3 ms·

In software it's useful in internationalization. In languages like Spanish or Russian you have to know the gender of the person or thing you're talking about.

In software it's useful in internationalization. In languages like Spanish or Russian you have to know the gender of the person or thing you're talking about. This extends to non-living things, in many languages, you can't just do "$THING has been deleted". How you say "deleted" changes depending on the grammatical gender of the thing. "El objeto ha sido eliminado", "La entrada ha sido eliminada".

jeroenhd 4y ago
Is it useful, though? Suppose someone enters "nonbinary". What is your Russian i18n team going to do? Even in gendered language, you need to come up with some kind of "other" category, and you'll likely need to rewrite your sentences to make it work if you can make it work at all.
- dale_glass 4y ago
  > Is it useful, though? Suppose someone enters "nonbinary". What is your Russian i18n team going to do? No clue. But at least you have the data to use whenever you figure out what to do with it, and I imagine somebody tackled that question already, since this is not something that showed up yesterday. In some languages like English you can go with "they" or such, in others there aren't good options that would be widely recognized. But that's just how i18n goes. Languages don't neatly align with the desires of computer programmers.
danShumway 4y ago
> In languages like Spanish I can't speak to Russian at all, I have zero experience with that language in any context. But I was taught that when speaking Spanish, if you're using a noun with two different gendered variants but you don't know the gender, typically you default to a specific one of the gendered variants that plays double-duty as the gender-neutral term (and different animals/objects have different defaults you're supposed to use, which you just kind of have to memorize). For example, I was taught that if you're picking up a cat off the sidewalk, and you haven't checked its genitals, and you want to ask if it belongs to someone, you just use "gato", and it's understood that "gato" can mean both "explicitly male" and "I haven't taken the time to check." Similar deal for mixed groups containing people of multiple genders, I was taught if there's at least one man you use the male forms when referring to that group. Admittedly I did have an American education, so it's very possible I was taught incorrectly. I don't put a lot of faith in my Spanish teachers. But it's not like gender ambiguity is a modern thing; scenarios where speakers don't yet know the sex/gender of the things they're referring to are a fairly common issue that will come up pretty often in any culture, regardless of what its gender norms are. If you're in Russia and you tell a story about a fox you almost hit with your car or something, I assume you can tell that story to a friend in a way where your friend will understand you're not claiming that you were ever close enough to the fox to determine its sex. Again, I don't know, but I assume there are something like default gender-variants that Russian people use in that situation; I assume its possible to have that conversation in Russian.
- dale_glass 4y ago
  > I can't speak to Russian at all, I have zero experience with that language in any context. But I was taught that when speaking Spanish, if you're using a noun with two different gendered variants but you don't know the gender, typically you default to a specific one of the gendered variants that plays double-duty as the gender-neutral term Yeah, but that doesn't work great in many contexts. If somebody already told you their name is "Maria" and you refer to them as a man, expect confusion or offense. In Russian, people's gender applies to verbs and adjectives, so that works even less. > If you're in Russia and you tell a story about a fox you almost hit with your car or something Funnily enough, foxes are female by default in Russian, while rabbits default to male. If you're making a game, and foxes and rabbits are things you can run over, there are cases that will require you to have both a male and a female version of the conversation.
  - danShumway 4y ago
    > If someone already told you their name is "Maria" and you refer to them as a name, expect confusion or offense. Isn't that's true of every language, including English? Singular "they" has risen in popularity quite a bit in English, but there are still a ton of people who use "he" as a gender neutral term, and once someone tells them their name is Maria, they switch to "she". I'm not sure I see the difference. If someone tells you their name is Maria or you learn someone's gender during a conversation, as the hearer you intuit that Maria is a common feminine name and starts using feminine pronouns; you stop saying "they told me their name was Maria" and start saying "she told me." In English conversations with people who don't use singular "they" this is a pretty common experience I run into fairly often. If I'm telling a story about someone and I don't reveal I'm talking about a woman until part-way through the story, at that point the person I'm talking with will fluidly switch from "he" to "she" when referring to the subject. > If you're making a game, and foxes and rabbits are things you can run over, there are cases that will require you to have both a male and a female version of the conversation. I worry a little bit we're talking past each other, because I agree with all of this and I'm not sure I'm communicating well enough what my contention actually is. I would expect with any language with gendered verbs/nouns, you're going to need multiple versions of most text sections. But my point is that in situations where the sex/gender isn't known by both the reader and the speaker, there is a default version you can use, it's not untranslatable.

