I feel that ‘gender’ is probably a misleading term for the languages that have ‘grammatical gender’, it rarely has anything to do with genitalia. ‘Noun class’, where adjectives have to decline to agree with the class would fit better in most cases.
English essentially does not have decline adjectives, except for historical outliers like blond/e where no-one much cares if you don’t bother, and uses his / hers / its / erc using a very predictable rule. So no ‘grammatical gender’.
At some point it was also used as a (probably less common than it is now) synonym for sex.
It was chosen to describe the non-physical concept we now call gender exactly because the original use to describe words doesn’t have anything to do with genitalia – and the intent was that “gender” would refer only to what’s between one’s ears and “sex” only to what’s between one’s legs.
in humans the gender can be any, even when the person has specific genitalia. so saying gender is a misleading term because it rarely has to do with genitalia doesn’t make much sense to me.
so basically i dont see why not just call it gender when the pronouns given to each word in such languages is gendered
English has the peculiarity of having two variants of the same word: “gender” and “genre” with slightly different meanings.
You could lean on it and go with genre. But just changing the word is unlikely to help much, the concept itself is deeply associated with genitalia in English culture, you’d still need to explain it.
I feel that ‘gender’ is probably a misleading term for the languages that have ‘grammatical gender’, it rarely has anything to do with genitalia. ‘Noun class’, where adjectives have to decline to agree with the class would fit better in most cases.
English essentially does not have decline adjectives, except for historical outliers like blond/e where no-one much cares if you don’t bother, and uses his / hers / its / erc using a very predictable rule. So no ‘grammatical gender’.
The word “gender” was a linguistic thing long before it was ever used to describe people. The latter use case didn’t really exist before the 1940s.
If anything, it’s the ‘people definition’ that ought to have to change term names, it’s the newcomer, lol.
I just want pile onto this yeah
Gender was originally used to describe words.
At some point it was also used as a (probably less common than it is now) synonym for sex.
It was chosen to describe the non-physical concept we now call gender exactly because the original use to describe words doesn’t have anything to do with genitalia – and the intent was that “gender” would refer only to what’s between one’s ears and “sex” only to what’s between one’s legs.
in humans the gender can be any, even when the person has specific genitalia. so saying gender is a misleading term because it rarely has to do with genitalia doesn’t make much sense to me.
so basically i dont see why not just call it gender when the pronouns given to each word in such languages is gendered
English has the peculiarity of having two variants of the same word: “gender” and “genre” with slightly different meanings.
You could lean on it and go with genre. But just changing the word is unlikely to help much, the concept itself is deeply associated with genitalia in English culture, you’d still need to explain it.
great,now explain why the water in spanish fits into a noun class with incorrect “the” and why hands do the same thing, but for the opposite class.
bonus : why are fire and door in different noun classes?
the source of this arrogance : first language had no noun classes , nor indefinite articles.