Gendered nouns and gender ideology in other languages - can anyone here answer my question?

I think went is the past of wend. So we kept wend as a verb but only really used it frequently in its past tense form.

I've not heard that either but I've definitely heard strived for strove.

Pluperfects in English interest me as they seem to be dying out e.g. strive/strove/striven

I think the points made by @NeighbourhoodWatchPotholeDivision are incredibly interesting. Yes it certainly is the case thinking about it that common verbs seem to be irregular ones e.g. go/went. Think/thought. See/saw.

This is also the case in the other two languages I know.

Anyway, to stay on topic - don't mess with pronouns! They are some of the oldest parts of speech. Some evolutionary psychologists even believe that they were the first parts of speech to evolve after nouns and before verbs.

This is interesting! To my understanding English was a gendered language until the early middle ages and still shows traces of this in nouns such as 'ship' and also, as you say, 'bell'. English also retains a certain amount of inflection.

And in dialect. I remember one of my father's very Dorset farm workers referring to a (leaking) pipeline as "her".

I have never heard anyone say 'seeked' for 'sought'. It's obviously wrong to any native speaker - 'seek' is not that rare e.g. 'hide and seek'.

This is interesting! To my understanding English was a gendered language until the early middle ages and still shows traces of this in nouns such as 'ship' and also, as you say, 'bell'. English also retains a certain amount of inflection.

Language development interests me a lot. It's organic, which is why we can't just magically introduce neopronouns or wrong pronouns and then think we can bully them into common usage.

Bells are also referred to as 'she' in English. 'Look to! The treble's going. She's gone', is said, for example, to begin ringing the bells.

Lol, exactly. What a numpty.

Estonian has no gender.
It also has no future.

Just thought I'd add that into the mix.

No idea but my very GNC and now fully fledged feminist friend's daughter walked out of French in protest once because she declared that the language was too sexist 🤩

LOL this has got to be one of the most Anglo-centric complacent things I've read on MN this year.

Ill-educated but self-important kid condemns a millennia-old language because she fails to understand how Proto-Indo-European developed, with animate and inanimate classes of nouns.

And now she'll never learn either cos she flounced out of class.

Anyhoo...to answer the guestion, my first language has three genders, masc, fem and neutral. Transgenderism isn't yet a bit thing in my home country because as a nation we are not yet rich and leisured enough to be bamboozled by such issues. However there is a small but growing trans community and they want the whole grammatical structures changed for trans people.

Needless to say, this will not happen.

People who think it's easy to mess with pronouns tend not to be multi-lingual. What's possible (if clumsy) in English isn't possible in other languages.

in speech that's expressed by leaving a short respectful pause.

The pause is not actually a pause but a glottal stop (like 'anhalten, Ver'anstaltung, 'Auto). Gibt es dafür einen deutschen Begriff? Knacklaut?

Sorry, my asterisks have been replaced by commas. The Germans use an asterisk to denote non-male or female people, and in speech that's expressed by leaving a short respectful pause.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding of this is that instead of saying "Studenten und Studentinnen" - meaning "male students and female students", TRA's have pressurised a change to "Studentinnen". The , which is expressed by leaving a small pause in speech, is there to denote students who are supposedly not either male or female.
This has met with resistance, but is being forced onto people.
Some are changing the language again to avoid the issue. So universities which would previously have used "Studenten" to denote all students, or "Studenten und Studentinnen" to be clearly inclusive of female students, are now using "Studeierende", which means "people who are studying".
It's not pretty.

They mightn't think much about a noun''s gender @Abhannmor , but they are definitely not unaware of it, particularly because of pronouns. Masculine and feminine nouns are treated differently, have different rules associated with them, but pronouns are one of the more obvious ways of differentiating between them and somewhere you have to be aware of the noun's gender. Because there's no word for "it".

No, nothing at all to do with sex. And the word for girl is masculine, but if you were speaking about a particular girl you'd say "her".
Eg "give the coffee to the girl (masculine noun). Give it to her (sex of person)."
So no need for exploding heads..
The gender of the noun involved isn’t relevant at all because if you're speaking about a person or animal you match pronouns to the sex of the individual, or these days to the preference of the individual maybe.

You are right yet nobody is thinking of the gender of a noun when they use it. Even when ' it' is í or é . The fact that 'cailín' / girl is a masculine noun surely proves that. Otherwise people's heads would be exploding with the cognitive dissonance. It's almost as if they knew it has nothing to do with sex.

But actually they don't. Because they don't think about it at all.

Gah - bold fail as well as linguist dilemmas!

