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> 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

> 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.
- dale_glass 4y ago
  > 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. Doesn't work in many languages. You can't talk about somebody else or yourself in Russian in gender neutral terms for any length of time. Sentences like "I'm tired" and words like "friend" are gender specific. Gender neutrality like "they" isn't an option. Referring to somebody as a "he" then switching to "she" will be seen as confusing or insulting. So your plot twist is likely impossible to translate to Russian. > 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. There are, but it typically doesn't work for people. Yeah, you can treat a rabbit as male by default, but that doesn't work in Russian for people. Eg, if you run over somebody, you can refer to them in neutral terms like "person", but that's going to get weird very fast. It's roughly like talking about running over a "creature" for an extended length of time -- people will quickly start wondering why you keep sticking to such a non-specific term.
  - danShumway 4y ago
    > Sentences like "I'm tired" and words like "friend" are gender specific. I know that; but there isn't a default gendered form to use when referring to people non-discriptly, like "he" is very often used for in English? I just don't understand how that's possible; it's not a cultural difference -- there is no way that any population isn't going to run into situations where they're forced to refer to someone who's gender they don't know. Not knowing the gender of a person you're talking about is an extremely common situation that would comes up all the time, regardless of a country's history or language. Is the sentence, "a cloaked figure approached me but was covered in so many layers of jackets and clothing that I could not tell if it had a penis" untranslatable in Russian? A police report comes out and the police want to say, "someone robbed the convenience store and we're looking for any information we can find about the culprit." That's untranslatable in Russian? That's not a scenario that the language developed to accommodate? They can't default to masculine pronouns, they have no natural way to signal that they don't know if the criminal is male or female? Even the car example -- it's extremely plausible if you witness a car accident involving a human being that you might not know whether the people involved are women or men. Are you telling me it's impossible to have a conversation about that without it getting "weird very fast?" Gender reveals are not just plot twists in books, they happen in real life. There is no way that a culture wouldn't regularly encounter these scenarios; people have conversations about events that involve human agents where they don't know basic information about the humans involved all the time. It is just unfathomable to me that what you're saying about the Russian language is correct -- that you could witness an event happening from a distance where you couldn't identify the genders of the people involved, and the language just wouldn't have any way at all for you talk about it even by defaulting to masculine pronouns/variants; that the language was never at any point in history adapted for dealing with situations where you're talking about a person you saw who was wearing a mask. Gender ambiguity is a scenario that Russians will encounter in real life and I guarantee have encountered in real life throughout Russia's history regardless of their cultural views or linguistic representations of gender. They probably have a way of talking about those situations, or at least understand that sometimes gender in a conversation is being inferred or substituted without factual knowledge of the actual person being talked about?

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.

dale_glass 4y ago
> 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. Doesn't work in many languages. You can't talk about somebody else or yourself in Russian in gender neutral terms for any length of time. Sentences like "I'm tired" and words like "friend" are gender specific. Gender neutrality like "they" isn't an option. Referring to somebody as a "he" then switching to "she" will be seen as confusing or insulting. So your plot twist is likely impossible to translate to Russian. > 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. There are, but it typically doesn't work for people. Yeah, you can treat a rabbit as male by default, but that doesn't work in Russian for people. Eg, if you run over somebody, you can refer to them in neutral terms like "person", but that's going to get weird very fast. It's roughly like talking about running over a "creature" for an extended length of time -- people will quickly start wondering why you keep sticking to such a non-specific term.
- danShumway 4y ago
  > Sentences like "I'm tired" and words like "friend" are gender specific. I know that; but there isn't a default gendered form to use when referring to people non-discriptly, like "he" is very often used for in English? I just don't understand how that's possible; it's not a cultural difference -- there is no way that any population isn't going to run into situations where they're forced to refer to someone who's gender they don't know. Not knowing the gender of a person you're talking about is an extremely common situation that would comes up all the time, regardless of a country's history or language. Is the sentence, "a cloaked figure approached me but was covered in so many layers of jackets and clothing that I could not tell if it had a penis" untranslatable in Russian? A police report comes out and the police want to say, "someone robbed the convenience store and we're looking for any information we can find about the culprit." That's untranslatable in Russian? That's not a scenario that the language developed to accommodate? They can't default to masculine pronouns, they have no natural way to signal that they don't know if the criminal is male or female? Even the car example -- it's extremely plausible if you witness a car accident involving a human being that you might not know whether the people involved are women or men. Are you telling me it's impossible to have a conversation about that without it getting "weird very fast?" Gender reveals are not just plot twists in books, they happen in real life. There is no way that a culture wouldn't regularly encounter these scenarios; people have conversations about events that involve human agents where they don't know basic information about the humans involved all the time. It is just unfathomable to me that what you're saying about the Russian language is correct -- that you could witness an event happening from a distance where you couldn't identify the genders of the people involved, and the language just wouldn't have any way at all for you talk about it even by defaulting to masculine pronouns/variants; that the language was never at any point in history adapted for dealing with situations where you're talking about a person you saw who was wearing a mask. Gender ambiguity is a scenario that Russians will encounter in real life and I guarantee have encountered in real life throughout Russia's history regardless of their cultural views or linguistic representations of gender. They probably have a way of talking about those situations, or at least understand that sometimes gender in a conversation is being inferred or substituted without factual knowledge of the actual person being talked about?