I love linguistics but it has some weird stuff in it.
Chinese doesnāt have gendered pronouns in the spoken language. āHeā, āsheā, and āitā are all pronounced, ātÄā.
Possession and number are done by adding ē (de) or 们 (men) after the pronoun, irrespective of gender.
Originally, there was only one character for ātÄā, ä».
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, 儹 (she) and å® (it) were adopted. (they used to mean other things and were repurposed).
One immediate problem that people noticed was the choice of components. ä» includes the äŗ»component, which means āpersonā. 儹 replaces it with the 儳 component, which means āfemaleā. So some linguists pointed out that this implies that women arenāt people.
The current situation is that people tend to use, 儹, when there is a single subject who is known to be female. When itās unknown or there are multiple subjects they default to, ä» or ä»ä»¬.
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 MƤdel/MƤdchen - neuter
Sun - Die Sonne - feminine
Thereās the added confusion that the third person feminine singular, is spelled and pronounced the same as the second person plural. The second person doesnāt differentiate in gender but itās often impolite to use the singular so itās common to refer to males as āSieā.
Not to say that any of that is hard. Native German speakers constantly need to match the gender of adjectives to nouns so theyāre very used to it.
Russian seems to be more complicated. I recently read that Masha Gessen uses, ātheyā. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masha_Gessen It seems that Russian uses gendered past-tense verbs. They originally used masculine verbs out of, āhoping that I would wake up a boy. A real boyā but switched to feminine verbs as a teen and stuck with that. If anyone speaks Russian well Iād 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 doesnāt 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 doesnāt 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 MƤdchen 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 ālittle girl,ā so it is strange the germans decided to sort this word into the neuter gender, no?
well, no. it isnāt strange and it isnāt 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 KƤtzchenĀ - kitten
das HĆ¼ndchen - puppy
das PlƤtzchen - a cookie (depends on dialect exactly what this refers to afaik but generally is always some sort of cookie)
das OhrlƤppchen - 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 āarbitraryā 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 doesnāt seem useful or logical to (rhetorical) you doesnāt 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 iāve seen to āde-genderā spanish (this is just what is local to me) all fundamentally misunderstand what it is theyāre 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 iām not dogging on the premise, just the serious attempts iāve seen implemented in real life speech and their implementation. i think itās 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!
The big thing that people get wrong and which makes me so very tired is that ITāS NOT SOCIETAL GENDER, itās just a case of terrible terminology that weāre stuck with. A chair isnāt feminine or whatever, itās 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 āgenreā which shares the same root but doesnāt create the connotation to societal gender.
Thank you for your thorough response.
You make some good points. I think weāre talking about slightly different topics though.
Thereās always some explanation to why certain words or grammar forms evolved. Sometimes those reasons are commonly known, sometimes the ācommonly knownā reasons are wrong, sometimes linguists argue about the origin, sometimes they have no idea.
For everyday speakers, the ālogicā of immediate usage, is more important than the etymology.
German speakers are generally aware of the āruleā 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 donāt really.
āPlatzā is grammatically, the non-diminutive form of āPlƤtzchenā but it doesnāt mean ā(normal sized) cookieā (aside: Not to make fun of our Northern friends but āKeksā gets around that confusion)
āMagdā is the non-diminutive form of āMƤdelā but girls arenāt (generally) ālittle maids.ā I canāt remember the last time I heard anyone say, āmagdā to refer to a living person.
Also notice that when we strip off the diminutives, the remaining words are no more ālogicalā. Cats and earlobes arenāt inherently feminine and dogs arenāt inherently male.
My usage of ālogicā 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 āDerā about subjects, that nobody would think of as male. German speakers are likewise comfortable saying āSieā about subjects that nobody would think of as female and, āDasā 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 ārandomizeā he/she/it. They donāt 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. āDutzenā is often done without the word āduā. Speakers easily put together the correct endings for the singular and listeners instantly recognize the implication.
As a final example, Iād offer the sentence, ā___ ist ein fesch__ ___.ā I posit that if I insert āDieā vs āDerā into the sentence, most German speakers would instantly correctly fill in the rest of the blanks with, ā-es Madlā or ā-er Buaā. If you try to say the wrong one it just sounds weird.
