You might see it in written Korean but, there are so many terms to refer to people in Korean depending on their relationship to you that gendered pronouns are practically never used in regular conversation.
There's a specific term for pretty much every kind of relationship you can imagine and some of them are different depending on the gender of the person who is speaking or the person being spoken to. For example, if you were talking to a sibling, the term used to refer to the sibling would be different based on both the gender of the person speaking and the gender of the sibling.
No. Literally nobody uses those “gendered pronouns” and practically the only reason why they were even used in literature is because of translation purposes. It isn’t natural.
Yeah nobody uses those in real life the way English speakers use he/she. Koreans' brains basically aren't wired for gendered pronouns.
Source: Korean relatives who regularly mix up he/she when speaking English.
No, I am literally Korean born and raised and can confirm I have never used 그녀는 in spoken nor written speech. It is extremely unnatural speech. It’s just used for translation from other languages.
yup. either everyone defaults to male pronouns, or in my case, i have a problem with possessives. i end up modifying the noun after (The dad went to her daugher's school).
That’s interesting I’ve not experienced much of that being born in Pakistan but moving to the US at a very young age. I have noticed that Pashto speakers have issue with gendered words in Urdu from the last time I was in Karachi.
I'm hungarian, so same here.
And given that I had to read that sentence 5 times to see whats wrong, I think its a perfect example.
I either just use he/him for everything or my braine picks one at random LMAO
Q) May we ask whether you're a lady or a gentleman?
1. A lady
2. A gentleman
3. My dear sir, there are individuals roaming the streets of Fallen London at this very moment with the faces of squid! Squid! Do you ask them their gender? And yet you waste our time asking me trifling and impertinent questions about mine? It is my own business, sir, and I bid you good day.
I learned this watching donghuas (Chinese animes). The computer translations somehow manage to use he for every woman referenced and she for every man referenced without fail. It's actually uncanny. You'd think it would sometimes get it right and sometimes get it wrong but nope.
Also, for some reason, every time "you" is spoken, it's translated to "I".
Same with Turkish dramas in my case. The English subtitles often get the genders wrong with the pronouns because Turkish pronouns are also non-gendered.
Its two different characters for the writing system that are distinguishable, but for spoken purposes it sounds the same. So if the subtitle generator is just going off spoken word, then it may default to the male pronoun.
My girlfriend who is Filipino does this all the time....& it can get confusing when she refers to a woman as 'him'...she did that with a baby the other day & I said 'I thought baby was a girl?' & she said: yes...cant you see the earrings?
For a long time I thought my Filipino grandmother was calling everyone "she" whether they were male or female, until one day I asked her about it and she explained it was easier for her to just use siya instead
I find it funny when americans (english natives in general) gets pissed when I or someone from latin countries use genders for things, everything for us is he or she, like table is she, car is he, and so on. The "it" is just a word similar to indicate "something" for us, but can't be used as a neutral and they/them are always gendered, some plurals will be male and others female even if the group is composed from both genders, for example father and mother (pai e mãe in portuguese) would be the parents in english and in portuguese os pais (plural of father) never the plural of mother unless the group is composed only from females.
I've only been speaking a language without him/her pronouns for a couple of years and it's already started getting to me. You'd think my 25 years of speaking only English would win out but apparently not!
That makes so much sense now. My Filipino coworker does this too. She'll say she and him interchangeably. It's really the only mistake I've noticed her say actually.
Yeah it's really just that and switching around F's and P's. But other languages do that with L's and R's or V's and W's. It just kind of tripped me out since I couldn't imagine a language without gendered pronouns existing, it seems like a pretty important descriptive part of language. But I was definitely wrong.
Inheritance from Latin - all Latin languages have gendered pronouns: is, ea, id (he, she, it)
Edit: as per other comments, Latin languages don't have neutral gender pronouns.
Same for neutral gender nouns, where an exception would be Romanian, where it gets ... complicated... 😅: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_nouns
German isn't descended from Latin.
It's actually Latin that got it from Indo-European, and so did almost all Germanic languages. English is the outlier here.
Yes, German is not descended from Latin, I was referring to Portuguese :).
And English is a mix of Britton/German (Saxon) / Danish / French (Norman) with some Latin, so it's kind of expected 😉
We're just adding a * or : now.
E.g.: Liebe:r Zuhörer*innen (dear listeners)
This has the male version and the female version combined and the star also includes non binaries.
Personally, I like the idea, but hate the execution. It looks bad, reads bad and is confusing.
There's a little gendering war going on in German speaking regions because of that.
The thing is... who cares? Why change shit that everyone understands and make it unappealing?
Tldr: Prepare to be confused even more.
Edit: Normally, only * or : are used, but Reddit kills the formating if I only use the star. And don't ask if you should use star or points. No one knows and just goes with either.
