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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.
Are there any myths created by the bidet industry?
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.
I tried telling this to a someone and they claimed it made sense. Then I ended up using a sentence with they/them replacing genders, inserting the subject’s name where it made sense for clarity. " That is the most confusing text I have ever received."
🤦♀️
I’ve determined this is how she looks like an accepting and inclusive person while actually prefering ignorance.
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
Then you have Welsh where a lot of things are double affirmed in sentences removing ambiguity. even for the word yes you conjugate your reply as it depending on the quesrion they asked you.
Wyt. (Yes, you are. when asked as Am I?)
Ydw. (Yes, I am.)
Ydy. (Yes, he is.)
Ydy. (Yes, she is.)
Ydych. (Yes, you are. when asked as are We?)
Ydyn. (Yes, we are.)
Ydyn. (Yes, they are.)
How do you pronounce Ydw, Ydy and Ydych?
Oh boy, Welsh is fun. Y is sort of an UH sound, W is a OO sound and CH is A hard back of throat noise you make for the real scottish LOCH
Seems to be like “Eh-dew”, “Eh-dee”, “Eh-dich”, so eh- or uh- for the Y at the start. Welsh IPA guide on wiktionary says Y at the start is like the a at the start of “about”, when it’s not either a single-syllable or in the last syllable of a word, in which case it’s an “eee” sound, like the end of “happy”.
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
doesn’t Chinese have pronouns though?
她 she 他 he 它 it
or am I missing something ?
They’re written differently, but pronounced the same.
Cries in HSK 0
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).
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.
Interesting. In German typography we used to use lower quotation marks at the beginning of a quote and lower quotation marks at the end of a quote, both in handwriting and print:
„Amazing“
But the lower version isn’t found on the default QWERTZ keyboard layout so in personal digital communication (instant messages, emails, etc) especially you find double upper ones a lot:
“Amazing” or ‘Amazing’
The formal spelling rules haven’t been updated and you may still find the lower-upper vision in professional publications where the software adjusts the quotation marks according to a global setting. But most anything that is typed directly by a user will use the lazy lower-lower version.
We actually have the same issue with our « quotes » and accentuated capital letters in French, so « l’État » sometimes becomes “l’Etat”.
FYI, hold Alt and the press 0 1 8 3 then release Alt.
Doesn’t work on a phone/tablet
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?
Bürgende?
Why not just use the generic plural form (Bürger) as people always have? It has always been used for mixed groups so why shouldnt it continue to? And sometimes it doesnt even work (eg. for “Bauer”. The plurals would be “Bauern” and “Bäuerinnen”.
The problem people have with the Generischer Maskulinum is, that it is exactly that, the male plural form.
Grammatical genus is not the same as biological gender. Or do people that are biologically neither male nor female need a third plural form?
That would be another advantage if we had a form that clearly eliminates the gender.
Spanish.
The Austrian state I used to live in (Niederösterreich) actually just outlawed gendering words like that on any government documents. Absolutely idiotic.
Is Bürger not just “citizens”
Male citizens.
Portuguese! Even the f…ing objects are gendered!
“mmm this table looks quite feminine to me”
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.
Me, a german: Why would they not be gendered? At least you have only 2 genders
nO tHeRe ArE iNfInItE gEnDeRs!!!
Or, you know. Just Bürger, the generic masculinum. That all-inclusive. And it worked for a long time. It’s only because some snowflakes thought they needed something to complain about that we’re having this whole debate.
Der bre benutzt einfach “snowflakes” unironisch, was ist das, 2016?
Ja, Kumpel * in dud * in bro* sephine. Diese ganzen Gendersternverherrlicher innen brauchen einfach etwas worüber sie innen sich aufregen *innen könn *innen.
Ausserdem, bro *sephine, hast du mein Profil soweit durchgeschaut dass du rausgefunden hast dass ich männlich bin, oder hast du gerade mein Gender assumiert? Hier hättest du, um deinen eigenen Standards zu entsprechen, ein Genderneutrales Pronomen verwenden sollen, Bro *sephine.
