• Mwalimu@baraza.africa
    3·
    9 months ago

    Same here. My native langauge is not gendered and I rarely associate “man” in academic spaces with “gender” category. I usually need more info to tilt to gender in discussions.

    • multifariace@lemmy.world
      05·
      9 months ago

      Which is your native language? I keep looking for ways to ungender my english if possible. Removing gender from language feels more honest.

      • Mwalimu@baraza.africa
        5·
        9 months ago

        Swahili. If you want to translate “she/he went to the river”, you say “Alienda mtoni” which collapses she/he into the subject A- (Alienda) to mean “the person”. You always need context to use a gendered word (like mwanamke for woman) otherwise general conversation does not foreground it. There is literally no word for he/she in Swahili, as far as I know.

      • Gabu@lemmy.world
        51·
        9 months ago

        That shows you have no idea what grammatical gender is. It has no relation to your social behavior or what you have between your legs.

        • multifariace@lemmy.world
          1·
          9 months ago

          I’m not sure if you were responding to my question or if you are presumptuous and angry. I hope you have a nice day.

      • robotica@lemmy.world
        11·
        9 months ago

        English is not a grammatically gendered language. Otherwise, all languages have gender.

        • multifariace@lemmy.world
          1·
          9 months ago

          Why do I have to know the gender of a person in order to talk about them in third person singular? On more days than not, there is conversation about someone I never met where there is an irrelevant sidebar to clarify gender before communication can continue. I find this relic of the language to be inefficient, pointless and annoying. Daily life would be a lot easier with a non-gendered word for referring to a single person in third person. Languages like Spanish, with gendered nouns, is confusing for even native speakers. I am fascinated by how different languages have different ways of being complicated as well as by their phonology and syntax. I asked my question because I was looking into how other languages use gender and came to the conclusion that none were free from that complication. So I agree with you so far. All languages have gender.

        • Gabu@lemmy.world
          21·
          9 months ago

          False, English is a gendered language that lost most of its gender usage. Some words still retain gender, such as blond/blonde.

          • robotica@lemmy.world
            11·
            9 months ago

            🤦‍♂️Yes, in that sense, English could be gendered. But what it actually means is that English used to be gendered and retains some gendered words from that time.

            Another example, Russian has noun cases, but not the vocative case. However, it does have two words that have a vocative case from when the language as a whole did use to have the vocative case - Бог (Боже) and Господь (Господи) - but that doesn’t mean that Russian has it now.

            Also, blond/blonde are pronounced the same so the distinction is lost in speech and probably soon in writing as well, and words like fiancé/fiancée (which are also pronounced the same), widow/widower, actor/actress do not signify grammatical gender by itself.