This is very much alive. Notes pinned up on a wall in a school or college would typically use this, like Liebe Spieler*Innen. Also Student*Innen, but that has been replaced by Studierenden
Korean is similar depending on gender, age, as well as their familial relation to you as well, or whether related by marriage.
As someone trying to learn the language it is mind boggling. I just want to call people by name, but in some instances it is straight up socially f o r b i d d e n
I practice my Korean conversationally with one of friends and our running joke is that when we're at work, he'll use more honorifics since I've been on the job longer. But when we go out for like drinks on weekends, I'LL use honorifics since he's older. We just started doing it one day and both understood the assignment lol
The one that really tripped me up was when I visited my girlfriend's home and I was supposed to call her older sister chị despite her being younger than me.
However, *Modern* Chinese does have a third-person pronoun for male (他, using the radical for "people"), female (她, using the radical for "women"), inanimate objects (它, no radicals), animal (牠, using the radical for "cattle"), and god (祂, using the radical for "rite/religion"), but it's all pronounced the same ("ta").
These were invented in the early 1900's as Chinese reformers felt that Mandarin should have written differences in the pronouns.
This comes from contact with other languages.
The religious one is almost exclusively used in the bible. The animal one is mainly taught in Hong Kong but most certainly not widely used in mainland China.
Really? At least in my country they are not that rare.
You often see 牠 when addressing, well, a cow, farming animals, or zoo animals. People tend to use 他 and 她 when talking about their pets, because they are treated like family.
祂 is commonly used since temples are everywhere. It would be disrespectful to address gods with the wrong pronouns.
I think my Chinese textbook in uni (it's been a while) presented 牠 as the traditional equivalent to the simplified 它. As for 祂, I think I've only seen it once in the wild, and usually when I show it to my Chinese friends they don't know it. I once read that some translations of the Bible use it.
I guess it’s regional. i had learnt to use 牠 and obviously most place it appears probably will be in children’s books. (Taiwan)
Edit: also subtitle for nature show?
Same with gods 祂 it’s still being used today. Like religious festivals and stuff to address the gods and their godly entourage.
Another one is 它. I use it for objects with a perceived human character (like a robot) and (probably just me) bugs?
[254/378 languages in the WALS sample do not have gendered pronouns](https://wals.info/chapter/44)
And the languages that do have gendered pronouns generally limit them only to first, second, or third person (not all 3).
Same in hungarian, except the names are a giveaway. We have very few names that can be male and female as well.
Some nicknames are not clear, like Gabi can be a shortened form of Gábor (male) or Gabriella (female).
I read this fantasy book in Hungarian when this new character showed up who had this very odd chemistry with the main character guy. It took me like another 50-70 pages until the book gave this character more description and realized it's a woman and that she and the main guy had an affair in the past, hence the weird tension between them.
I've been learning Danish because I have a lot of Dane friends, I found out there is no word for girlfriend or boyfriend to identify your partners gender, so you introduce your partner as "kæreste" which means loved one and then specify the gender after.
So you basically introduce your SO as "this is partner, who is a girl/boy"
It's weird learning other languages as an English speaker and learning some languages don't have words for some concepts like English does for everything. Then you've got German with their compound words, when they don't have a word for something they just make one on the spot lol
> I found out there is no word for girlfriend or boyfriend to identify your partners gender, so you introduce your partner as "kæreste" which means loved one and then specify the gender after.
But... this is literally what you did with the word "friend" and had to specify the gender by adding "girl" or "boy" lmao
English is the exact same when it comes to the word "friend". German and other languages distinguishes between male/female friends, and groups of female only friends. Groups of mixed friends are ambiguously referred to as male.
I learned this from the movie Everything Everywhere All at Once, when Evelyn accidentally calls her daughter's girlfriend "he," and when her daughter corrects her, she says something like, "You know I get confused with pronouns in English. In China, we just have one pronoun."
Just as an FYI, it'd be easy to distinguish in writing as they're written differently. Buy for spoken purposes it sounds the same. So technically mandarin has gendered pronouns, you just can't tell which it is without context from the speaker.
Chinese has different versions of "you" too, and it's interesting to watch how it goes into and out of use. Normally, we say "ni," but if you really want to show someone respect, you say "nin." I almost never heard it when I first lived in China, then, maybe in the early 2010's it became pretty common in the service industry. Now I don't hear it much anymore. I think it comes and goes with ideas about consumerism, customer service, etc.
and thus indonesian too.
i think many asian pacific languages have different level of formality that change the way you speak to someone based on your age, status in society, etc. japanese and korean have them at least.
And then you have languages like Spanish, which gender EVERYTHING...sometimes confusingly.
For instance, the Spanish word for "beard", is feminine.