jeroenhd 4y ago

Is it useful, though? Suppose someone enters "nonbinary". What is your Russian i18n team going to do? Even in gendered language, you need to come up with some kind of "other" category, and you'll likely need to rewrite your sentences to make it work if you can make it work at all.

dale_glass 4y ago
> Is it useful, though? Suppose someone enters "nonbinary". What is your Russian i18n team going to do? No clue. But at least you have the data to use whenever you figure out what to do with it, and I imagine somebody tackled that question already, since this is not something that showed up yesterday. In some languages like English you can go with "they" or such, in others there aren't good options that would be widely recognized. But that's just how i18n goes. Languages don't neatly align with the desires of computer programmers.

danShumway 4y ago

> In languages like Spanish I can't speak to Russian at all, I have zero experience with that language in any context. But I was taught that when speaking Spanish, if you're using a noun with two different gendered variants but you don't know the gender, typically you default to a specific one of the gendered variants that plays double-duty as the gender-neutral term (and different animals/objects have different defaults you're supposed to use, which you just kind of have to memorize). For example, I was taught that if you're picking up a cat off the sidewalk, and you haven't checked its genitals, and you want to ask if it belongs to someone, you just use "gato", and it's understood that "gato" can mean both "explicitly male" and "I haven't taken the time to check." Similar deal for mixed groups containing people of multiple genders, I was taught if there's at least one man you use the male forms when referring to that group. Admittedly I did have an American education, so it's very possible I was taught incorrectly. I don't put a lot of faith in my Spanish teachers. But it's not like gender ambiguity is a modern thing; scenarios where speakers don't yet know the sex/gender of the things they're referring to are a fairly common issue that will come up pretty often in any culture, regardless of what its gender norms are. If you're in Russia and you tell a story about a fox you almost hit with your car or something, I assume you can tell that story to a friend in a way where your friend will understand you're not claiming that you were ever close enough to the fox to determine its sex. Again, I don't know, but I assume there are something like default gender-variants that Russian people use in that situation; I assume its possible to have that conversation in Russian.

dale_glass 4y ago
> I can't speak to Russian at all, I have zero experience with that language in any context. But I was taught that when speaking Spanish, if you're using a noun with two different gendered variants but you don't know the gender, typically you default to a specific one of the gendered variants that plays double-duty as the gender-neutral term Yeah, but that doesn't work great in many contexts. If somebody already told you their name is "Maria" and you refer to them as a man, expect confusion or offense. In Russian, people's gender applies to verbs and adjectives, so that works even less. > If you're in Russia and you tell a story about a fox you almost hit with your car or something Funnily enough, foxes are female by default in Russian, while rabbits default to male. If you're making a game, and foxes and rabbits are things you can run over, there are cases that will require you to have both a male and a female version of the conversation.
- danShumway 4y ago
  > If someone already told you their name is "Maria" and you refer to them as a name, expect confusion or offense. Isn't that's true of every language, including English? Singular "they" has risen in popularity quite a bit in English, but there are still a ton of people who use "he" as a gender neutral term, and once someone tells them their name is Maria, they switch to "she". I'm not sure I see the difference. If someone tells you their name is Maria or you learn someone's gender during a conversation, as the hearer you intuit that Maria is a common feminine name and starts using feminine pronouns; you stop saying "they told me their name was Maria" and start saying "she told me." In English conversations with people who don't use singular "they" this is a pretty common experience I run into fairly often. If I'm telling a story about someone and I don't reveal I'm talking about a woman until part-way through the story, at that point the person I'm talking with will fluidly switch from "he" to "she" when referring to the subject. > If you're making a game, and foxes and rabbits are things you can run over, there are cases that will require you to have both a male and a female version of the conversation. I worry a little bit we're talking past each other, because I agree with all of this and I'm not sure I'm communicating well enough what my contention actually is. I would expect with any language with gendered verbs/nouns, you're going to need multiple versions of most text sections. But my point is that in situations where the sex/gender isn't known by both the reader and the speaker, there is a default version you can use, it's not untranslatable.