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Feminism: Sex and gender discussions

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Original poster

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

58 replies

mauvish · 21/08/2023 19:49

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?

OP posts:
crosstalk · 24/08/2023 17:41

Estonian has no gender.
It also has no future.

Just thought I'd add that into the mix.

YouJustDoYou · 24/08/2023 17:49

Dramatico · 24/08/2023 15:17

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.

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Lol, exactly. What a numpty.

Grammarnut · 25/08/2023 08:40

mauvish · 21/08/2023 19:49

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?

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.

Dramatico · 25/08/2023 10:36

Grammarnut · 25/08/2023 08:40

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.

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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.

Grammarnut · 25/08/2023 10:39

NeighbourhoodWatchPotholeDivision · 21/08/2023 21:18

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.

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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'.

EBearhug · 25/08/2023 10:45

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".

Dramatico · 25/08/2023 10:59

Grammarnut · 25/08/2023 10:39

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'.

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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.

Stillabitbroken · 25/08/2023 14:33

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.

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