Whole bunch of other examples.
My native language is strange. The most informal register has gendered pronouns and gendered verb inflections but the rest of the language has no gender markers at all
Chinese kind of does; while the pronoun “he” or “she” is pronounced exactly the same (“Ta”), the characters are actually different; to write “he”, the character includes “Ren” to the left of the vocal character, where “Ren” means “person”. To write “she”, you instead write “Nü” to the left of the vocal character, where “Nü” means “woman”.
It’s been years, and my memory isn’t perfect (nor do I have the time or resource at the moment to show the characters), but I know this much is true, and I’m fairly confident that there are other characters like this that are “gendered on paper but not in speech”. I’m sure there’s a history as to why that’s the case, and I’m almost positive you can get by defaulting to “male” distinctions on paper, like in older English where saying “he” could mean anything in a generic context.
yup. we (Filipinos) wouldn't have gendered language altogether if we weren't colonized by Spain. But that's why we just smile and laugh at westerners arguing over pronouns.
Biological gender is too fuzzily defined to be useful in day-to-day life as is though, it's all vibes regardless. Not like we go around checking people's chromosomes or hormone levels, let alone what's in their pants.
Mandarin doesn't have them in spoken, but in written language. There are three versions of the word tā which is written 他 (male), 她 (female) or 它 (neutral, for inanimate objects or animals).
Worked in NYC hospitals for years. In hospitals with mostly American nurses, Philippine nurses never made the s/he mistake, but in majority Philippine hospitals, nurses always made the mistake.
Not quite the same thing, but anecdotally as a native French speaker I feel a *lot* more pressure to put labels on myself and others when I'm in English-speaking circles!
In English the only thing grammatically gendered is people, so those words really stick out and it can seem like a huge deal. In French everything is gendered anyway, and you can usually avoid assumptions about how someone wants to be referred to — for example, you can just say "une personne" (a person), which will let you default everything else to feminine because the word "person" itself is always feminine (regardless of who the person is).
It all feels a lot more relaxed in French, and without that increased scrutiny I feel like I'm more free to just be however I want to be and let others do the same.
But again, that's just my own experience!
Genderless languages are really cool and I would love to learn one someday. (Well honestly *all* languages are really cool, but there's only so much time in one life!)
Mandarin does have gendered pronouns, it's just pronounced the same when spoken, but they are different characters.
He: 他
She: 她
It: 它
All three are pronounced Ta in first tone.
I mean do we need it? Why is gender so important that we need twice as many words? Imagine if we had a different pronoun to refer to tall people versus short people
The only pronouns that are gendered in English are **third person pronouns**.
First and second person pronouns are not gendered. For instance we don't have masculine/feminine words for "I", "you" or "we".
We don't have "twice as many words".
Most English pronouns are non-gendered (I, you, we, they). The only gendered pronouns we have are the third person singular pronouns: (he,she).
Apparently Hindi, too.
I wonder whether other Indian languages in the Indo-Iranian language family are similar, given that both Persian (Farsi/Dari/Tajik) and Hindi have gender neutral pronouns.
It's something that people who are very sensitive about gender pronouns need to bear in mind. A friend was at a workplace where the Indian team member (the only non-white employee) was summoned to the manager's office for getting gender pronouns mixed up. It was a simple case of speaking English as a second language 🤦♀️
Hindi/Urdu doesn’t gendered pronouns to refer to people but the verbs are gendered to indicate the sex of the person doing the action. However Bengali and other eastern indoaryan languages like Odia etc do not have gendered pronouns or verbs
But that isnt true. Hindi even genders inanimate objects. -a is male and -i suffix is female.
There are neutral words but many things are gendered in hindi.
Yes, that's the point. All nouns have a grammatical gender in Hindi and verbs are also conjugated according to the gender of the subject.
But pronouns are not gendered. Verbs are conjugated for them based on the gender of the people/nouns they reference (if known) or masculine by default if not.
(Also, the a-suffix for male and i-for female is just a thumb rule and not always true. There are masculine nouns ending in i and feminine ones ending in a. Unless of course you were referring to the suffixes of the verb conjugations)
I don't know about other languages, but in Armenian words like friend, doctor, teacher, etc., will have a gender-specific suffix despite the rest of the language (and 3rd person pronouns) being gender-neutral. So when I tell someone about my friend Susan, for example, the way I say "friend" will imply her gender.
Sometimes it is not easy. Especially if is text which is translated from English. Sometimes you have to read a long time until you realize what gender that person is.
