I love linguistics but it has some weird stuff in it.
Chinese doesn’t have gendered pronouns in the spoken language. “He”, “she”, and “it” are all pronounced, “tā”.
Possession and number are done by adding 的 (de) or 们 (men) after the pronoun, irrespective of gender.
Originally, there was only one character for “tā”, 他.
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, 她 (she) and 它 (it) were adopted. (they used to mean other things and were repurposed).
One immediate problem that people noticed was the choice of components. 他 includes the 亻component, which means “person”. 她 replaces it with the 女 component, which means “female”. So some linguists pointed out that this implies that women aren’t people.
The current situation is that people tend to use, 她, when there is a single subject who is known to be female. When it’s unknown or there are multiple subjects they default to, 他 or 他们.
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 Mädel/Mädchen - neuter
Sun - Die Sonne - feminine
There’s the added confusion that the third person feminine singular, is spelled and pronounced the same as the second person plural. The second person doesn’t differentiate in gender but it’s often impolite to use the singular so it’s common to refer to males as “Sie”.
Not to say that any of that is hard. Native German speakers constantly need to match the gender of adjectives to nouns so they’re very used to it.
Russian seems to be more complicated. I recently read that Masha Gessen uses, “they”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masha_Gessen It seems that Russian uses gendered past-tense verbs. They originally used masculine verbs out of, “hoping that I would wake up a boy. A real boy” but switched to feminine verbs as a teen and stuck with that. If anyone speaks Russian well I’d 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 doesn’t 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 doesn’t 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 Mädchen 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 “little girl,” so it is strange the germans decided to sort this word into the neuter gender, no?
well, no. it isn’t strange and it isn’t 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 Kätzchen - kitten
das Hündchen - puppy
das Plätzchen - a cookie (depends on dialect exactly what this refers to afaik but generally is always some sort of cookie)
das Ohrläppchen - 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 “arbitrary” 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 doesn’t seem useful or logical to (rhetorical) you doesn’t 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 i’ve seen to “de-gender” spanish (this is just what is local to me) all fundamentally misunderstand what it is they’re 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 i’m not dogging on the premise, just the serious attempts i’ve seen implemented in real life speech and their implementation. i think it’s 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!
I love linguistics but it has some weird stuff in it.
Chinese doesn’t have gendered pronouns in the spoken language. “He”, “she”, and “it” are all pronounced, “tā”. Possession and number are done by adding 的 (de) or 们 (men) after the pronoun, irrespective of gender. Originally, there was only one character for “tā”, 他. 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, 她 (she) and 它 (it) were adopted. (they used to mean other things and were repurposed). One immediate problem that people noticed was the choice of components. 他 includes the 亻component, which means “person”. 她 replaces it with the 女 component, which means “female”. So some linguists pointed out that this implies that women aren’t people. The current situation is that people tend to use, 她, when there is a single subject who is known to be female. When it’s unknown or there are multiple subjects they default to, 他 or 他们.
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 Mädel/Mädchen - neuter
Sun - Die Sonne - feminine
There’s the added confusion that the third person feminine singular, is spelled and pronounced the same as the second person plural. The second person doesn’t differentiate in gender but it’s often impolite to use the singular so it’s common to refer to males as “Sie”. Not to say that any of that is hard. Native German speakers constantly need to match the gender of adjectives to nouns so they’re very used to it.
Russian seems to be more complicated. I recently read that Masha Gessen uses, “they”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masha_Gessen It seems that Russian uses gendered past-tense verbs. They originally used masculine verbs out of, “hoping that I would wake up a boy. A real boy” but switched to feminine verbs as a teen and stuck with that. If anyone speaks Russian well I’d 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 doesn’t 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 doesn’t 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 Mädchen 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 “little girl,” so it is strange the germans decided to sort this word into the neuter gender, no?
well, no. it isn’t strange and it isn’t 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 Kätzchen - kitten
das Hündchen - puppy
das Plätzchen - a cookie (depends on dialect exactly what this refers to afaik but generally is always some sort of cookie)
das Ohrläppchen - 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 “arbitrary” 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 doesn’t seem useful or logical to (rhetorical) you doesn’t 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 i’ve seen to “de-gender” spanish (this is just what is local to me) all fundamentally misunderstand what it is they’re 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 i’m not dogging on the premise, just the serious attempts i’ve seen implemented in real life speech and their implementation. i think it’s 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