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> 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 so

> 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?
- dale_glass 4y ago
  > 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? Sure, you can refer to them in explicitly vague terms, like "cloaked figure" or "person". You still use gendered language, only now it corresponds to that of the abstract noun you're using. > Are you telling me it's impossible to have a conversation about that without it getting "weird very fast?" Yeah, because there will be situations where you can't maintain ambiguity for long enough. Eg, take a sentence like "I went around the corner and crashed into a stranger", "stranger" is already a gendered word (and the sentence also makes you disclose your own). Yeah, maybe you didn't see immediately who it was, but if you interact for any length of time, the cultural expectation is that you'll include it when retelling. Eg, in real life you crash into somebody, get knocked down, they cuss you out, and you figure out that you crashed into a woman. When retelling though the normal way to explain it is to say "I went around the corner and crashed into a female stranger". English allows for more ambiguity. You can say, set up a mystery encounter like: "We're meeting my room mate who works at NASA as an engineer, won a robotics competition and just recovered from an illness", and then boom! It's a woman. Can't do that in Russian. "room mate", "won", and "recovered" are all gendered, and you can hardly pretend you don't know who they are without looking insane or obviously hiding something. You can of course technically do it -- "We're meeting a person who lives in my house", but it only works if you're implying you yourself haven't met them and know absolutely nothing about them, and it takes pretty darn special circumstances for it to make sense. If you know about their achievements because somebody told you, you'd know their gender and just use it from the start.
  - danShumway 4y ago
    > Sure, you can refer to them in explicitly vague terms, like "cloaked figure" or "person". You still use gendered language, only now it corresponds to that of the abstract noun you're using. [...] "room mate", "won", and "recovered" are all gendered, and you can hardly pretend you don't know who they are without looking insane or obviously hiding something. Right; while English has more ambiguous tools, even in English many speakers will think it's a bit weird to keep using "they" to refer to someone if you do know what their gender and pronouns are. (For many listeners at least), it wouldn't be natural-sounding dialog/conversation for me to describe my sister exclusively with the word "they". I'm not saying that in casual conversation people would use ambiguous language -- but there are scenarios where you'll have conversations about something you saw where you don't at any point during that conversation have any knowledge of the genders involved, and of course the language has support for scenarios like that. Agreed that English has more tools for explicit ambiguity; if you see a car fly off a bridge, you can say, "I hope they're OK." But even if you weren't using 'they', you could say "I hope he's OK" in that situation and the majority of people around you would understand that using the word 'he' wasn't a declaration that you knew who was in the car. The movement away from "he" as a default gender in English wasn't because without singular 'they' there was no support for situations where the gender was unknown, it was a movement away from the social/political/moral implications of default gender in society, and later became expanded into a way to explicitly accommodate nonbinary speakers and avoid misgendering. I got curious about this and tried to look it up, and while the explanations were a bit limited, my takeaway is that it does seem like the Russian language works the same way? If a car flies off a bridge and you use masculine language to talk about the driver, and then later find out the driver was a woman, my understanding is that people probably aren't going to be offended about that or think that you've done something odd? At the point where you learned the driver was a woman you'd just quickly apologize and switch to feminine forms.

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?

dale_glass 4y ago
> 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? Sure, you can refer to them in explicitly vague terms, like "cloaked figure" or "person". You still use gendered language, only now it corresponds to that of the abstract noun you're using. > Are you telling me it's impossible to have a conversation about that without it getting "weird very fast?" Yeah, because there will be situations where you can't maintain ambiguity for long enough. Eg, take a sentence like "I went around the corner and crashed into a stranger", "stranger" is already a gendered word (and the sentence also makes you disclose your own). Yeah, maybe you didn't see immediately who it was, but if you interact for any length of time, the cultural expectation is that you'll include it when retelling. Eg, in real life you crash into somebody, get knocked down, they cuss you out, and you figure out that you crashed into a woman. When retelling though the normal way to explain it is to say "I went around the corner and crashed into a female stranger". English allows for more ambiguity. You can say, set up a mystery encounter like: "We're meeting my room mate who works at NASA as an engineer, won a robotics competition and just recovered from an illness", and then boom! It's a woman. Can't do that in Russian. "room mate", "won", and "recovered" are all gendered, and you can hardly pretend you don't know who they are without looking insane or obviously hiding something. You can of course technically do it -- "We're meeting a person who lives in my house", but it only works if you're implying you yourself haven't met them and know absolutely nothing about them, and it takes pretty darn special circumstances for it to make sense. If you know about their achievements because somebody told you, you'd know their gender and just use it from the start.
- danShumway 4y ago
  > Sure, you can refer to them in explicitly vague terms, like "cloaked figure" or "person". You still use gendered language, only now it corresponds to that of the abstract noun you're using. [...] "room mate", "won", and "recovered" are all gendered, and you can hardly pretend you don't know who they are without looking insane or obviously hiding something. Right; while English has more ambiguous tools, even in English many speakers will think it's a bit weird to keep using "they" to refer to someone if you do know what their gender and pronouns are. (For many listeners at least), it wouldn't be natural-sounding dialog/conversation for me to describe my sister exclusively with the word "they". I'm not saying that in casual conversation people would use ambiguous language -- but there are scenarios where you'll have conversations about something you saw where you don't at any point during that conversation have any knowledge of the genders involved, and of course the language has support for scenarios like that. Agreed that English has more tools for explicit ambiguity; if you see a car fly off a bridge, you can say, "I hope they're OK." But even if you weren't using 'they', you could say "I hope he's OK" in that situation and the majority of people around you would understand that using the word 'he' wasn't a declaration that you knew who was in the car. The movement away from "he" as a default gender in English wasn't because without singular 'they' there was no support for situations where the gender was unknown, it was a movement away from the social/political/moral implications of default gender in society, and later became expanded into a way to explicitly accommodate nonbinary speakers and avoid misgendering. I got curious about this and tried to look it up, and while the explanations were a bit limited, my takeaway is that it does seem like the Russian language works the same way? If a car flies off a bridge and you use masculine language to talk about the driver, and then later find out the driver was a woman, my understanding is that people probably aren't going to be offended about that or think that you've done something odd? At the point where you learned the driver was a woman you'd just quickly apologize and switch to feminine forms.