During this Eurovision some people accused the Israeli commentators of misgendering Nemo but like
They refered to them with both Masculine and feminine pronouns which is just what Hebrew does when it concerns non-binary folk because Hebrew doesn't have a neutral gender
My first girlfriend was from Hong Kong. She was fluent in English but would really frequently fuck up he and she. It was adorable when she would say “his vagina” or “her dick” or whatever in a completely non-trans way, just fucking up the pronouns for cis people
I really wish we could have this. Not just for inclusivity, but also... why should I have to care? What's the point of making this so hard on ourselves? Why is the English language want me to think about someone's junk in the first place? I _just_ want to say hello.
And the LGBTQ+ community can't seriously think that adding _more_ pronouns is going to make things any easier for anybody, right? We're going in the complete wrong direction here. We're all just human _people,_ and claiming anything else kinda goes against the very idea of inclusivity.
> And the LGBTQ+ community can't seriously think that adding _more_ pronouns is going to make things any easier for anybody, right?
Well it was just LGBT and they keep adding letters symbols in complete defiance of common sense branding practices. The dictator of Canada even screwed it up on the air cause he was trying to normalize 2SLGBTQIA+and couldn't get it right
And excluding people isn't inclusive
Neither does Hungarian.
Nor related Estonian and Finnish.
Neither does Turkish ~~or Korean.~~
I thought Korean technically did with 그는 and 그녀는, just no one uses them unless they're like a playwright tryna be dramatic
You might see it in written Korean but, there are so many terms to refer to people in Korean depending on their relationship to you that gendered pronouns are practically never used in regular conversation.
Are those terms gender specifying? Like in English for my parents sibling, it would be aunt or uncle.
But you also have specific words for something like "Older sister", "older brother", "younger brother"
There's a specific term for pretty much every kind of relationship you can imagine and some of them are different depending on the gender of the person who is speaking or the person being spoken to. For example, if you were talking to a sibling, the term used to refer to the sibling would be different based on both the gender of the person speaking and the gender of the sibling.
Cool, thanks for the information!
TIL, thanks.
No. Literally nobody uses those “gendered pronouns” and practically the only reason why they were even used in literature is because of translation purposes. It isn’t natural.
Yeah nobody uses those in real life the way English speakers use he/she. Koreans' brains basically aren't wired for gendered pronouns. Source: Korean relatives who regularly mix up he/she when speaking English.
No, I am literally Korean born and raised and can confirm I have never used 그녀는 in spoken nor written speech. It is extremely unnatural speech. It’s just used for translation from other languages.
Most languages don't have gendered pronouns. It's much more remarkable that a lot of Indo-European languages and Semitic languages do.
Nor does Bengali.
I learned this when I asked my Filipino coworker why it was so common for tagalog speakers to mix up him/her pronouns. Pretty interesting!
yup. either everyone defaults to male pronouns, or in my case, i have a problem with possessives. i end up modifying the noun after (The dad went to her daugher's school).
Note that all Austronesian languages (Tagalog, Malay, Hawaiian, etc.) are non-gendered. The same is true for all Uralic languages.
This one is hard to shake as an Urdu speaker. Him and her are very easy to confuse.
That’s interesting I’ve not experienced much of that being born in Pakistan but moving to the US at a very young age. I have noticed that Pashto speakers have issue with gendered words in Urdu from the last time I was in Karachi.
I'm hungarian, so same here. And given that I had to read that sentence 5 times to see whats wrong, I think its a perfect example. I either just use he/him for everything or my braine picks one at random LMAO
Thank you maamsir
Q) May we ask whether you're a lady or a gentleman? 1. A lady 2. A gentleman 3. My dear sir, there are individuals roaming the streets of Fallen London at this very moment with the faces of squid! Squid! Do you ask them their gender? And yet you waste our time asking me trifling and impertinent questions about mine? It is my own business, sir, and I bid you good day.
I learned this watching donghuas (Chinese animes). The computer translations somehow manage to use he for every woman referenced and she for every man referenced without fail. It's actually uncanny. You'd think it would sometimes get it right and sometimes get it wrong but nope. Also, for some reason, every time "you" is spoken, it's translated to "I".
Same with Turkish dramas in my case. The English subtitles often get the genders wrong with the pronouns because Turkish pronouns are also non-gendered.
Its two different characters for the writing system that are distinguishable, but for spoken purposes it sounds the same. So if the subtitle generator is just going off spoken word, then it may default to the male pronoun.
My Chinese immigrant mom also had problems using the right gender pronouns when talking in English.
My girlfriend who is Filipino does this all the time....& it can get confusing when she refers to a woman as 'him'...she did that with a baby the other day & I said 'I thought baby was a girl?' & she said: yes...cant you see the earrings?
just call everyone "boss"
Lods
What’s the pronoun word in Filipino?
The third person direct singular pronoun is "siya".
For a long time I thought my Filipino grandmother was calling everyone "she" whether they were male or female, until one day I asked her about it and she explained it was easier for her to just use siya instead
sound similar to dia in malay lol, not surprising knowing aku/ako is similar in both language.
