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

[mauvish]

English doesn't have gendered nouns. I think boats are always "she"; I can't think of any other examples at all. Similarly we don't then have to alter adjectives or ay verb forms to match the gendered noun.

But many other languages have at least 2 genders to their nouns, or even 3 (masc, fem, neuter) (There may be others with more but I'm not aware of them).

So in English, if we talk about a man but refer to him as "she" (for example), it stands out. And this flavours the debate over the issue.

Does this have a similar impact in other languages? Un homme isn't going to be une homme (or in the circumstances, is it?) I guess they "become" une femme and everything else about them linguistically also has to be feminine? How does a "lady dick" work, linguistically, where "lady" (fem) SHOULD agree with "dick" (masc) but doesn't? (other examples are, I'm sure, available!)

I kind of feel that where everything else in the sentence is used in the "neuter" sense, it can both dilute and amplify the effect of calling a person by their non-birth sex, but maybe the opposite might be true in gendered languages? Does anyone know?

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.

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!

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.

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!

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

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.

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.

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!

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

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.

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..."

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).

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

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.

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.

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 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!*

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!'.

Gah - bold fail as well as linguist dilemmas!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.