4 ms·

I find the points really confusing / not saying what you seem to expect. 1. You can inject anything irrelevant into a conversation until it's offensive. You co

I find the points really confusing / not saying what you seem to expect. 1. You can inject anything irrelevant into a conversation until it's offensive. You could do by constantly talking about cars, but it has no effect on the word "car". 2. In that case cis/trans still exists in terms of changing the gender. 3. Have you got a source for that? I won't pretend I'm a linguist, but most language families I'm aware of certainly have at least 2 genders. Many have 3. Quite a few assign genders to objects as well. Wikipedia lists just a few examples and some of them are further qualified: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_neutrality_in_genderless_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_neutrality_in_genderles... Even English is a qualified entry on that list and yet we have no issues taking about it. Coming from a way more gendered language natively, I can tell you it only makes this situation harder. English didn't have to deal with a "women are doctors now, but doctor is a male word" issue. I can have a whole conversation about someone in English and you wouldn't know their gender, but in other languages I know, I couldn't say a single sentence without it.

bloak 2y ago
You can have a whole conversation about someone in English without revealing their gender, but it takes some skill. There's even a name for it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pronoun_game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pronoun_game I am not at all sure that most languages are genderless. I just get that impression. Once I even picked some random unrelated languages "at random" from a big list and then investigated them, painstakingly, and found that a large majority of them were genderless. It was hardly scientific because not only was it a small sample but I don't even know how to go about picking unrelated languages "at random" or even what that means. Definitely more research required! Though probably someone has already done the real research so I should just search the literature more diligently than just using a search engine. Of course most of the languages that English speakers are familiar with are Indo-European or Afro-Asiatic and both of those language families happen to have genders (though Persian, in the Indo-European family, has lost the he/she distinction, and I think I read somewhere that one of the Afro-Asiatic languages has similarly lost the distinction: like Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic is a huge family).

bloak 2y ago

You can have a whole conversation about someone in English without revealing their gender, but it takes some skill. There's even a name for it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pronoun_game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pronoun_game I am not at all sure that most languages are genderless. I just get that impression. Once I even picked some random unrelated languages "at random" from a big list and then investigated them, painstakingly, and found that a large majority of them were genderless. It was hardly scientific because not only was it a small sample but I don't even know how to go about picking unrelated languages "at random" or even what that means. Definitely more research required! Though probably someone has already done the real research so I should just search the literature more diligently than just using a search engine. Of course most of the languages that English speakers are familiar with are Indo-European or Afro-Asiatic and both of those language families happen to have genders (though Persian, in the Indo-European family, has lost the he/she distinction, and I think I read somewhere that one of the Afro-Asiatic languages has similarly lost the distinction: like Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic is a huge family).