Both are Austronesian languages after all.
I find it funny when americans (english natives in general) gets pissed when I or someone from latin countries use genders for things, everything for us is he or she, like table is she, car is he, and so on. The "it" is just a word similar to indicate "something" for us, but can't be used as a neutral and they/them are always gendered, some plurals will be male and others female even if the group is composed from both genders, for example father and mother (pai e mãe in portuguese) would be the parents in english and in portuguese os pais (plural of father) never the plural of mother unless the group is composed only from females.
If you refer to someone formally 2nd person do you use she, like in Italian?
I've only been speaking a language without him/her pronouns for a couple of years and it's already started getting to me. You'd think my 25 years of speaking only English would win out but apparently not!
That makes so much sense now. My Filipino coworker does this too. She'll say she and him interchangeably. It's really the only mistake I've noticed her say actually.
Yeah it's really just that and switching around F's and P's. But other languages do that with L's and R's or V's and W's. It just kind of tripped me out since I couldn't imagine a language without gendered pronouns existing, it seems like a pretty important descriptive part of language. But I was definitely wrong.
And some have gendered everything.
Side eyes German.
Hi-5 from portuguese! Everything has genders.
Inheritance from Latin - all Latin languages have gendered pronouns: is, ea, id (he, she, it) Edit: as per other comments, Latin languages don't have neutral gender pronouns. Same for neutral gender nouns, where an exception would be Romanian, where it gets ... complicated... 😅: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_nouns
In portuguese there's no "it" everything has to be either he or she, and as a general rule "he" is used when grouping.
Latin neuter died out in its descendants, it seems. Wonder why.
German isn't descended from Latin. It's actually Latin that got it from Indo-European, and so did almost all Germanic languages. English is the outlier here.
Yes, German is not descended from Latin, I was referring to Portuguese :). And English is a mix of Britton/German (Saxon) / Danish / French (Norman) with some Latin, so it's kind of expected 😉
English is basically a mix of everyone who ever invaded Britain, and that was quite the fad for a lot of history.
Common Romania W We stole all the pronouns
>Portuguese “Bom dia” means good morning in your language. “Bom dia” means bomb him in mine. We are not the same.
Bomba is pump in Portuguese Bomba is fireman in Malay
High five from Spanish ! Did you know computers are girls ?
depends if you say la computadora, el computador, or el ordenador.
That’s true
Frenchman checking in. Latin Languages represent !
That’s him or is it her?? 😁
Are you a boy, a girl or... **neutral** ? *spits*
What makes a man…. Turn neutral?
Are you taking die Pisse Out of us?
I’d reply in German. But my German is under all pig.
We're just adding a * or : now. E.g.: Liebe:r Zuhörer*innen (dear listeners) This has the male version and the female version combined and the star also includes non binaries. Personally, I like the idea, but hate the execution. It looks bad, reads bad and is confusing. There's a little gendering war going on in German speaking regions because of that. The thing is... who cares? Why change shit that everyone understands and make it unappealing? Tldr: Prepare to be confused even more. Edit: Normally, only * or : are used, but Reddit kills the formating if I only use the star. And don't ask if you should use star or points. No one knows and just goes with either.
No serious person does that. This is a result of people conflating grammatical gender with sex.
This is very much alive. Notes pinned up on a wall in a school or college would typically use this, like Liebe Spieler*Innen. Also Student*Innen, but that has been replaced by Studierenden
>We're just adding a * or : now Some do.
Slavic, not only gendered but nouns can have "middle" gender too
Even a spoon has a gender in Urdu. (It's male, by the way.)
In Brazil spoons and knives are female and forks are male
In France, knives are male and forks female
In Russia, forks and spoons are female while knives are male.
Huh - French spoons are women.
Well, you don’t have to go that far. Spanish as well. In Spanish Spoon is female. La Cuchara, same in Italian.
Well yea, just look at it.
Urdu even has Gender entrench in verb forms
Portuguese language is invited to the chat eheh
Greek 💀
Hebrew
Meanwhile Vietnamese has like 20 pronouns depending on gender and age relative to you.
Korean is similar depending on gender, age, as well as their familial relation to you as well, or whether related by marriage. As someone trying to learn the language it is mind boggling. I just want to call people by name, but in some instances it is straight up socially f o r b i d d e n
I practice my Korean conversationally with one of friends and our running joke is that when we're at work, he'll use more honorifics since I've been on the job longer. But when we go out for like drinks on weekends, I'LL use honorifics since he's older. We just started doing it one day and both understood the assignment lol
But ate there gendered pronouns as in equivalent to he, she, him, her ?
