3 ms·

I don't think they ever were true synonyms. Eg, take the concept of grammatical gender. "Ventana" ("window" in Spanish) has a feminine grammatical gender in Sp

I don't think they ever were true synonyms. Eg, take the concept of grammatical gender. "Ventana" ("window" in Spanish) has a feminine grammatical gender in Spanish. I don't think it has ovaries, at least mine doesn't. When a form asks for gender, it's typically concerned with the grammatical sort. It wants to know whether to welcome me with "Bienvenido" or "Bienvenida", not anything having to do with my biology.

danwee 4y ago
In Spanish it's fine to say "Bienvenido" even to women. It's a generic greeting (used in the plural as well, as far as I know... unless you want to be fancy and say "Bienvenidas y bienvenidos", which is rather an idiotic trend).
- dale_glass 4y ago
  > In Spanish it's fine to say "Bienvenido" even to women. Not in singular as far as I know. Plurals traditionally prioritize men, so 20 women and 1 guy would be "ellos". > It's a generic greeting (used in the plural as well, as far as I know... unless you want to be fancy and say "Bienvenidas y bienvenidos", which is rather an idiotic trend). In plural, software could get away with defaulting to masculine. But really that sort of thing only gets you so far. In Russian gender goes damn near everywhere, and trying to be gender neutral gets awkward very fast. For instance an instant messenger displaying the notification "Bob is online" needs to know Bob's gender to do it correctly in Russian. One piece of software I've seen tried to get around it by transliterating the english word "online" in Russian letters. That's also rather awkward, and would be user unfriendly in many cases.
- SoftTalker 4y ago
  For now. "He" used to be OK in English as a gender-neutral prononun also.
- kgwgk 4y ago
  Have you ever witnessed a Spanish-speaker saying “bienvenido” to a woman?
fluoridation 4y ago
If anything, the word "género" has historically only ever been used in the grammatical sense, while the word "sexo" applies to living things, including humans. I would be very surprised to find references to the "género" of a person in any sources before the 20th century. It's not even that the words were synonyms; earlier speakers would have thought of referring to the "género" of a person as redundant and indistinguishable from the "sexo".

danwee 4y ago

In Spanish it's fine to say "Bienvenido" even to women. It's a generic greeting (used in the plural as well, as far as I know... unless you want to be fancy and say "Bienvenidas y bienvenidos", which is rather an idiotic trend).

dale_glass 4y ago
> In Spanish it's fine to say "Bienvenido" even to women. Not in singular as far as I know. Plurals traditionally prioritize men, so 20 women and 1 guy would be "ellos". > It's a generic greeting (used in the plural as well, as far as I know... unless you want to be fancy and say "Bienvenidas y bienvenidos", which is rather an idiotic trend). In plural, software could get away with defaulting to masculine. But really that sort of thing only gets you so far. In Russian gender goes damn near everywhere, and trying to be gender neutral gets awkward very fast. For instance an instant messenger displaying the notification "Bob is online" needs to know Bob's gender to do it correctly in Russian. One piece of software I've seen tried to get around it by transliterating the english word "online" in Russian letters. That's also rather awkward, and would be user unfriendly in many cases.
SoftTalker 4y ago
For now. "He" used to be OK in English as a gender-neutral prononun also.
kgwgk 4y ago
Have you ever witnessed a Spanish-speaker saying “bienvenido” to a woman?

fluoridation 4y ago

If anything, the word "género" has historically only ever been used in the grammatical sense, while the word "sexo" applies to living things, including humans. I would be very surprised to find references to the "género" of a person in any sources before the 20th century. It's not even that the words were synonyms; earlier speakers would have thought of referring to the "género" of a person as redundant and indistinguishable from the "sexo".