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Lack of Noun Gender in English | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| DaisyMaisy Senior Member United States Joined 5380 days ago 115 posts - 178 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish Studies: Swedish, Finnish | Message 41 of 126 19 December 2013 at 6:32am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I agree with s allard.
"John" is only replaced by "he" when you are referring to John the person. "Where is John? He isn't here". John as a slang noun for toilet would not be replaced by he. example: "I need the john. Where is it?" 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Марк Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 5056 days ago 2096 posts - 2972 votes Speaks: Russian* | Message 42 of 126 19 December 2013 at 10:15am | IP Logged | ||||||||
English has sex-based grammatical gender because it is UNGRAMMATICAL to use "she" or "it" for the word "boy". Many languages have only one word for "he", "she" and "it". French, Spanish have sex-based and formal-based gender. And the category of gender is incorporated much deeper than in English. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4707 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 43 of 126 19 December 2013 at 10:38am | IP Logged | ||||||||
That's the usual way, but you can choose to deviate if you like.
Better question - how IS it sexist? Putting an affix behind something doesn't make it sexist. Some languages use a female default, most languages a male historically. Some can use either or a neuter, and some don't have gender, and some don't have noun classes. It doesn't mean anything that we used the male word as a basis (or the female word) as a basis - that's just the word you happen to use. It would be sexist if we particularly used diminitives to indicate that girls are worth less than boys in general, but that's not what the diminutive means. The diminutive is the idiomatic way to say "girl", nothing more, nothing less. Masculine words happen to often be the base in Germanic languages because it was the convenient way to solve problems, not because the words are thereby inherently biased against women. That diminutive wasn't put there to show "you, girl, are worth less than your brother/father/husband". That's nonsensical. Otherwise it's equally sexist against men that we consider all governments feminine (despite there usually being more men in governments. (die Regierung).
Urgh. I am all for the non-binary rights, but I've always found this to be a non- argument. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4678 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 44 of 126 19 December 2013 at 11:10am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Indeed... some people like to see discrimination everywhere: sexist (or third gender), racial, etc. Just like conspiracists, you can't convince them (and they may be right). Even left-handed people are discriminated against, in life and in language. (sinister in Latin, coming from a word meaning lame in German, what is left in English, a negative prefix involved in "accident", "misjudgement" etc in Hungarian...) 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6597 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 45 of 126 19 December 2013 at 12:48pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Sexism is defined as treating someone differently because of their gender. How am I not treated differently if the default words for things don't describe my gender? Which languages consider the feminine gender default in any way? Even if there are some, they are obviously an exception and not the rule.
I never said it was intentionally sexist, though. But given how sexist the attitudes were in the past, it can't be a coincidence. Really, much of the discrimination that happens isn't intentional, and that's why some people don't care enough to notice it if it doesn't affect them. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4707 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 46 of 126 19 December 2013 at 12:58pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
No, it's defined as treating someone differently in a negative sense! Otherwise it's sexist to have female bathrooms because it's different from a male bathroom. The reason there are feminine (or masculine) suffixes is because it's useful to make the gender distinction in some contexts, it can add the necessary redundancy in the language. It literally has nothing to do with sexism at all
Yes, it can. Otherwise, why is goverment a feminine word in Dutch and German? Clearly a male-dominated discipline. Edited by tarvos on 19 December 2013 at 12:59pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4678 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 47 of 126 19 December 2013 at 12:59pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I don't think your two sentences make sense. In one, you say that it's sexism if it considers you differently for your gender, and in the other you're not happy because the word doesn't carry the same gender as your physical gender (perhaps the word was made neutral for little girls who don't identify themselves as being of either gender, ha?).
But gender has nothing to do with it. If the default word for girl was feminine, it would define you through your marital status or something. That would be clearly sexist (and yes, a consequence of history). An awful lot of things are sexist in language, but gender? Just take a list of 100 random words of each gender and see if it really makes sense. (and I said "random") 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5430 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 48 of 126 19 December 2013 at 1:01pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I think there is some confusion here between biological and grammatical gender. Let's consider the following examples: The young man is tall and good-looking. The young woman is tall and good-looking. Le jeune homme est grand et beau. La jeune fille est grande et belle. El chico es alto y guapo. La chica es alta y guapa. As can be clearly seen, French and Spanish use grammatical gender. We see how the gender of the words is marked by the article and morphology of the adjectives. English does not do this. Does English have grammatical gender because "man" refers to a masculine person and "woman"' to a feminine person? English does use biological gender when referring to humans and living beings, and even that is being contested with gender- neutral language. Consider the following example. Every student must show their identity card. "Their' is used to replace the cumbersom "his or her." What is the grammatical gender of "student"? 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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