4 ms·

Knowing the gender is necessary to produce grammatical sentences in many languages.

• rjh29 4y ago
  That would be pronouns, not gender, right?
  • nicky0 4y ago
    No becauase in some language the forms of words used to describe people vary depending on whether the person is male or female. It's not just a case of picking the right pronouns, it's the gender agreement of the other parts of speech too.
    • danShumway 4y ago
      Do you have an example? Most languages I've seen that do this seem to be deriving gendered word variants from the pronoun, at least as far as I can tell with my very limited experience. Spanish has a lot of word variants based on feminine/masculine/plural subjects, but it's not really based on gender (otherwise inanimate objects wouldn't have those variants); as far as I can tell with my limited Spanish experience they're based on word agreement in the sentence with the pronouns or at most with masculine/feminine presentation. Is there ever a scenario where, "el gata" would be correct in Spanish? "Gato" agrees with the "el" pronoun; it's not based on the gender identity of the noun independently of the pronoun, is it? Are there other languages that work differently? This also seems like a problem that doesn't really require knowledge of gender identity as much as "do you want us to use masculine/feminine variants of words when referring to you?" -- something that seems easy enough to guess based on the pronoun or (when loading up a language translation that needs more advanced logic) to just outright ask the user. I kind of hate the software trend towards "we need to derive everything we're doing from first principles"; I feel like a lot of these problems could be solved by saying, "when we encounter an edge case we'll ask what to do, rather than doing data collection up-front that will be irrelevant for the majority of users."
      • xigoi 4y ago
        I think you're confused. In Spanish and other languages, both pronouns and other words depend on grammatical gender. Saying that you can “guess based on the pronoun” doesn't make sense, because the pronoun depends on gender too. It's true that inanimate objects have kind of arbitrary genders, but for specific people, they're based on their actual gender.
        • danShumway 4y ago
          > because the pronoun depends on gender too. But you can ask the pronoun. If you know the pronoun, you know what variants of words to use, don't you? You don't need to know if the person is transgender or what their gender identity is, if they use `el`, you use masculine word variants to refer to them. I'm not sure what I'm missing here; the only reason why knowing the gender identity would matter is if gendered word variants are allowed to mismatch pronouns in the language. And even in that case, does the specific gender identity matter, or do we really only need to know whether someone wants to use masculine/feminine word variants when referring to them?
          • xigoi 4y ago
            Well, you could ask about the pronoun and use it to determine gender, but how is that different from asking for gender directly?
            • danShumway 4y ago
              My understanding is that it's reasonably common for a chunk of agender/nonbinary people to use traditional feminine/masculine pronouns. It just seems a bit more direct to ask how people want to be referred to; I would compare it to how typically in web forms we ask people if they go by Mrs/Ms/Mr/Dr/etc directly, rather than asking them if they have a PHD and are married. Especially if we're talking about gendered languages where there isn't strong support for nonbinary pronouns/variants. Someone telling us that they're agender/nonbinary doesn't actually help us much in that situation; we won't know from that information alone whether to use feminine or masculine variants.
  • tremon 4y ago
    Not just pronouns, but nouns and adjectives too, and in some languages verbs.
  • viraptor 4y ago
    Kinda, but also no. It depends on a language. For example in Polish you'll say "has done" as "zrobił" (he), "zrobiła" (she), "zrobiło" (baby, or it). You don't get to play fancy with pronouns there, because the verb itself is modified. (Also to make things fun, objects are gendered too, so when speaking you need to know that the fridge is female and a table is male)
  • kelseyfrog 4y ago
    The easy example in English(though obviously borrowed) is the difference between fiance and fiancée. Granted, this is a very domain-specific case, but points out that yes, gender can modify words in English other than pronouns and titles.
  • vehemenz 4y ago
    Technically yes, but for the vast majority of English speakers, pronouns supervene on gender.
• nmz 4y ago
  Which means gender should just be 3 choices, he, she, they. That's it. if a singular pronoun is used, its just changed to, "The person".