Comments | 4bit4: Gender Pronouns

4bit4

Gender Pronouns

Nov 21, 2013 22:16

I recently started studying French and I found it off that with direct objects, the gender of the pronoun is determined by the object rather than the person whose it is. Thus you would basically say his book if you are talking about a woman’s book because book is masculine or you would say her table if you are talking about a man’s table because ( Read more... )

Comments 7

heavenlyevil November 22 2013, 05:10:20 UTC

Something I learned yesterday from talking to some people from France and Germany is they don't use Mademoiselle or Fräulein anymore except to refer to women under 18. Madame and Frau is used for all adult women whether married or not. They've basically kept the original words but turned the meaning to be what in English is Ms. Whereas we still have Mrs. and it still has a distinct meaning from Ms.

Not the same as ditching the gendered words, but adapting the current words to be more inclusive (and not imply the ownership of a man) is a step in the right direction, no?

4bit4 November 23 2013, 11:05:51 UTC

I think most of modern society is heading in a good direction overall. I just find it so universally odd that most languages have differentiation based on gender and (insofar as I have experienced (aside from singular vs plural)) nothing else.

On grammatical gender psych0naut November 22 2013, 09:20:31 UTC

Keep in mind that words mean different things in different subject areas. The word "gender" means different things in grammar and in biology, just like the word "period" means different things in grammar and biology. In linguistics "gender" is just a class of words which imposes certain rules on how the words around them (like pronouns) behave. It doesn't necessarily have any relationship with real-world attributes like biological sex, and even when there seemingly is a relationship it's usually fuzzy and wildly inconsistent. Some languages don't use gender at all, others like French have two genders, some have three, and some like Swahili have 18! Labelling the genders in a two-gender system as "masculine" and "feminine" is often little more than a convenience and can't be used to draw conclusions about how speakers of that language relate to people.

Re: On grammatical gender nzraya November 22 2013, 21:17:30 UTC

Except that it can, because for some reason they've arbitrarily and gratuitously decided to divide all nouns, including inanimate ones, into two distinct groups and label them "masculine" and "feminine" (as opposed to, say, "left" and "right" or "wet" and "dry," which would be equally logical). If anything that's MORE revealing than the way they/we talk about objects that actually HAVE gender/biological sex.

It's not even as if the divisions were consistent across languages. Just to take the two examples Blake picked out, "book" is masculine in French but feminine in Russian and neuter in German. "Table" is feminine in French but masculine in Russian and German. Etc.

Re: On grammatical gender psych0naut November 23 2013, 10:57:23 UTC

But not all two-gender systems label their genders as "masculine" and "feminine". Some of them use "animate" and "inanimate", or "common" and "neuter", or some other arbitrary pair of names. I don't think there's any significantly different way in which speakers of languages with different grammatical gender systems treat people according to biological gender -- leastaways not one whose cause can be traced back to language.

For example, French has two grammatical genders named masculine and feminine, the neighbouring Basque language has two grammatical genders named animate and inanimate, but the societal and cultural status of men and women isn't significantly different in French- and Basque-speaking areas. This would seem to reinforce my point that people don't make socially meaningful distinctions on the basis of grammatical gender; the "masculine" and "feminine" labels which some languages use are largely arbitrary.

Re: On grammatical gender 4bit4 November 23 2013, 11:58:03 UTC

In response to your first comment, the point is not that I think people give a biological gender to inanimate objects, it's that gender is used as the differentiation. I find French odd because in the direct object pronoun sense, they give move importance to the gender of the object than of the person. Which is just weird since there is no inherent gender to the object ( ... )

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