 90s when I heard people applying a grammatical term, gender, to people's social/sexual expression. What's next, I thought, call infectious people "dative?" Anyway, I got used to it because it's a useful distinction when applied to people. I'm pretty sure in a 20th century dictionary you'll find gender was a purely grammatical term. And it was an uncommon word in English because all of our nouns are not gendered like so many other languages.

ksaj 4y ago
And what to think of languages like Swedish that have Masculine and Neuter, but not Feminine, and the fact that some languages don't even agree on what is a Masculine word and what is a Feminine word?
- orwin 4y ago
  That linguistics and language evolution is really interesting. Old french/vulgar latin had a neuter gender, which pronoun sounded a lot like the male pronoun, and with nominative ending who were the same. Hence male pronouns are the default pronouns.