Wait until you hear about languages where everything is gendered.
We're currently debating, whether BürgerInnen, Bürger:innen or "Bürgerinnen und Bürger" is the proper way to address all citizens. This is not even about anything LGBTQ, it's simply acknowledgement of the concept of non-male people (which is really hard for some conservatives).
I do love a Good Bürger.
Welcome to Good Burger, home of the Good Burger, may I take your order?
I'm a dude, he's a dude, she's a dude, we're all dudes hey!
In French we have a similar problem. Currently the most popular form is "citoyen.ne.s" or "citoyen.nes" (besides the good old "citoyens" or "citoyennes et citoyens"), which sometimes gets rendered as a website by some text displayers (e.g. les habitant.es). It's technically supposed to be a middle dot (citoyen·ne·s) but nobody has that on their keyboard (I literally had to copy-paste it from wikipedia) so people use the point instead. We used to use parentheses like "citoyen(ne)s" but these have vastly be replaced by the dots.
I prefer the elimination of gender by using the participle because I think it’s easier to read and say, e.g. instead of Student:In you say Studierende (I guess also using the genderless plural of the participle, similar to the English concept). I’m not sure what the equivalent for Bürger would be though. Geborgene?
Portuguese! Even the f...ing objects are gendered!
Most things in Portuguese are gendered, yet we sometimes care fuck all about them (e.g: Sandwich is usually feminine, but it can be masculine depending on who you talk to).
Source: I'm Portuguese.
In German:
Man = male (der Mann)
Woman = female (die Frau)
Boy = male (der Junge)
Girl = neutral (das Mädchen)
No idea why lol.
Also I'm learning French and everything has a gender but I don't see any pattern to it at all. Pizza is female, books are male, a suitcase is female, hats are male and so on.
Also in French, the names of numbers go absolutely mental once you go above about 50. That's got nothing to do with gender but I want to complain it whenever I can.
Girl = neutral (das Mädchen)
No idea why lol.
Mädchen is a diminutive, and all diminutives are grammatically neutral.
It's the same in Dutch btw, and my girlfriend who is learning Dutch is frequently abusing this as a cheat code: whenever she doesn't know the gender of a word, she'll just use the diminutive and it will automatically be neutral.
I think it's das Mädchen because it's a sort of diminutive (by use of chen). But it's been a while since I studied German.
Correct, all diminutives are neuter in German. In this instance the base word is die Magd (historically the maiden, nowadays the maid), which is grammatically female.
In contrast to Mädchen the equivalent for Junge, „Jüngchen“, has not entered officialese and is seldomly used in colloquial language.
And it is also „das Jüngchen“.
Ah, yes the famous quatre-vingt-dix-neuf (commonly pronounced "quatre-vingt-deez-nuts"). Numbers are quite a mouthful in French. One of the reasons I erased it from my memory the moment I didn't need it no more.
German is so weird. They came up with the concept of a neutral gender, but objects that obviously have no real gender (tables, boxes, sunglasses) don't use neuter.
Like, what's the process when they create a new word.
"Computer".... hmm, I think it's female.
Nah, it's neuter.
You guys are idiots, he's obviously male!
Oh yeah, Gunther is right! Look at him!
No idea why lol.
This always confused me, even as a native speaker so I looked it up some. Ultimately it's because modern German is the confluence of multiple older, historic languages one of which came from a tree with a strict male/female rule for nouns while the other one's grammar defaulted to a neutral case.
As languages merge or adopt from others they often becomes a conjoined mess of multiple rules coexisting at the same time. A contemporary example is that in English the plural of a word is usually formed by attaching the suffix "s" to the singular form, aka house becomes houses. However there's plenty of exceptions (mouse, mice) in particular if the words stem from a different language (octopus, octopi but nowadays octotuses is also acceptable). In that sense to people not privy to the etymology of words and who only study/learn the language per se there would be no perfectly accurate mechanism to predict the plural of a word.
As a consequence my Taiwanese husband calls his mum “he” and his male friends “she” in English lol
My Chinese wife does this all the time.
It can make following a story so hard because people with gendered pronouns hang so much of the story on she said that to him and when the pronouns switch mid story even though she is still talking about the same person I am instantly like wow this doesn't even make sense. How is he now saying stuff to her, I thought he blocked her or something similar.
That is kinda weird. There certainly are different sings for “she”/“她“ and “he”/”他” in chinese characters. Though, both signs are pronounced exactly the same.
I also do this from time to time, but I'm Hungarian. Our politicians however will "save" us from the decaying western liberalism, which is more important than schools, heath care, etc.
