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

Oh here we go 🤣. I didn't come here to get into this debate.

Well you did post on a thread including the phrase 'gender ideology' on the Feminism: Sex and Gender board, so it shouldn't be too much of a surprise if people mention gender ideology!

It's a bit of an odd one this because in Greek, gender is dictated by the ending of the word, and does have a kind of map back to social concepts of maleness and femaleness because there are masculine sounds and feminine sounds.

It's a bit weird to explain, but it is kinda there in my head when I think about it. The explosion of neuter words (usually foreign) has eroded this somewhat though.

And because everything has to agree (pronoun, article, adjective, sometimes number, adverb), it's a real head twist to try and misgender.

In german it would be (Masc.) Der LadyDick because penis is masculine.

But my old boss was Finnish and he said people invented whole new pronouns so that they could enforce them on others. He even sent me an article about it- someone bemoaning that their language wasn’t gendered enough for them to be able to pick opposite sex pronouns.

As if we didn’t already know it was always only about enforcing compliance.

Oh here we go 🤣. I didn't come here to get into this debate.

Related to this , I always find it jarring when a lot of people advocating for using "chosen" pronouns say it's a really easy change to make. It's such an anglo-centric view. It really isn't easy in a lot of languages as sex is marked in many ways, not just pronouns!

Of course it does!
Who do you think is left out?

Back to the OP - the main difference is that in gsndered languages you may also use gendered words (mainly adjectives) when talking directly to the person. For example in 'are you tired?' Tired should take a masculine or femenine form.

It doesn't 😁. People just end up saying both gendered noun forms to try to include everyone (which it still doesn't, really).

It does really, since everyone is either male or female, however they choose to dress or present themselves!

There are consistent patterns to the gender of the suffixes. You can consciously learn these, or subliminally pick them up, but either way, you end up just knowing if previously unseen word is masculine, feminine or neuter. For example, words ending in -nis are feminine.

There are exceptions and irregularities, but it's standard in living languages that the only words that break the grammatical rules/patterns are high-frequency words that you will already know. Obscure words follow the rules, because no-one uses them enough to preserve a grammatical irregularity. Contrast the simple past tenses of the high-frequency English verb to eat versus to paint in the first person singular: present tense 'I eat' goes to I ate which is irregular and specific, whereas present tense 'I paint' only adds -ed to produce its past of I painted.

We talk about eating food all the time, so the irregularity in the past tense of the verb to eat is modeled to children every day, and they teach it to their children in turn. As a population, we don't talk about painting, so if the verb to paint had anything unusual to it, it would get lost and replaced with -ed within a few generations. You can see this phenomenon happening today with the verb to seek. It used to be a high-frequency word, so it has an irregular simple past tense of sought. Usage has dropped, so more and more people instinctively assume the past form is seeked.

@DoAWheelie
'Because it's dehumanising to refer to a person the same way you'd talk about a random object.'

Dehumanising like menstruator or uterus haver?

I got tangled up in this as I was climbing the peak but it is actually meaningless. There are no useful points of contact between grammatical gender and 'social' gender. The only thing that I can't understand is how preferred pronouns work in a gendered language. English speakers can say 'his table' or 'her table'. It is 'sa table' for both in French.

In France New words go through the Académie française who say whether they're masculin or feminine. Sometimes popular usage overturns that and both are acceptable. For example Covid (coronna virus disease , disease = maladie = feminine) should be la covid , but the vast majority of people say le covid .
Crisps is another one but with a more even split - I've heard un chips as many times as I've heard une chips (don't get me started on the plural which you can hear 🙄).

A bit off subject I know, but when I worked with a German girl, I asked her how she knew the gender of a new word, and therefore how to use it grammatically, bearing in mind that in German it's stuff like der Tisch masculine, the table. Like how do you know if it's der, die or das, if it's a word you don't know? And she, not so helpfully, replied that you "just know".

Why are you proud of this? The French thing, not the backpack which makes sense?

She's doing a French alevel now if that helps

She was young, 10/11, and took a stand against the fact that a French word was deemed masculine or feminine. She felt it was sexist. She was gender non conforming. She'd been getting messages that girls should do x and boys y which she saw as sexist too.

She got into a lot of trouble and her mum obviously told her off. And explained she had chosen the wrong protest (and in a very inappropriate way!) as they couldn't re write the French language. But secretly we were impressed that she even thought to question it.

She also successfully protested against the then uniform policy which disadvantaged girls. (in a more appropriate fashion via letters to governors.)

It doesn't 😁. People just end up saying both gendered noun forms to try to include everyone (which it still doesn't, really).

Using @ is more like a shorthand for including both -a and -o, rather than creating terms in their own right.

How would that work in speech though?

In french:

Un pénis
Un vagin

Une bite
Une chatte

Make of that what you will (''correct" terms happen to be masculin, slang female in this case).

But as has already been said ''lady dick'' wouldn't really be any different I suppose, ''bite de femme'' maybe?

There's a new(ish) neutral pronoun to add to il (he) & elle (she): iel (non-binary).

We don't have the issue of misgendering in quite as many ways as in English, for example ''his pencil'' & ''her pencil' would both be ''son (his) crayon'', just as ''his rubber'' & ''her rubber'' would both be ''sa (her) gomme'' (crayon being a masculin noun, rubber a feminine one).

And for your "lady dick" example, if it were literally translated into Spanish, surely it'd be something like "polla de mujer" (gramatically feminine) or "polla mujer" (most likely grammatically masculine as it's a compound noun). There's probably already a completely different term for it in Spanish though though and might vary from region to region...

Snap, @ImDoingThisNow!

It's like "it" is the diminutive/juvenile form (don't know the correct term) of "they" which is what people say instead of "he or she" when talking about a hypothetical person or a person whose sex is not known.

Using @ is more like a shorthand for including both -a and -o, rather than creating terms in their own right.

And they would answer 'it's a boy/ girl!'

We use "it" for a baby/child whose sex you don't know or where its sex isn't obvious. It's not supposed to be rude or dehumanising, it's just not usual to use "it" for a person over the age of about two.

Why is it?

For example, I might say, " what sex is it?' When referring to a baby.

'non binary' is dehumanising seeing as humans are either male or female.

Yes true but there is a new wave of people advocating for a gender-neutral terms

But the grammatical gender of objects has nothing to do with human gender. Even among closely related languages (e.g. Spanish & Portuguese, which I can speak), the grammatical gender of many nouns is different