Wait until you hear about languages where everything is gendered.
We're currently debating, whether BürgerInnen, Bürger:innen or "Bürgerinnen und Bürger" is the proper way to address all citizens. This is not even about anything LGBTQ, it's simply acknowledgement of the concept of non-male people (which is really hard for some conservatives).
I prefer the elimination of gender by using the participle because I think it’s easier to read and say, e.g. instead of Student:In you say Studierende (I guess also using the genderless plural of the participle, similar to the English concept). I’m not sure what the equivalent for Bürger would be though. Geborgene?
In French we have a similar problem. Currently the most popular form is "citoyen.ne.s" or "citoyen.nes" (besides the good old "citoyens" or "citoyennes et citoyens"), which sometimes gets rendered as a website by some text displayers (e.g. les habitant.es). It's technically supposed to be a middle dot (citoyen·ne·s) but nobody has that on their keyboard (I literally had to copy-paste it from wikipedia) so people use the point instead. We used to use parentheses like "citoyen(ne)s" but these have vastly be replaced by the dots.
Or, you know. Just Bürger, the generic masculinum. That all-inclusive. And it worked for a long time. It's only because some snowflakes thought they needed something to complain about that we're having this whole debate.
Portuguese! Even the f...ing objects are gendered!
Most things in Portuguese are gendered, yet we sometimes care fuck all about them (e.g: Sandwich is usually feminine, but it can be masculine depending on who you talk to).
Source: I'm Portuguese.
In German:
Man = male (der Mann)
Woman = female (die Frau)
Boy = male (der Junge)
Girl = neutral (das Mädchen)
No idea why lol.
Also I'm learning French and everything has a gender but I don't see any pattern to it at all. Pizza is female, books are male, a suitcase is female, hats are male and so on.
Also in French, the names of numbers go absolutely mental once you go above about 50. That's got nothing to do with gender but I want to complain it whenever I can.
Girl = neutral (das Mädchen)
No idea why lol.
Mädchen is a diminutive, and all diminutives are grammatically neutral.
It's the same in Dutch btw, and my girlfriend who is learning Dutch is frequently abusing this as a cheat code: whenever she doesn't know the gender of a word, she'll just use the diminutive and it will automatically be neutral.
I think it's das Mädchen because it's a sort of diminutive (by use of chen). But it's been a while since I studied German.
Correct, all diminutives are neuter in German. In this instance the base word is die Magd (historically the maiden, nowadays the maid), which is grammatically female.
In contrast to Mädchen the equivalent for Junge, „Jüngchen“, has not entered officialese and is seldomly used in colloquial language.
And it is also „das Jüngchen“.
Austrians: da buah
Ah, yes the famous quatre-vingt-dix-neuf (commonly pronounced "quatre-vingt-deez-nuts"). Numbers are quite a mouthful in French. One of the reasons I erased it from my memory the moment I didn't need it no more.
So french is just like portuguese, but in portuguese you normally know if something is male or female by the ending of the words (with a feel exceptions), for example pizza is female because ends with "a"
No idea why lol.
This always confused me, even as a native speaker so I looked it up some. Ultimately it's because modern German is the confluence of multiple older, historic languages one of which came from a tree with a strict male/female rule for nouns while the other one's grammar defaulted to a neutral case.
As languages merge or adopt from others they often becomes a conjoined mess of multiple rules coexisting at the same time. A contemporary example is that in English the plural of a word is usually formed by attaching the suffix "s" to the singular form, aka house becomes houses. However there's plenty of exceptions (mouse, mice) in particular if the words stem from a different language (octopus, octopi but nowadays octotuses is also acceptable). In that sense to people not privy to the etymology of words and who only study/learn the language per se there would be no perfectly accurate mechanism to predict the plural of a word.
Also bonus content:
singular: "das Mädchen" (neutral) - the girl
plural: "die Mädchen" (female) - the girls
So in the plural form you have to use a female article again, but the actual spelling of the word is unchanged. Go figure 🤷♂️ 🇩🇪.
Ohh oui, french numbers I think they go mental after 69 ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
70: 60+10 (soixante-dix)
91: 4x20+11 (quatre-vingt-onze)
Why? No clue I am not french.