My native language is genderless so I really dislike all the gendered grammar and words in different languages. English is very easy but in other cases when you start to have a male and a female version of each word which sometimes can be irregular and give you the clue that ohh yeah this should be male but noooo it's female and in many cases there is just simply no logic behind them it is just the way they are.
English is barely gendered. In Slavic languages, as someone said, verbs are conjugated differently based on gender. In Serbian for instance, to say "I saw him", you would say "Video sam ga" if you were a man, and "Videla sam ga" if you were a woman. In Arabic I think even more things vary based on gender, like "to you" has different forms based on whether "you" are a man or a woman. It might not be specifically that, but I distinctly recall Arabic using gender-based forms for something that Slavic languages don't.
German even has a neutral gender because two aren't enough of a headache lol
Plus 4 cases which makes it so that there are 16 (Masc, Fem, Neutr, Plural X 4 cases) different ways of typing an article depending on the gender of the word and what the word is doing whereas in English this is all replaced by "The". And don't forget about declining the adjective and the noun in some cases.
Rant over.
... Aaaand as it turns out, most European languages are gendered. At least more gendered than ours.
In most European languages you have to worry about misgendering a table.
Yeah, this is a whole thing. In Portuguese, like most other Romance languages I believe, every single noun is gendered, so cars are male, houses are female, and so on and so forth. We have the male pronoun ele (he) and the female one ela (she), and besides these there's also a neutral isso (it) but using that to refer to someone is very rude and dehumanizing, so we basically have no neutral pronouns (when talking about multiple people you generally use the plural male pronoun eles unless they're all women, but some people think that's kinda sexist I guess).
Some people have been trying to create new pronouns to fix that, such as elu, elx and ile, all of which have seen very limited adoption. I like to consider myself a progressive and inclusive person but I just can't bring myself to use these new words, they all sound terrible, it's like I'm butchering the language. So yeah, when talking about someone you don't know in Portuguese you basically have to guess their gender or just ask them what they like more.
I was just going to come and say basically the same. Portuguese has everything gendered, all words, impossible to speak without it. I would very much like to a have a non-gendered language.
Interestingly, written Chinese does have a gendered 'she' pronoun, 她, but it's pronounced the same as the male one, and it's a recent invention meant specifically to improve compatibility with Western languages.
Also, if you want a sample of how this works in English, the narrator / main character of Ann Leckie's "Ancillary" trilogy doesn't understand gendered pronouns and constantly gets them mixed up.
yeah debates over Neo-pronouns are always a really tedious Anglo-centric thing. it's not something that the majority of trans people worldwide are even able to care about
Honestly I wish English was less gendered than it is.
E.g. Nephew/Niece, why is there no proper gender-neutral one. This isn't just for LGBTQ stuff, just seems silly to have everything gendered in general
See: Nibling
Nibbler?
Fair enough, learn a new thing each day haha
Altho I think it still says something about how we use English that I don't think I've ever heard that used
Gender is a myth invented by toilet companies to sell more toilets.
It's a little known fact that men were created in 1925 by a marketing company tasked with selling urinals.
I've stopped learning Chinese when I left the country. I've only had HSK 2, but man do I miss no conjugation, you ate an apple pie for breakfast this morning? Well "This morning breakfast I eat an apple pie".
You already told it was this mornings breakfast with context.
This is something you really see when discovering another language that is not yours. I'm on Modern Speaking Arabic right now and I see it a lot
Technically it's:
今天早上的早餐我吃了一个苹果派
Today morning breakfast I eat(了）an apple pie
You have to put the "了" to be correct
了 is kinda like past tense
Ok but in writing you do, at least if you're my college professors and want to make your students sad
他 third person singular, neutral 她 she 它 it (non-human, especially inanimate) 牠 it (animal) 祂 third person singular (divine)
Reading through the comments is making me interested in the difference in transgendered people in cultures with gendering versus ones that keep it neutral.
Like if there are more trans in neutral cultures because gendering isn't as important, and where gendering is cultural there are less due to an ingrainedness of it all?
Me whose native language conjugates verbs and adjectives according to subject's gender:
wasz język nie wymaga sprecyzowania płci podmiotu w każdym zdaniu?
I recently started very casually learning Chinese, this absolutely blew my mind along with the fact that verbs don't have a billion different forms depending on time and the object of the sentence like all the other languages I know.
It's a manufactured problem by snowflake, conservative douchebags.
We just use the word "they" if we aren't sure. The types upset by this are dumbasses.