Gerade nachgeschaut. In meinem Profil steht überhaupt nichts zu meinem Gender. Du hast also zwangsweise einfach mal so angenommen, dass ich ein Mann bin. Stimmt das mit deiner Ideologie überein?
Bro ist mir egal ob du den Stern nutzt oder nicht, du bist nur bissl cringe im Internet unterwegs und ich wollte mich drüber lustig machen.
Dass du da nen ganzen Paragrafen schreiben musstest, ist schon telling ne
No it’s not and there’s scientific evidence. Studies have shown that female children will name career paths as their dream job less often if only the male version is shown to them, presumably because they think it’s not an option for them, as it’s perceived to be only possible for males to follow that path. Explicitly mentioning both genders suddenly makes girls also want to become doctors.
You might not like it, but there’s enough evidence to show that it has merit.
“scientific evidence”.
Just like the ‘scientific evidence’ that, for whatever reason, in countries where women are way less free than in the west, many more women go into STEM?
According to https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/200758/umfrage/entwicklung-der-anzahl-der-medizinstudenten/ since at least 2010 there are way many more women studying medicine than men.
You might not like it, but just because it’s “Die” Sonne And “Der” Mond, That Does not suddenly mean that the moon is male and the sun is female, just how “Der Schüler” Does not imply that they are male or female.
This whole discussion about grammatical gender is stupid and biased as fuck by “researchers” who come to the conclusion they want to come to. I work in academia myself, I know how much bullshit gets pushed through.
Don’t get me wrong, I support anyone being able to do whatever they want. Women can do engineering just as much as men can, same for medicine and everything else. The literal only upside that men have is - on average - higher physical strength. And that just means that a higher percentage of men is strong enough to do certain physical job than the percentage of women. Doesn’t mean the women strong enough to do that job do it any worse than men.
Statista is a website that steals data from everywhere, it’s not a source as they don’t do any research.
women right? so annoying…
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.
Hell, German has three genders. “The” is translated der, die or das depending on the noun
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.
And then like half of the articles are “der” and you just have to use context to figure out which one it is
Edit: I was randomly reminded of this graffiti I saw in Berlin:
So just get the whole country to use one “the”, simple 😎
Meanwhile in Japanese, you get to gender YOURSELF!
Me whose native language conjugates verbs and adjectives according to subject’s gender:
wasz język nie wymaga sprecyzowania płci podmiotu w każdym zdaniu?
Also Chinese kind of has gendered pronouns: 你 and 妳, both mean ‘you’ and are pronounced the same but the latter is used in writing to address females specifically. Though this is Taiwanese Mandarin-specific.
edit: 他她 as well obviously
Yeah Chinese isn’t a perfect example with the existence of 你妳 and 他她, etc. Though to be fair I’ve noticed native Chinese speakers get pretty confused by English pronouns and tend to mix them up since it’s mostly optional in Cheese.
Optional in cheese sounds like a lactose intolerant thing (my autocorrect tried putting in optimal and lacrosse, which was funny to me)
I was so confused when I saw your comment abou lactose intolerance and was wondering what it has to do with “optional in Chinese.” It took longer that I’d like to admit to realize that the original comment and yours said “cheese.”
How about Optimal Cheese Macross
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
Yeah I feel some groups would have been better served getting on the gender abolition train rather than gender overspecialization; but it’s nicer to feel like you can pinpoint exactly where you belong than let go of the sillier social constructs in a world so invested in making them artificially important.
well artificial or not they are still important. it could be argued that our connection with reality itself is a social construct, at least insofar as we think in language and comprehend the world through language.
pronouns aren’t just jewels bedazzling our language. They’re a fundamental grammatical part of it. the language through which we understand the world only holds up with some basic underlying structures. so how we choose what words to use to stand in for something really shapes how we understand that thing.
