I love linguistics but it has some weird stuff in it.
Chinese doesn’t have gendered pronouns in the spoken language. “He”, “she”, and “it” are all pronounced, “tā”.
Possession and number are done by adding 的 (de) or 们 (men) after the pronoun, irrespective of gender.
Originally, there was only one character for “tā”, 他.
In the early 20th century there were several westernization movements in China. One of them included adding gendered pronouns, in order to be able to more accurately translate English texts.
Thus, 她 (she) and 它 (it) were adopted. (they used to mean other things and were repurposed).
One immediate problem that people noticed was the choice of components. 他 includes the 亻component, which means “person”. 她 replaces it with the 女 component, which means “female”. So some linguists pointed out that this implies that women aren’t people.
The current situation is that people tend to use, 她, when there is a single subject who is known to be female. When it’s unknown or there are multiple subjects they default to, 他 or 他们.
German is heavily gendered. You can still linguistically gender someone correctly but, in addition to pronouns, you also need to match adjectives. You also need to get comfortable with the gender of nouns often not making any logical sense. eg:
Moon - Der Mond - masculine
Girl - Das Mädel/Mädchen - neuter
Sun - Die Sonne - feminine
There’s the added confusion that the third person feminine singular, is spelled and pronounced the same as the second person plural. The second person doesn’t differentiate in gender but it’s often impolite to use the singular so it’s common to refer to males as “Sie”.
Not to say that any of that is hard. Native German speakers constantly need to match the gender of adjectives to nouns so they’re very used to it.
Russian seems to be more complicated. I recently read that Masha Gessen uses, “they”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masha_Gessen It seems that Russian uses gendered past-tense verbs. They originally used masculine verbs out of, “hoping that I would wake up a boy. A real boy” but switched to feminine verbs as a teen and stuck with that. If anyone speaks Russian well I’d love to hear more about how gender is used and perceived in Russian. Particularly from the linguistic, rather than the cultural, perspective. It looks like Russian does have gendered pronouns https://www.russianlessons.net/grammar/pronouns.php but the Wikipedia article doesn’t say which they use.
i like this comment but i feel the need to reply because it touches upon a pet peeve of mine in linguistics: there is a persistent myth in the modern period that grammatical gender is useless, pointless, or somehow arbitrary and is just some sort of vestigial, rotting, lexical limb that made it to the 21st century by fluke.
this is simply not true. just because grammatical gender often appears arbitrary or illogical doesn’t mean it actually is. and just because grammatical gender follows many, many rules does not mean there are no rules. grammatical gender is just a fairly common form of noun class system. as with most forms of noun classing, what the rules are in a given dialect can be a little wishy-washy but they are certainly not arbitrary.
for example, you point out the german Mädchen as an example of illogical noun gendering. this is an opinion often expressed by foreigners learning the language, and even by linguistically-ignorant germans. it makes sense on the face of it, this word has a similar meaning to the english phrase “little girl,” so it is strange the germans decided to sort this word into the neuter gender, no?
well, no. it isn’t strange and it isn’t illogical, in actuality. -chen is a diminutive in german. for those who are unaware, diminutives are suffixes/prefixes in languages that serve to make nouns feel smaller or more cute in a language. think booklet vs book or dog vs doggie for some english examples.
what are some examples of more german diminutives?
das Kätzchen - kitten
das Hündchen - puppy
das Plätzchen - a cookie (depends on dialect exactly what this refers to afaik but generally is always some sort of cookie)
das Ohrläppchen - earlobe
noticing a trend? these are all neuter! and thus we uncover a little grammatical rule that grammatical gender was trying to tell us. all diminutives are neuter.
most every “arbitrary” example of grammatical gender people provide has some sort of similar reasoning or rule behind it, some story or information it is trying to give you that makes speaking the language that much easier.
just because what it is encoding doesn’t seem useful or logical to (rhetorical) you doesn’t mean it is not. grammatical gender is much more than just gender-washing everyday speech for kicks and does carry useful meaning, if you can be bothered to puzzle it out. attempts i’ve seen to “de-gender” spanish (this is just what is local to me) all fundamentally misunderstand what it is they’re even trying to do and often opt for rotely tearing out the entire gendered case system without offering proper lexical and linguistic infrastructure for the language to actually effectively function without it. these attempts sound clunky because they are clunky! and to be perfectly clear i’m not dogging on the premise, just the serious attempts i’ve seen implemented in real life speech and their implementation. i think it’s relevant bc it showcases how modern misunderstanding of what grammatical gender is can realize as actual, negative manifestations in the non-conceptual world. why this is important to think about more than passingly!
Thank you for your thorough response.
You make some good points. I think we’re talking about slightly different topics though.
There’s always some explanation to why certain words or grammar forms evolved. Sometimes those reasons are commonly known, sometimes the “commonly known” reasons are wrong, sometimes linguists argue about the origin, sometimes they have no idea.