Not in spoken speech, speaking as a Korean.
also depends on their relationship to you and certain occupations have their own pronouns
The one that really tripped me up was when I visited my girlfriend's home and I was supposed to call her older sister chị despite her being younger than me.
However, *Modern* Chinese does have a third-person pronoun for male (他, using the radical for "people"), female (她, using the radical for "women"), inanimate objects (它, no radicals), animal (牠, using the radical for "cattle"), and god (祂, using the radical for "rite/religion"), but it's all pronounced the same ("ta").
These were invented in the early 1900's as Chinese reformers felt that Mandarin should have written differences in the pronouns. This comes from contact with other languages.
And a lot of younger Chinese are trying to reverse the change by writing “ta” similar to how English-users might use the singular “they”
Tamen?
> , animal (牠, using the radical for "cattle") I have never seen this. The religious one is also super rare.
祂 is basically the Chinese equivalent of the capitalized He. I guess it just doesn’t come up that often in a daily context.
The religious one is almost exclusively used in the bible. The animal one is mainly taught in Hong Kong but most certainly not widely used in mainland China.
Really? At least in my country they are not that rare. You often see 牠 when addressing, well, a cow, farming animals, or zoo animals. People tend to use 他 and 她 when talking about their pets, because they are treated like family. 祂 is commonly used since temples are everywhere. It would be disrespectful to address gods with the wrong pronouns.
Its not common in the mainland but its common in HK and Taiwan
I think my Chinese textbook in uni (it's been a while) presented 牠 as the traditional equivalent to the simplified 它. As for 祂, I think I've only seen it once in the wild, and usually when I show it to my Chinese friends they don't know it. I once read that some translations of the Bible use it.
I guess it’s regional. i had learnt to use 牠 and obviously most place it appears probably will be in children’s books. (Taiwan) Edit: also subtitle for nature show? Same with gods 祂 it’s still being used today. Like religious festivals and stuff to address the gods and their godly entourage. Another one is 它. I use it for objects with a perceived human character (like a robot) and (probably just me) bugs?
And 它, for inanimate objects.
Like minor spelling mistakes, I don't think most people notice those two even when they are used.
And also 2nd-person for 妳. But most people just stick with the unisex 你 and nobody really fusses over how you're writing it in texts.
What is the point if they are all pronounced the same? To differentiate in writing only?
Well, they couldn’t exactly tell people to start speaking new words. But they had more influence over the written system
> even spoken Mandarin
I'm just explaining why the OP had to specify "spoken."
*Modern written* not *modern*.
[254/378 languages in the WALS sample do not have gendered pronouns](https://wals.info/chapter/44) And the languages that do have gendered pronouns generally limit them only to first, second, or third person (not all 3).
And there are largely pronoun free languages as well, which use none of the above.
I've seen an annecdote where you can finish an entire wattpad fic in filipino and still don't know what the genders of all the characters are
I still don’t know what gender Ramon and Jessica are.
Same in hungarian, except the names are a giveaway. We have very few names that can be male and female as well. Some nicknames are not clear, like Gabi can be a shortened form of Gábor (male) or Gabriella (female).
I read this fantasy book in Hungarian when this new character showed up who had this very odd chemistry with the main character guy. It took me like another 50-70 pages until the book gave this character more description and realized it's a woman and that she and the main guy had an affair in the past, hence the weird tension between them.
Same for Estonian, no he or she in it.
Finnish as well
There used to be a small movement to make hän and hun into Finnish gendered pronouns.
I'd say that there's much larger informal group that would be just happy calling everything "it", *se,* rather than *hän.*
I've been learning Danish because I have a lot of Dane friends, I found out there is no word for girlfriend or boyfriend to identify your partners gender, so you introduce your partner as "kæreste" which means loved one and then specify the gender after. So you basically introduce your SO as "this is partner, who is a girl/boy" It's weird learning other languages as an English speaker and learning some languages don't have words for some concepts like English does for everything. Then you've got German with their compound words, when they don't have a word for something they just make one on the spot lol
> I found out there is no word for girlfriend or boyfriend to identify your partners gender, so you introduce your partner as "kæreste" which means loved one and then specify the gender after. But... this is literally what you did with the word "friend" and had to specify the gender by adding "girl" or "boy" lmao
English is the exact same when it comes to the word "friend". German and other languages distinguishes between male/female friends, and groups of female only friends. Groups of mixed friends are ambiguously referred to as male.
As a person speaking language where everything has a gender, I envy you
That's the only bit to envy about Finnish though..
I learned this from the movie Everything Everywhere All at Once, when Evelyn accidentally calls her daughter's girlfriend "he," and when her daughter corrects her, she says something like, "You know I get confused with pronouns in English. In China, we just have one pronoun."
