• SheeEttin@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Hot take: gendered language doesn’t serve any meaningful purpose and we should just get rid of it. There is no need for inanimate non-gendered objects to have a linguistic gender.

    • TheSanSabaSongbird@lemdro.id
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      1 year ago

      Or, you know, you could just get over it and realize that gender in language is not the same thing as gender in people. There’s one African language, for example, that has 16 different genders.

      Also, you are mistaken that linguistic gender doesn’t serve a purpose. It does and there’s a pretty extensive body of linguistic literature on the subject.

      Fun fact; as with most of the other Germanic languages, English originally had three genders; masculine, feminine and neuter. They got stripped out of the language for reasons having to do with English history that are too technical to go into right now.

      • LrdThndr@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Can you link a layman’s explanation of the value of grammatical gender regarding inanimate objects? After years of learning and being frustrated by French, I had come to the conclusion that grammatical gender was stupid and served no purpose, but I’d love to have a better understanding of its value.

        Again, this isn’t coming from a position of “prove me wrong, buttfart”. This is coming from “I’d like to learn more and have a better understanding of something I’m probably just not getting.”

    • TWeaK@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Hot take: person who only speaks English thinks everyone should just speak English.