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> 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 o

> 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

> 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.