#language gender

[archival-arrival]

EtudiEnFrancaic

a gender related to studying the french language, the name of the gender taken from "étudier en français" which translates to "study in french"

etymology: Etudi = Etudier = Study En = in Francai = Francais = French the suffix -ic = of/pertaining to

pronunciation: Eh-too-dee, Eh-n, Frahn-say-ick

coined for day 9 of this event

[somethingusefulfromflorida]

I think we can all agree that gender is the most pointless aspect of the Spanish language.

El, la, los, las, les, who gives a shit? Like, oh, -a words are feminine... but only most of the time. "La idioma? Fuck you, idiot, it's EL idioma."

Who cares what gender a plate is? Or a television? Or a couch? If I want to say there's a lot of something, muchos should be sufficient! Muchas is extraneous and bad. As long as I get the singular/plural right, it shouldn't matter what vowel it ends in; it all sounds the same when spoken fast anyway, words blur together, nobody would notice if you swapped an o and an a.

As a native English speaker I realize I'm the pot calling the kettle black. English is not a language so much as the combined table scraps of every other language in Europe thrown into a blender and frapped until it became a semi-homogenous sludge. Too many silent letters and irregular conjugations, it shouldn't exist, but I'm allowed to complain because I'm at least making an effort to learn another one unlike the vast majority of my countrymen.

[daythewriter-blog]

Non-Binary People with Gender-Specific Languages

The most frustrating thing for me is when I start to learn a language and then I find out that their whole language is based around the idea of male and female (e.g. Thai, Hindi, Arabic), so I would essentially have to pick which one I want to use when I speak.

I couldn’t imagine how irritating that would be to grow up speaking those languages and then realizing that you’re non-binary. Even for binary trans people, you and everyone around you would have to change all of your language in order to accommodate your transition, so it’s probably way less likely that your gender is respected. But I’m just guessing.

Ugh. Anyone have some firsthand experience?

[thechekhov]

Some thoughts about "gender" in language - and why the tail is wagging the dog.

Look, we've all heard this little tidbit about gender - actually noun class - in, say, most PIE ProtoIndoEuropean)-languages. People will always bring up the "bridge" fiasco. They'll say "in THIS langauge, bridge is a MALE noun so the people use MASCULINE adjectives to describe it, and in THAT langauge, bridge is a FEMALE so the people use FEMININE adjectives to describe it". Yes, yes, the study is actually accurate as far as I know. But it's pointless. You wanna know why?

Noun class comes first - the gender association came second.

Let's imagine for a moment a langauge - not any particular language. Use whatever you have on hand in your lovely brain. 

This language has four noun classes - A, B, K, Q and X. 

Let's say that Noun Class K is for big, round objects - the earth, the sun, the moon, the disco ball...

Noun Class X is for six-legged insects, tortoises, pencils and sunglasses.

Noun class B is for post-it notes, wallets, boats, male humans and Sunny-D bottles.

Noun class A is for lightbulbs, salads, female humans, ceiling fans and pianos.

Noun class Q is for everything else.

So, then, let's imagine that one day, a person sits there, thinking "wow, I belong to Noun Class B, which is pretty cool. I think that all the other things in Noun Class B are as cool as I am. Whoever thought up Noun Class B must have had that coolness in mind!"

Thus begins backwards association. Just because a certain male human belongs to Noun Class B does NOT mean that they inherently share the same feature (though they often do, as in the case of noun class K.) However, since we ARE human and since we DO love out patterns, we tend to begin to assign meaning where it does not belong. 

Perhaps somewhere along the way, we begin to describe noun class as "gender" because we saw that OUR gender made us view the noun class differently, by association with it. 

But just became conjugation happens to place a bridge and a man in the same wordspace does not mean they are inherently gendered. The association itself is learned.

As is gender.

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