For everyday speakers, the “logic” of immediate usage, is more important than the etymology.
German speakers are generally aware of the “rule” that diminutives are neuter. If you look at this list words, some of them have non-diminutive forms;
Die Katze
Der Hund
Die Ohrlappe
Two of them don’t really.
“Platz” is grammatically, the non-diminutive form of “Plätzchen” but it doesn’t mean “(normal sized) cookie” (aside: Not to make fun of our Northern friends but “Keks” gets around that confusion)
“Magd” is the non-diminutive form of “Mädel” but girls aren’t (generally) “little maids.” I can’t remember the last time I heard anyone say, “magd” to refer to a living person.
Also notice that when we strip off the diminutives, the remaining words are no more “logical”. Cats and earlobes aren’t inherently feminine and dogs aren’t inherently male.
My usage of “logic” in the context of German grammar, is that grammatical gender is often at odds with both self identified gender and biological gender. German speakers are generally comfortable saying “Der” about subjects, that nobody would think of as male. German speakers are likewise comfortable saying “Sie” about subjects that nobody would think of as female and, “Das” to subjects that are very obviously not neuter.
The reason for contrasting several languages was that I suspect there are different cognitive loads involved in correctly gendering people, depending on language.
Many people notice that native Chinese speakers routinely “randomize” he/she/it. They don’t just misgender trans-people, they often just forget which one means which.
German speakers are pretty used to playing around with endings to imply additional meaning. “Dutzen” is often done without the word “du”. Speakers easily put together the correct endings for the singular and listeners instantly recognize the implication.
As a final example, I’d offer the sentence, “___ ist ein fesch__ ___.” I posit that if I insert “Die” vs “Der” into the sentence, most German speakers would instantly correctly fill in the rest of the blanks with, “-es Madl” or “-er Bua”. If you try to say the wrong one it just sounds weird.
The big thing that people get wrong and which makes me so very tired is that IT’S NOT SOCIETAL GENDER, it’s just a case of terrible terminology that we’re stuck with. A chair isn’t feminine or whatever, it’s just that words related to femininity happen to be in the same class as other words.
I really wish we could all agree to call it basically anything else, like “genre” which shares the same root but doesn’t create the connotation to societal gender.
And Finnish doesn’t have any gendered words. Aside from a few suffixes you can use for professions to imply gender, and I think that’s more because other languages had it so the difference needed translation.
As in actor/actress näyttelijä/näyttelijätär. But using any would sound very archaic.
“Hän on tuolla.”
“He/she is there.” You have to either write it that way or assume a gender, and writing he/she isn’t equal either because writing it “she/he” could seem weird (and make you think of Michael Jackson singing.)
Interesting. I know very little about Finnish other than that the Uralic languages are _very_different from the Indo-European or Sinitic ones.
So how does that play out in Finish when it comes to gender identification?
Let’s say someone wants to transition. Does anything change linguistically? Are there other social queues people would use to indicate that they acknowledge/support the transition? Or is it more of a, “You do you because we don’t have the grammar to have a conversation about it?”
Let’s say someone wants to transition. Does anything change linguistically?
Their name, and that’s it. edit like aside from some one directly addressing you with a title like miss or mister, we do have those. Or going “what’s up guys” but that’s sort of as neutral as it in English, as in technically refers to males but can be used to refer to a group of mixed genders. But aside from using a noun that means a female, then no. No word conjugate differently, we have no articles, nothing.
Are there other social queues people would use to indicate that they acknowledge/support the transition
Acknowledge? Sure. In a positive way? I doubt it.
Idk how it is in the capital area, which is arguably at least a tad more progressive, but people where I live (which is likely a bit more than an hour by train from Helsinki), people are still very casually racist, homophobic, transphobic, etc.
I genuinely socially isolated because I have principles and for example I was getting to know this news group people, not bad, were had fun meetings and activities. One time though, after an activity the group split into basically some of the men and most women and a few guys went home.
After talking for some time, I had heard, amongst other things, how homelessness is a choice, and how “transgenderism is brainwashing the youth”, “I can always spot them” (there really aren’t many trans people in my city dude was basically deluding himself into thinking every third rough looking girl he met had a penis) and then from a guy I thought more reasonable I heard “they could’ve been normal”.
That’s when I walked away.
Finland definitely isn’t the happiest country in the world that’s a huge myth. You can’t even transition without getting sterilised. (Although I haven’t checked on that for a year or two.) “Gender” and “sex” is conflated by many in English, but at least English has two different words. Try explaining the difference between “gender” and “sex” to some ill-read, inbred Finnish transphobe when both of those words translate as “sukupuoli”.
Finland is easy to live in. If your requirements are not dying of hunger and having an apartment, but if you think lifestyle should has joy, emotional and you should be able to have a chance at any sort of self-fulfillment, then don’t move here.
