As Someone Learning German, I Know This Pain

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It’s probably makes sense once explained properly but as an outsider to gendered languages in general it feels like the stupidest archaic idea ever lol.
- Grammatical gender has nothing to do with sexual gender. It is simply the expression on how words are declined in different cases.
  
  I’m not arguing there is good reason and thoughtful context haha, I’m certain of that. Just makes learning a mess if you’ve not encountered it beforehand lol.
- As a speaker of a couple of gendered languages, it absolutely is.
- As an insider to gendered language it feels like the stupidest idea ever to make non-gendered language gendered and call it inclusion or whatever they call it.
  
  I don't know what we're talking about anymore
  
  This is just a guess since the above comment appears to come out of nowhere and doesn't explain further.
  In gendered languages, there are often gender-neutral words, but some people say that it is sexist and demand a female form for that word, making it gendered.
  For example in Spanish, "médico" (medical doctor) used to be the only word for both men and women, but since it looks like a masculine word (because it ends in "o") people complained about it and made "médica" for women. So before we had "El/la médico" and now we have "El médico" and "la médica".
  In my opinion this is such a double standard because it is only done with words that appear masculine. For example "pianista" (player of piano) is feminine looking but gender neutral (so you can say "El/la pianista").
- reject natural language, return to toki pona
- You clearly use one gendered language, at least. Yes - English is a gendered language, you'll be surprised to learn. It just so happens that your language is such a clusterfuck it couldn't reconcile traditional Latin/German gendered structure, and abandoned most of it.
  
  English is a clusterfuck no doubt about it. I don’t know if losing the gendered portion over time was such a bad thing though. Might’ve made it more accessible in some ways and that helps a language survive I think. But I’m not a linguist and there’s a million other factors too.

233 comments