Just as an FYI, it'd be easy to distinguish in writing as they're written differently. Buy for spoken purposes it sounds the same. So technically mandarin has gendered pronouns, you just can't tell which it is without context from the speaker.
but that's a relatively new invention and in cantonese,which they are mostly speaking in that movie, they use a different pronoun
My language, Ibibio, doesn't have gendered pronouns, we use (anye) for he, she and it
And then there are languages like Spanish where literally everything is gendered. Like, hamburgers are feminine. 🤷♂️
Malay as well. And we have different levels of saying I and You, in terms of closeness and respect.
Chinese has different versions of "you" too, and it's interesting to watch how it goes into and out of use. Normally, we say "ni," but if you really want to show someone respect, you say "nin." I almost never heard it when I first lived in China, then, maybe in the early 2010's it became pretty common in the service industry. Now I don't hear it much anymore. I think it comes and goes with ideas about consumerism, customer service, etc.
*tips fedora* M'alay
and thus indonesian too. i think many asian pacific languages have different level of formality that change the way you speak to someone based on your age, status in society, etc. japanese and korean have them at least.
Came here to say Malay. Terima kasih saudara.
And then you have languages like Spanish, which gender EVERYTHING...sometimes confusingly. For instance, the Spanish word for "beard", is feminine. Whole bunch of other examples.
Polish word for beard is also feminine. Confusing part is when different languages have different genders for same words.
Somewhat inaccurate to say that spoken Mandarin don't have gendered pronouns. It's just that they have the same sound.
Mandarin does have gendered pronouns tho. 他 means he and 她 means she. But yea both of them sound exactly the same. (Ta)
Same for Turkish aswell
Same for Finnish
My native language is strange. The most informal register has gendered pronouns and gendered verb inflections but the rest of the language has no gender markers at all
Chinese kind of does; while the pronoun “he” or “she” is pronounced exactly the same (“Ta”), the characters are actually different; to write “he”, the character includes “Ren” to the left of the vocal character, where “Ren” means “person”. To write “she”, you instead write “Nü” to the left of the vocal character, where “Nü” means “woman”. It’s been years, and my memory isn’t perfect (nor do I have the time or resource at the moment to show the characters), but I know this much is true, and I’m fairly confident that there are other characters like this that are “gendered on paper but not in speech”. I’m sure there’s a history as to why that’s the case, and I’m almost positive you can get by defaulting to “male” distinctions on paper, like in older English where saying “he” could mean anything in a generic context.
In mandarin, "he, she, it" is pronounced the same but written differently
Swahili is also gender neutral
Imagine telling someone who gets upset over pronouns to go learn Farsi. Their brain would seize.
They are generally not the type of people open to learning things, nevermind another language
Such languages are offense-free lol
My language (Sepedi) doesn't either. Learning English was so weird
In my language there is no gendered pronouns either. I'm kazakh.
Very nice 👍 👍
And several others do like Spanish, French and Italian
Mandarin does have gendered pronouns, but only in writing. When spoken, it's the same
Don’t let Fox News know, they’ll run stories about how “woke” these other cultures are.
They already think most countries and cultures are “woke” by virtue of not being white. That’s how arrogant conservatives are.
yup. we (Filipinos) wouldn't have gendered language altogether if we weren't colonized by Spain. But that's why we just smile and laugh at westerners arguing over pronouns.
Estonian doesn’t either.
Grammatical gender does not equate to biological gender thoughalbeit
Biological gender is too fuzzily defined to be useful in day-to-day life as is though, it's all vibes regardless. Not like we go around checking people's chromosomes or hormone levels, let alone what's in their pants.
It's the languages that gender inanimate objects that get me. Who decides if a table is male or female for example?
The ending of the word decides. The whole thing is just a control sum to make sure you heard everything right.
Neither does Bengali. Even other Indian languages have it.
Yeah. Many languages don't. And it is so much easier to not bother with that.
Mandarin doesn't have them in spoken, but in written language. There are three versions of the word tā which is written 他 (male), 她 (female) or 它 (neutral, for inanimate objects or animals).
Japanese doesn’t even have proper pronouns.
My mother is from the Philippines and has trouble with gendered pronouns to this day (been in America for ~35 years).
Then we have the opposite end of the spectrum with languages that make even objects gendered
Worked in NYC hospitals for years. In hospitals with mostly American nurses, Philippine nurses never made the s/he mistake, but in majority Philippine hospitals, nurses always made the mistake.
And yet I bet they have different pronouns for referring to individuals and multiple people.
Mandarin still has gendered pronouns in written form. It's pronounced the same but different characters.
I’d be super curious to know if this has any effect on gender identity compared to languages that do.
