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Pronouns
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 28 Apr 2024
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English is gender neutral. You have to deliberately apply a gender to something unless that word is gender specific, like cow or bitch referring to female animals.
In my brief forays learning other languages one of the more frustrating things to learn is that you can have female refrigerators, male buses, and gender neutral roofs. That is not gender neutrality.
So I don’t get your issue with genders, seeing as they have nothing to do with English language neutrality and everything to do with how you address a specific individual at their request.
In one of the languages I know, there isn't a different pronoun for each gender; there's just one pronoun to indicate 'they' in the singular form. Maybe that's what they meant.
In what fucked up language are refrigerators female? They're obviously male.
Heresy! They are neuter!
Spanish and mayB Italian iirc?
you put things in them
In Persian we don't have genders for anything. No words, no pronouns, nothing. So having gendered pronouns for me is not gender neutral. I would rather call everyone equally "they" than get into this game of what are you identifying yourself because it makes the language more complex for me.
How is it more difficult? If someone’s name is Joe Smith, you would commonly expect to refer to them as Joe. But say they ask you to refer to them as Mr. Smith. Ok, no big deal, right?
Referring to someone by their preferred pronoun is no different. If Joe wants to be “they”, it’s no big deal.
The apparent issue is with gender and people’s personal hang ups with it. People change how they address others all the time, formally, informally, professionally, familiar, marriage name change, etc. So all I’m getting here is resistance to what…? LBGTQ people?
The fuck you are talking about? You didn't have to explicitly say your forays of language studying were brief, anyone could tell that after a second of reading this. English is a gendered language. Obviously. It has gendered pronouns. My native language doesn't have genered pronouns AS SUCH. It is a non genderd language. They are rare but they do exist. The fact that nouns can have pronouns that apply to specific Nouns, like das Külschrank, doesn't make it a more gendered language. This is just factually wrong, and is so poorly researched it is amusing.
Hey buddy, if you're gonna be that mad, at least be correct.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_type_of_grammatical_genders
Notice how "English" is listed there in the "No grammatical gender" list, which is what's being talked about here.
Yes the 'grammatical' in the term 'grammatical gender' is the operative word. A GENEDERED language, has pronouns. Because I happen to be able to speak one of the few ungendered languages in the world I know what the term means.
In English, when we say "gendered language", we mean "grammatically gendered language", not just "language has gendered pronouns".
Except somehow a Gender-neutral language is one that has no gender the way I described. So what is the opposite of a Gender-neutral language? Gender-inclusive? Gender-bias?
A language doesn't "have gender" in any way other than noun class. Gender is cultural and exists outside of the confines of language. So "gendered language" would likely be referring to grammatical gender and not gender.
The original commenter who used the term "gender neutral language" meant "non-grammatically gendered language", that much is clear from context. It was a semantic mistake. Hopefully things are cleared up for you now. If you have a point beyond semantics, feel free to make it.
From zero to insult in one post? C’mon man, your incorrect use of terms isn’t my problem. I don’t need a PhD in linguistics to meet your unstated requirements to have an opinion on this.
If you want gender neutral pronouns in order to avoid the inconvenience of having to address the groups of people you singled out, like LGBTQ, that’s what you should have said instead of clearly specifying an entire language’s use of gender. You obviously know the difference in your ragepost, so next time spend some effort to get your message across correctly the first time and don’t have a fit when people can’t read your mind.
I think you should also understand that even if gender neutral informal pronouns like “they” do develop and become common usage, you’re still going to have to learn to address people in their preferred pronoun if they ask.
Yeah on the insult bit, my bad. I was angry because of unrealed issues. Soz.