I love linguistics but it has some weird stuff in it.
Chinese doesn’t have gendered pronouns in the spoken language. “He”, “she”, and “it” are all pronounced, “tā”. Possession and number are done by adding 的 (de) or 们 (men) after the pronoun, irrespective of gender. Originally, there was only one character for “tā”, 他. In the early 20th century there were several westernization movements in China. One of them included adding gendered pronouns, in order to be able to more accurately translate English texts. Thus, 她 (she) and 它 (it) were adopted. (they used to mean other things and were repurposed). One immediate problem that people noticed was the choice of components. 他 includes the 亻component, which means “person”. 她 replaces it with the 女 component, which means “female”. So some linguists pointed out that this implies that women aren’t people. The current situation is that people tend to use, 她, when there is a single subject who is known to be female. When it’s unknown or there are multiple subjects they default to, 他 or 他们.
German is heavily gendered. You can still linguistically gender someone correctly but, in addition to pronouns, you also need to match adjectives. You also need to get comfortable with the gender of nouns often not making any logical sense. eg:
Moon - Der Mond - masculine
Girl - Das Mädel/Mädchen - neuter
Sun - Die Sonne - feminine
There’s the added confusion that the third person feminine singular, is spelled and pronounced the same as the second person plural. The second person doesn’t differentiate in gender but it’s often impolite to use the singular so it’s common to refer to males as “Sie”. Not to say that any of that is hard. Native German speakers constantly need to match the gender of adjectives to nouns so they’re very used to it.
Russian seems to be more complicated. I recently read that Masha Gessen uses, “they”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masha_Gessen It seems that Russian uses gendered past-tense verbs. They originally used masculine verbs out of, “hoping that I would wake up a boy. A real boy” but switched to feminine verbs as a teen and stuck with that. If anyone speaks Russian well I’d love to hear more about how gender is used and perceived in Russian. Particularly from the linguistic, rather than the cultural, perspective. It looks like Russian does have gendered pronouns https://www.russianlessons.net/grammar/pronouns.php but the Wikipedia article doesn’t say which they use.
edit: clarifications and grammar
i like this comment but i feel the need to reply because it touches upon a pet peeve of mine in linguistics: there is a persistent myth in the modern period that grammatical gender is useless, pointless, or somehow arbitrary and is just some sort of vestigial, rotting, lexical limb that made it to the 21st century by fluke.
this is simply not true. just because grammatical gender often appears arbitrary or illogical doesn’t mean it actually is. and just because grammatical gender follows many, many rules does not mean there are no rules. grammatical gender is just a fairly common form of noun class system. as with most forms of noun classing, what the rules are in a given dialect can be a little wishy-washy but they are certainly not arbitrary.
for example, you point out the german Mädchen as an example of illogical noun gendering. this is an opinion often expressed by foreigners learning the language, and even by linguistically-ignorant germans. it makes sense on the face of it, this word has a similar meaning to the english phrase “little girl,” so it is strange the germans decided to sort this word into the neuter gender, no?
well, no. it isn’t strange and it isn’t illogical, in actuality. -chen is a diminutive in german. for those who are unaware, diminutives are suffixes/prefixes in languages that serve to make nouns feel smaller or more cute in a language. think booklet vs book or dog vs doggie for some english examples.
what are some examples of more german diminutives?
das Kätzchen - kitten
das Hündchen - puppy
das Plätzchen - a cookie (depends on dialect exactly what this refers to afaik but generally is always some sort of cookie)
das Ohrläppchen - earlobe
noticing a trend? these are all neuter! and thus we uncover a little grammatical rule that grammatical gender was trying to tell us. all diminutives are neuter.
most every “arbitrary” example of grammatical gender people provide has some sort of similar reasoning or rule behind it, some story or information it is trying to give you that makes speaking the language that much easier.
just because what it is encoding doesn’t seem useful or logical to (rhetorical) you doesn’t mean it is not. grammatical gender is much more than just gender-washing everyday speech for kicks and does carry useful meaning, if you can be bothered to puzzle it out. attempts i’ve seen to “de-gender” spanish (this is just what is local to me) all fundamentally misunderstand what it is they’re even trying to do and often opt for rotely tearing out the entire gendered case system without offering proper lexical and linguistic infrastructure for the language to actually effectively function without it. these attempts sound clunky because they are clunky! and to be perfectly clear i’m not dogging on the premise, just the serious attempts i’ve seen implemented in real life speech and their implementation. i think it’s relevant bc it showcases how modern misunderstanding of what grammatical gender is can realize as actual, negative manifestations in the non-conceptual world. why this is important to think about more than passingly!
edit:formatting
Thank you for your thorough response. You make some good points. I think we’re talking about slightly different topics though.