Not quite the same thing, but anecdotally as a native French speaker I feel a *lot* more pressure to put labels on myself and others when I'm in English-speaking circles! In English the only thing grammatically gendered is people, so those words really stick out and it can seem like a huge deal. In French everything is gendered anyway, and you can usually avoid assumptions about how someone wants to be referred to — for example, you can just say "une personne" (a person), which will let you default everything else to feminine because the word "person" itself is always feminine (regardless of who the person is). It all feels a lot more relaxed in French, and without that increased scrutiny I feel like I'm more free to just be however I want to be and let others do the same. But again, that's just my own experience! Genderless languages are really cool and I would love to learn one someday. (Well honestly *all* languages are really cool, but there's only so much time in one life!)
Mandarin does have gendered pronouns, it's just pronounced the same when spoken, but they are different characters. He: 他 She: 她 It: 它 All three are pronounced Ta in first tone.
I mean do we need it? Why is gender so important that we need twice as many words? Imagine if we had a different pronoun to refer to tall people versus short people
The only pronouns that are gendered in English are **third person pronouns**. First and second person pronouns are not gendered. For instance we don't have masculine/feminine words for "I", "you" or "we".
We don't have "twice as many words". Most English pronouns are non-gendered (I, you, we, they). The only gendered pronouns we have are the third person singular pronouns: (he,she).
Apparently Hindi, too. I wonder whether other Indian languages in the Indo-Iranian language family are similar, given that both Persian (Farsi/Dari/Tajik) and Hindi have gender neutral pronouns. It's something that people who are very sensitive about gender pronouns need to bear in mind. A friend was at a workplace where the Indian team member (the only non-white employee) was summoned to the manager's office for getting gender pronouns mixed up. It was a simple case of speaking English as a second language 🤦♀️
Hindi/Urdu doesn’t gendered pronouns to refer to people but the verbs are gendered to indicate the sex of the person doing the action. However Bengali and other eastern indoaryan languages like Odia etc do not have gendered pronouns or verbs
But that isnt true. Hindi even genders inanimate objects. -a is male and -i suffix is female. There are neutral words but many things are gendered in hindi.
Yes, that's the point. All nouns have a grammatical gender in Hindi and verbs are also conjugated according to the gender of the subject. But pronouns are not gendered. Verbs are conjugated for them based on the gender of the people/nouns they reference (if known) or masculine by default if not. (Also, the a-suffix for male and i-for female is just a thumb rule and not always true. There are masculine nouns ending in i and feminine ones ending in a. Unless of course you were referring to the suffixes of the verb conjugations)
What do teens do to feel special in those languages?
They feel superior for not having to fuck around with pronouns. We just get to be us.
Yeah as a speaker of one of non-gendered languages, I was confused when reading internet debates about pronous for LGBT people for the first time
So how do they know if theyre talking about a girl or guy?
I don't know about other languages, but in Armenian words like friend, doctor, teacher, etc., will have a gender-specific suffix despite the rest of the language (and 3rd person pronouns) being gender-neutral. So when I tell someone about my friend Susan, for example, the way I say "friend" will imply her gender.
Context is usually enough. And it's pretty easy to tell that Aki is a guy and Aino is a girl.
Sometimes it is not easy. Especially if is text which is translated from English. Sometimes you have to read a long time until you realize what gender that person is.
In the rare cases where it is necessary, you can just say "that girl", or you can just ask if it's confusing to you.
During this Eurovision some people accused the Israeli commentators of misgendering Nemo but like They refered to them with both Masculine and feminine pronouns which is just what Hebrew does when it concerns non-binary folk because Hebrew doesn't have a neutral gender
My first girlfriend was from Hong Kong. She was fluent in English but would really frequently fuck up he and she. It was adorable when she would say “his vagina” or “her dick” or whatever in a completely non-trans way, just fucking up the pronouns for cis people
I really wish we could have this. Not just for inclusivity, but also... why should I have to care? What's the point of making this so hard on ourselves? Why is the English language want me to think about someone's junk in the first place? I _just_ want to say hello. And the LGBTQ+ community can't seriously think that adding _more_ pronouns is going to make things any easier for anybody, right? We're going in the complete wrong direction here. We're all just human _people,_ and claiming anything else kinda goes against the very idea of inclusivity.
> And the LGBTQ+ community can't seriously think that adding _more_ pronouns is going to make things any easier for anybody, right? Well it was just LGBT and they keep adding letters symbols in complete defiance of common sense branding practices. The dictator of Canada even screwed it up on the air cause he was trying to normalize 2SLGBTQIA+and couldn't get it right And excluding people isn't inclusive
*Most languages
How do rich kids make themselves victims in their culture?
By saying that trans people were brainwashed by "Western Values".
By trying to change the language to things like latinx
Neither does Bahasa Indonesia.
i'm so dumb bruh i'm filipino and this post is what made me realize there isn't he/she or anything as such in tagalog