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Guy labeled “languages where everything is gendered” hovers menacingly, while a different guy labeled “non-binary people” runs away
I still don’t understand languages that gender things, anyone able to explain why its a thing? Like what if you removed the gender from the word, would the language explode?
Remember learning French and thinking it was completely absurd
The grammar would. You could probably easily “degender” Arabic by just making everything masculine, but you would have to pick one to be the one gender, it can’t be neither. But you’d also have to invent a bunch of new words, or just declare that things with “real gender” is all gender neutral in its masculine form now. Brother is sibling and we won’t have a word for brother.
Similarly in most Latin languages removing the gender totally would leave open questions of how grammar works. You’d have to decide formally how to do even basic stuff like pluralize which is now done according to gender. You COULD probably just decide you’re going to use one of the genders, but it would require reworking the language from the bottom up.
As far as portuguese is concerned it wouldn’t just sound weird and break the grammar, it might even sound disrespectful. A lot of grammar is imposed from the top by language academies, but most of the language itself is socially constructed. So it’s not like it’s an easy change.
im currently learning some spanish and the gendered thing might have some kind of deep linguistic and anthropological history behind it but mostly from what i can tell it comes down to the flow of the language, like la or el before a word has more to do with how that word flows in the masculine or feminine than anything else
there are exceptions of course like to my ear “la nina” flows off the tongue so much easier than “el nino” due to the placement of consonants being mashed too close together so when learning it i kind of just learn the gender with it because im not studying grammar or word lists but rather listening to the language spoken in context so the flow is always part of it
sometimes its just super obvious like try to say “la hombre” instead of “el hombre” its just so wierd like of course the word is masculine in that flowy sort of way you dont even need to know the word is referring to a man
Look, cars are obviously male and bridges are very clearly female. It makes so much sense that people just know it!
Not really, at least in Russian it depends on the ending consonant/vowel of the noun.
For example, car in Russian is mashina, it ends with -a which means it is a feminine noun.
I think it mostly has to do with how the pronunciation flows, like moya mashina (my car, with feminine singular moya as its possessive pronoun) obviously flows better than moy mashina (with masculine singular moy).
I definitely agree it has more to do with how it sounds than anything else. Just check how people gender foreign gender neutral words, it’s pretty random.
It’s a historical grammatical thing. It’s like a “tag” on one word that could be duplicated on another word (agreement of adjectives, verbs, etc. with a noun) so that information is not just preserved but error-corrected in case someone misspeaks or mishears.
Gender is actually a subset of class systems in general and is overblown because of bias towards Indo-European class systems which happen to be mostly along lines of gender.
Yeah I know, not really an improvement if we start calling it a class system instead of gender 😑
To answer your question, I guess a language could break down without this redundancy mechanism of class agreement. But then descendants of European languages like pidgins and creoles often just drop gender altogether and work just fine.
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hungarian isnt gendered at all
not even gendered pronouns
you have to expressly mention gender if you want it known as far as i understand it
now you might think to yourself : “neat maybe ill learn some hungarian as a fun hobby” let me say, no, you wont. my great grandparents only spoke hungarian and its a bitch of a language to learn
oh yeah, remembered this funny thing, just as a demonstration of the genderless nature of hungarian.
so one of the points of the communist usage of comrade was that it’s inclusive and non-gendered, right? now, we didnt borrow the word, we made up a translation: elvtárs. it means something like companion-in-principles or something. principle-mate.
AND THEN THEY MADE UP elvtársnő! to be used for women. it’s the same word with “woman” stuck on the back.
neat, maybe ill learn some hungarian as a fun hobby. wow, “the hardest language to learn for an English speaker”, can’t be that bad.
eh, i doubt that’s true. “one of the hardest european languages to learn for an english native” feels closer to the truth.
The internet lied to me? Wild
this is the usual anglocentric map: https://i.imgur.com/4ABYc7X.png
so basically indoeuropean languages supposedly get harder the further away you go from england, and then languages belonging to a different language family are super hard.
and i think languages spoken by non-whites are even harder, but that’s not on this map, except for that bit of arabic in north africa. i’d guess they rate chinese as harder than arabic.
hungarian uses the latin alphabet, has a fairly phonetic spelling, has had extensive contact with indoeuropean languages and borrowed a shitton of words from them (scientific vocabulary is largely latin/greek for example). so it’s not that bad in comparison.
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eh, it’s not that hard, babies can learn it.
but there’s no point, especially for nonbinary people. because while the grammar of the language isnt gendered, the PEOPLE speaking said language are fascist scum for the most part, and think not spitting in a woman’s eye is peak chivalry. yes, they think chivalry is still a thing.
Babies can learn any language.
that thought lies at the heart of the joke, yes
Sorry, my bad. I didn’t catch that it was a joke since it was being used to support a serious point.
Persian does not have a grammatical gender, none, and it is relatively easy to learn. Easy grammar, but a lot of phrases
English is worse in that it’s half assed genders, it’s so inconvenient like here’s an example
Convo example/rant
-Person 1: Hello how’s was your day?
Person 2: It was alright but there’s was traffic and I couldn’t get back home on time.
-Person 1: Did you get time to do your little home project?
Person 2: No, it was dark when I got back, only had time for dinner and sleep.
Now let’s say you want to ask Person 1 about Person 2’s project, in a heavily gendered language (for example Arabic) you would’ve known what to refer to them based on the pronouns used in the conversation (ex: in Arabic there’s gendered versions of the pronoun you), and in a language that doesn’t use genders you wouldn’t have to worry about misgendering Person 2 because you simply can’t, But in English because the pronoun for “you” is gender neutral but “He/She/They” isn’t neutral you have to either ask about the Person 2’s gender or risk misgendering them.
I guess, but the general convention is to just use “they” if you don’t know. Shakespeare did it, and we still do it.
Amen
Funny enough this isn’t true where I come from. In my native dialect, a person of unknown gender is referred to as “he”, a fact I vehemently defended before I discovered that I was trans (because being referred to as he hurts less if it’s a gender neutral pronoun)
Boy was that some stuff to unlearn
And people who speak Swahili (which has 18 noun classes/genders) might complain that with only 2 genders, there are many examples where its still ambiguous.
There’s an infinite amount of extra info you can append onto any part of a language, you have to make a cutoff somewhere. I’m just glad English didn’t go with a feature that made me want to kill myself in most conversations when I was learning Spanish.
The novel ‘sphinx’ by anne garreta plays around with this in a really interesting and beautiful way. It’s a romance novel where neither characters’ gender is explicitly stated. She gets around it by USING the gendered nature of nouns in french. So rather than say ‘he touched me’ she says 'A—‘s arm touched me’. It’s really fun to read and there’s a good english translation.
German solves this by further complicating its declension with a third gender.
arabic
i’m not even out to 99 percent of people irl but i don’t have a way to be referred to in arabic that’s gender neutral anyways.
“Take it easy man”
And then there’s Latin, where everything has a gender except when it doesn’t!
Language that accommodates you by default is great. Last time I visited Mexico all I had to do to reveal my pronouns was to refer to myself and my wife as “nosotras”. And then everyone refers to us as “amigas” and you feel so in-place.
Rare circumstance when being a trans lesbian is a benefit lmao
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best thing to do is ask the person their pronouns right? like in english which is not gendered like french, rather than say they, which could misgender in the same capacity as he or she, asking would completely clarify what to use for a person?