Hilariously (to me at least) is my daughter’s German teacher whose right on sensibilities drive him to use innen whilst his inner pedant is disgusted at this linguistic abomination.
Hard Times indeed for him!*

I feel for him. It's hard being a languages teacher sometimes. I may not have his particular right-on sensibilities, but I have a painful dilemma when I want to order a panini without sounding like a pretentious twat, but my inner linguist is hissing 'Panino, goddammit! Panini is plural!'.

In Japanese there can be distinctive ways of referring to yourself that sound either very feminine or very masculine. Similarly, there are ways to pronounce normal words that a man will pronounce one way, and a woman the "normal" way - it demonstrates very much male and female-ness. So a man often sounds more feminine if he refers to himself as "watashi", he would sometimes more likely use "boku/ore" instead as it's more masculine. I have never heard a woman IRL refer to herself as "ore" or "boku", it's just weird. The whole incorrect pronoun crap doesn't fly there, unless you're a passing trans and can get away it.

Hilariously (to me at least) is my daughter’s German teacher whose right on sensibilities drive him to use *innen whilst his inner pedant is disgusted at this linguistic abomination.
Hard Times indeed for him!

in German (the language) children and babies are das Kind, das Baby so you would literally ask "what is it" if you wanted to know the sex.

It gets a bit more complicated for girl because Mädchen is a diminutive form and they are always neuter. Das Mädchen (like das Brötchen for a breadroll)

If talking to mixed groups - say Colleagues - you can choose between the mouthful (and more traditional) "Kollegen und Kolleginnnen" or you can "gender" (German verb - to gender) and say "Kolleg:Innen". Written with the colon (or a * which screenreaders recognise, apparently). Spoken there is a miniscule pause "Kolleg'innen" - otherwise you are referring to either a room full of women, or you are using the generic-femininine (which i do sometimes in groups where there are clearly more women than men)

There are arguments about "gendern" which do get a bit silly. but it is catching on. As with other languages, the gramattical gender of things isn't connected to sex.

I don't think it's true that native speakers of Irish are unaware that nouns are gendered? They need to know the gender of a noun when they use a pronoun in its place. So, for example the Irish word for door is masculine and for window, feminine. If you want to say "Open it" you have to use the equivalent of "Open him" for the door and "Open her" for the window. There js no Irish equivalent for the word "it" ( though if you were translating you'd use "it" not "him/her").
It's nothing to do with sex. The Irish word for girl is masculine. Stallion is feminine.

MN ate the asterisk. It was meant to be Doktor+in.

While German (and probably other languages) have made some attempt to make job titles more inclusive, that's more about trying to get more women into professions than trans inclusively- at least when it started.

The newest "regulation" is the gender star (). As in Doktorin. It is not only written, but also spoken, with a glottal stop. The asterisk is the placeholder for all genders not man or woman. Public radio stations allow their presenters to use this form, if they want to. Whether listeners want to hear it was not part of the decision (it started about 3-4 years ago). Major newspapers and magzines rarely use this form , they mostly write both forms (Doktor und Doktorin, Ärzte und Ärztinnen).

Officially (register, passport) , there are two sexes plus a "diverse" entry for people with DSD (medical proof needed).

Linguistic gender isn't about sex. In the languages I know, it's mostly about word endings. Mädchen (German) and meisje (Dutch) both mean girl, but they're both neuter, because of the -chen and -je suffixes. Band in German means different things, depending on whether it's masculine, feminine or neuter. Der Band is volume in the sense of 2nd volume in the trilogy. Die Band is band in the sense of music group, and das Band is ribbon, tape, belt, and probably hat band.

While German (and probably other languages) have made some attempt to make job titles more inclusive, that's more about trying to get more women into professions than trans inclusively- at least when it started. And I'm okay with languages looking at things like groups defaulting to masculine the moment a single man is there among a hundred women, for example, but even if you've got an official language authority, changes in daily use are slower to happen. Having said that, there are perjorative terms used when I was a child in the '70s which you almost never hear now, because they are racist or homophobic, so language change can happen, but I bet there are still people, "I grew up with those words, I'm not changing now..."

Gender in languages is just a convention. We might just as easily say the Green Nouns and the Red Nouns. In Irish it just refers to how a noun is used in different modes and tenses. I'm sure other languages are similar.
There has been a suggestion by a trans rights activist to try and make it gender neutral. It is difficult to see how this might be achieved however.
Most native speakers are quite unaware that Nouns are gendered. It's just a description of how they speak. But then I've long since forgotten the formal rules of English grammar insofar as I ever knew them.

There was an item about this on From Our Own Correspondent recently. The reporter talks about culture wars in Germany and the introduction of ways to avoid having to say 'doctors and doctoresses' to show that the speaker is not assuming all doctors are men:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001pdy2?q=5