My native language is genderless so I really dislike all the gendered grammar and words in different languages. English is very easy but in other cases when you start to have a male and a female version of each word which sometimes can be irregular and give you the clue that ohh yeah this should be male but noooo it's female and in many cases there is just simply no logic behind them it is just the way they are.
German even has a neutral gender because two aren't enough of a headache lol
Plus 4 cases which makes it so that there are 16 (Masc, Fem, Neutr, Plural X 4 cases) different ways of typing an article depending on the gender of the word and what the word is doing whereas in English this is all replaced by "The". And don't forget about declining the adjective and the noun in some cases.
Rant over.
And then like half of the articles are "der" and you just have to use context to figure out which one it is
Edit: I was randomly reminded of this graffiti I saw in Berlin:
English is barely gendered. In Slavic languages, as someone said, verbs are conjugated differently based on gender. In Serbian for instance, to say "I saw him", you would say "Video sam ga" if you were a man, and "Videla sam ga" if you were a woman. In Arabic I think even more things vary based on gender, like "to you" has different forms based on whether "you" are a man or a woman. It might not be specifically that, but I distinctly recall Arabic using gender-based forms for something that Slavic languages don't.
Honestly I wish English was less gendered than it is.
E.g. Nephew/Niece, why is there no proper gender-neutral one. This isn't just for LGBTQ stuff, just seems silly to have everything gendered in general
See: Nibling
Nibbler?
Fair enough, learn a new thing each day haha
Altho I think it still says something about how we use English that I don't think I've ever heard that used
Agree. Your point still stands. I just like that word.
yeah debates over Neo-pronouns are always a really tedious Anglo-centric thing. it's not something that the majority of trans people worldwide are even able to care about
Interestingly, written Chinese does have a gendered 'she' pronoun, 她, but it's pronounced the same as the male one, and it's a recent invention meant specifically to improve compatibility with Western languages.
Also, if you want a sample of how this works in English, the narrator / main character of Ann Leckie's "Ancillary" trilogy doesn't understand gendered pronouns and constantly gets them mixed up.
Gender is a myth invented by toilet companies to sell more toilets.
It's a little known fact that men were created in 1925 by a marketing company tasked with selling urinals.
Ok but in writing you do, at least if you're my college professors and want to make your students sad
他 third person singular, neutral 她 she 它 it (non-human, especially inanimate) 牠 it (animal) 祂 third person singular (divine)
I've stopped learning Chinese when I left the country. I've only had HSK 2, but man do I miss no conjugation, you ate an apple pie for breakfast this morning? Well "This morning breakfast I eat an apple pie".
You already told it was this mornings breakfast with context.
This is something you really see when discovering another language that is not yours. I'm on Modern Speaking Arabic right now and I see it a lot
I recently started very casually learning Chinese, this absolutely blew my mind along with the fact that verbs don't have a billion different forms depending on time and the object of the sentence like all the other languages I know.
Finnish has 'hän' which is an ungendered pronoun. We use that for pets. Often we refer to people instead as 'se' which means 'it'.
Me whose native language conjugates verbs and adjectives according to subject's gender:
wasz język nie wymaga sprecyzowania płci podmiotu w każdym zdaniu?
For the lazy:
“Do you use gender pronouns?”
The "you" is plural btw. "You" in english was plural and "Thou" was singular. Idk why "Thou" disappeared. Just another English thing, I guess.
In French (and probably many other languages) first person plural is more polite. People in England started defaulting to "you" as it was a safer bet socially, and "thou" fell out of use.
English also used thorn (þ) before for "th" but printing presses didn't, and substituted "y", which I suspect contributed.
Oh gendered pronouns are fun in german.
Especially when combining the male and female version of a word to one gender neutral word.
For example doctor:
Arzt (male) + Ärztin (female) = ärzt'in (Singular) / ärzte'innen (Plural)
Are you sure? I think for plural it would be ärzt*innen, without the e, but i'm no expert
I mean there are no formal rules on how to form a gender neutral noun yet afaik, but what you stated is the form that would be used most commonly. Ärzte'innen is definitely nothing that I've seen so far, especially with the ' character. Usually * or : is used
in my language we have one pronoun for all genders(siya). it just morphs depending on context(siya/sila/niya/nila).