I love linguistics but it has some weird stuff in it.
Chinese doesnāt have gendered pronouns in the spoken language. āHeā, āsheā, and āitā are all pronounced, ātÄā. Possession and number are done by adding ē (de) or 们 (men) after the pronoun, irrespective of gender. Originally, there was only one character for ātÄā, ä». 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, 儹 (she) and å® (it) were adopted. (they used to mean other things and were repurposed). One immediate problem that people noticed was the choice of components. ä» includes the äŗ»component, which means āpersonā. 儹 replaces it with the 儳 component, which means āfemaleā. So some linguists pointed out that this implies that women arenāt people. The current situation is that people tend to use, 儹, when there is a single subject who is known to be female. When itās unknown or there are multiple subjects they default to, ä» or ä»ä»¬.
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 MƤdel/MƤdchen - neuter
Sun - Die Sonne - feminine
Thereās the added confusion that the third person feminine singular, is spelled and pronounced the same as the second person plural. The second person doesnāt differentiate in gender but itās often impolite to use the singular so itās common to refer to males as āSieā. Not to say that any of that is hard. Native German speakers constantly need to match the gender of adjectives to nouns so theyāre very used to it.
Russian seems to be more complicated. I recently read that Masha Gessen uses, ātheyā. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masha_Gessen It seems that Russian uses gendered past-tense verbs. They originally used masculine verbs out of, āhoping that I would wake up a boy. A real boyā but switched to feminine verbs as a teen and stuck with that. If anyone speaks Russian well Iād 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 doesnāt 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 doesnāt 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 MƤdchen 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 ālittle girl,ā so it is strange the germans decided to sort this word into the neuter gender, no?
well, no. it isnāt strange and it isnāt 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 KƤtzchenĀ - kitten
das HĆ¼ndchen - puppy
das PlƤtzchen - a cookie (depends on dialect exactly what this refers to afaik but generally is always some sort of cookie)
das OhrlƤppchen - 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 āarbitraryā 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 doesnāt seem useful or logical to (rhetorical) you doesnāt 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 iāve seen to āde-genderā spanish (this is just what is local to me) all fundamentally misunderstand what it is theyāre 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 iām not dogging on the premise, just the serious attempts iāve seen implemented in real life speech and their implementation. i think itās 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
The big thing that people get wrong and which makes me so very tired is that ITāS NOT SOCIETAL GENDER, itās just a case of terrible terminology that weāre stuck with. A chair isnāt feminine or whatever, itās 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 āgenreā which shares the same root but doesnāt create the connotation to societal gender.
Thank you for your thorough response. You make some good points. I think weāre talking about slightly different topics though.
Thereās always some explanation to why certain words or grammar forms evolved. Sometimes those reasons are commonly known, sometimes the ācommonly knownā reasons are wrong, sometimes linguists argue about the origin, sometimes they have no idea.
For everyday speakers, the ālogicā of immediate usage, is more important than the etymology.
German speakers are generally aware of the āruleā 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 donāt really.
āPlatzā is grammatically, the non-diminutive form of āPlƤtzchenā but it doesnāt mean ā(normal sized) cookieā (aside: Not to make fun of our Northern friends but āKeksā gets around that confusion) āMagdā is the non-diminutive form of āMƤdelā but girls arenāt (generally) ālittle maids.ā I canāt remember the last time I heard anyone say, āmagdā to refer to a living person.
Also notice that when we strip off the diminutives, the remaining words are no more ālogicalā. Cats and earlobes arenāt inherently feminine and dogs arenāt inherently male.
My usage of ālogicā 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 āDerā about subjects, that nobody would think of as male. German speakers are likewise comfortable saying āSieā about subjects that nobody would think of as female and, āDasā 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 ārandomizeā he/she/it. They donāt 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. āDutzenā is often done without the word āduā. Speakers easily put together the correct endings for the singular and listeners instantly recognize the implication.
As a final example, Iād offer the sentence, ā___ ist ein fesch__ ___.ā I posit that if I insert āDieā vs āDerā into the sentence, most German speakers would instantly correctly fill in the rest of the blanks with, ā-es Madlā or ā-er Buaā. If you try to say the wrong one it just sounds weird.