It’s even more complicated by the fact that English pronouns have historically tended to be a closed class of words. the language has never readily coined or adopted new pronouns in the way we adopt new nouns and verbs (i.e., “google it”). that’s not to say it’s impossible for pronouns to become open-class and for neo-pronouns to work, but it’s fighting a battle against not just modern biases but also centuries (millenia?) of fundamental structure.
The argument seems to be that, in a language with ungendered pronouns, all genders are included, so you don’t need neopronouns for the purpose of inclusion. Nevertheless, you could still replace an ungendered pronoun with a neopronoun to be more accurate, or for other purposes.
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.
So there is 他／她, but only in writing so you can be very disrespectful and your conversation partner is none the wiser.
Boy English is pretty tame. My native language has gendered pronouns for what feels like every type of relative you can have. I don’t see my extended family very often so truthfully I don’t even know half of those pronouns. Sometimes a relative pops up out of nowhere and I get all confused about pronouns again. Seriously, like last year at a family gathering my aunt (maybe? idk, she’s my grandmother’s niece) brought someone and was like “heyyyy yall are related come say hiii” and she was like brand new information to everyone there lol.
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)
In Finnish: hän = he/she. No need for gendered pronouns.
Wow! TIL this. I was under the impression that all European languages have gendered pronouns.
Finnish is unrelated to nearly all other European languages
Swedish has more in common with Hindi than it does Finnish, despite being neighbours
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 just might have just learned smth about my native language.
Mädchen is neuter because it is diminuitive.
Das Häuschen Das Bäumchen Das Hügelchen
and so on. Diminuitive is always neuter, and Mädchen is diminuitive of Magd (or Maid, I forgot).
Ohh oui, french numbers I think they go mental after 69 ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
70: 60+10 (soixante-dix)
91: 4x20+11 (quatre-vingt-onze)
Why? No clue I am not french.
May or may not have some relation, but next to France/part of, lies the Basque country, where all numbers under 100 are base 20+10, except 11 and 19…
57: 2×20+10+7 (berr-ogei-ta-hama-zazpi)
79: 3×20+19 (hiru-r-ogei-ta-hemeretzi)
French (in Belgium, Switzerland, and former colonies) also allows simple base 10:
70: 70 (septante)
91: 90+1 (nonante-et-un)
…so the geographic location seems to have an impact.
And just next to it, in Spain, everything is base 10… except 11 to 15 change the order from n×10+m, into 1+10 to 5+10.
Italian does the same, except it’s 11 to 16… just like in French.
English has a hiccup with eleven and twelve, then goes to n-teen, before going base 10 with n×10+m above 20.
German does the same, except it goes to m+n×10 above 20.
Overall, 20 seems to be a magic number, France just seems to have mixed in different ways of using it.
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.
It was to make the male seem more important. Even in English the word “woman” comes from “wife man”. Everything was about the pecking order in history. Gender bias was a major part of that.
That’s a misrepresentation of old English. Man used to be neutral, and was modified by were and wif respectively for man and woman. Wife comes from woman, not the other way around.
Also bonus content:
singular: “das Mädchen” (neutral) - the girl
plural: “die Mädchen” (female) - the girls
So in the plural form you have to use a female article again, but the actual spelling of the word is unchanged. Go figure 🤷♂️ 🇩🇪.
In plural every gender has the article “die”
Well at least it consistently unlogical. But wait: it actually depends on the grammatical case for example:
die Mädchen = the girls das Haus der Mädchen = the house of the girls // the girls’ house
So depending on context male, female, neutral articles are all used (der Mädchen, die Mädchen, das Mädchen) 🤷♂️
That’s not a male article, that’s the genitive plural article
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!
My favourite is some words having different pronouns in different regions. Like der/die/das Nutella, der Butter, das Joghurt 😳
Who the fuck says “der Butter” or “das Joghurt”? Nutella is difficult, because it’s a name.
Einige Regionen in Bayern. In Teilen Österreichs auch gerne feminin die Joghurt
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They don’t have pronouns in my mom’s native language so when she talks to me in English, she always mixes up he and she and it can get really confusing.