There’s always some explanation to why certain words or grammar forms evolved. Sometimes those reasons are commonly known, sometimes the “commonly known” reasons are wrong, sometimes linguists argue about the origin, sometimes they have no idea.
For everyday speakers, the “logic” of immediate usage, is more important than the etymology.
German speakers are generally aware of the “rule” that diminutives are neuter. If you look at this list words, some of them have non-diminutive forms; Die Katze
Der Hund
Die Ohrlappe
Two of them don’t really.
“Platz” is grammatically, the non-diminutive form of “Plätzchen” but it doesn’t mean “(normal sized) cookie” (aside: Not to make fun of our Northern friends but “Keks” gets around that confusion) “Magd” is the non-diminutive form of “Mädel” but girls aren’t (generally) “little maids.” I can’t remember the last time I heard anyone say, “magd” to refer to a living person.
Also notice that when we strip off the diminutives, the remaining words are no more “logical”. Cats and earlobes aren’t inherently feminine and dogs aren’t inherently male.
My usage of “logic” in the context of German grammar, is that grammatical gender is often at odds with both self identified gender and biological gender. German speakers are generally comfortable saying “Der” about subjects, that nobody would think of as male. German speakers are likewise comfortable saying “Sie” about subjects that nobody would think of as female and, “Das” to subjects that are very obviously not neuter.
The reason for contrasting several languages was that I suspect there are different cognitive loads involved in correctly gendering people, depending on language. Many people notice that native Chinese speakers routinely “randomize” he/she/it. They don’t just misgender trans-people, they often just forget which one means which. German speakers are pretty used to playing around with endings to imply additional meaning. “Dutzen” is often done without the word “du”. Speakers easily put together the correct endings for the singular and listeners instantly recognize the implication.
As a final example, I’d offer the sentence, “___ ist ein fesch__ ___.” I posit that if I insert “Die” vs “Der” into the sentence, most German speakers would instantly correctly fill in the rest of the blanks with, “-es Madl” or “-er Bua”. If you try to say the wrong one it just sounds weird.
The big thing that people get wrong and which makes me so very tired is that IT’S NOT SOCIETAL GENDER, it’s just a case of terrible terminology that we’re stuck with. A chair isn’t feminine or whatever, it’s just that words related to femininity happen to be in the same class as other words.
I really wish we could all agree to call it basically anything else, like “genre” which shares the same root but doesn’t create the connotation to societal gender.
And Finnish doesn’t have any gendered words. Aside from a few suffixes you can use for professions to imply gender, and I think that’s more because other languages had it so the difference needed translation.
As in actor/actress näyttelijä/näyttelijätär. But using any would sound very archaic.
“Hän on tuolla.”
“He/she is there.” You have to either write it that way or assume a gender, and writing he/she isn’t equal either because writing it “she/he” could seem weird (and make you think of Michael Jackson singing.)
Interesting. I know very little about Finnish other than that the Uralic languages are _very_different from the Indo-European or Sinitic ones.
So how does that play out in Finish when it comes to gender identification?
Let’s say someone wants to transition. Does anything change linguistically? Are there other social queues people would use to indicate that they acknowledge/support the transition? Or is it more of a, “You do you because we don’t have the grammar to have a conversation about it?”
Their name, and that’s it. edit like aside from some one directly addressing you with a title like miss or mister, we do have those. Or going “what’s up guys” but that’s sort of as neutral as it in English, as in technically refers to males but can be used to refer to a group of mixed genders. But aside from using a noun that means a female, then no. No word conjugate differently, we have no articles, nothing.
Acknowledge? Sure. In a positive way? I doubt it.
Idk how it is in the capital area, which is arguably at least a tad more progressive, but people where I live (which is likely a bit more than an hour by train from Helsinki), people are still very casually racist, homophobic, transphobic, etc.
I genuinely socially isolated because I have principles and for example I was getting to know this news group people, not bad, were had fun meetings and activities. One time though, after an activity the group split into basically some of the men and most women and a few guys went home.
After talking for some time, I had heard, amongst other things, how homelessness is a choice, and how “transgenderism is brainwashing the youth”, “I can always spot them” (there really aren’t many trans people in my city dude was basically deluding himself into thinking every third rough looking girl he met had a penis) and then from a guy I thought more reasonable I heard “they could’ve been normal”.
That’s when I walked away.
Finland definitely isn’t the happiest country in the world that’s a huge myth. You can’t even transition without getting sterilised. (Although I haven’t checked on that for a year or two.) “Gender” and “sex” is conflated by many in English, but at least English has two different words. Try explaining the difference between “gender” and “sex” to some ill-read, inbred Finnish transphobe when both of those words translate as “sukupuoli”.
Finland is easy to live in. If your requirements are not dying of hunger and having an apartment, but if you think lifestyle should has joy, emotional and you should be able to have a chance at any sort of self-fulfillment, then don’t move here.