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Comment by weberc2 | Hacker News Reader

This shouldn’t surprise you. Most people can infer gender from visual appearance alone with well over 99.99% accuracy without being explicitly told. If you know their name and other gendered indicators, it would be a marked anomaly NOT to know their gender.

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I can also guess people's height to within an inch or two, but I can still have an abstract conversation about a friend-of-a-friend I've never met, without expecting to be (constantly!) told how tall they are unless it's relevant to the story.

So in terms of the order we learn things about people we've never met (when it's not directly relevant), we expect gender much earlier than many other attributes. It mostly reflects our values as a society, as language often does, but that's kind of my point.

I misunderstood your point. I thought you found it remarkable that we expected to be able to discern gender quite quickly. In any case, I don’t know how much our gendered language indicates our values as a society, probably that gender is just information-dense (lots of behavior correlates strongly with gender) such that many languages evolved gender as a utility (and indeed English actually lost much of its grammatical gender though probably not because the density of information was lower in English-speaking societies, but rather due to massive influxes of non-native speakers which had a broader simplifying effect on the language).

But gender has a much more significant affect on how someone acts than their height, and significantly affects what kind of relationship you could have with that person.

That makes it relevant for stories like "I met him at a bar and we shared a few drinks," but not "I sold her a cup of coffee this morning" or "She's interviewing for our team."

Gender is also kind of a useless differentiator in many contexts because of the way that gender correlates with behavior: if there's a group of mothers or Catholic priests or even schoolteachers or venture capitalists, I'm much more likely to find pronouns for short/tall useful than for male/female in communicating about specific members of that group.

I can also infer race from visual appearance with similar accuracy, but if I say "Can you hand this to that black person" would be super weird and quite likely objectionable, even if I was correct that the person was black. And nobody would want abbreviated pronouns on race - "I talked to whim and whe said to talk to blim" just seems sort of ... overly concerned with people's races.

It's a linguistic quirk of English that "Can you hand this to [that female person]" is accepted and natural. On first principles it shouldn't be.

(It is interesting IMO that Japanese has a pronoun for "she," and it's a compound word that literally translates as "that woman." It only developed as a pronoun in the last century or so, from the influence of Weatern works which had he/she or equivalent pronouns.)

You reminded me of Douglas Hofstadter's "A Person Paper on Purity in Language"

https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.htm...

In which he pretends to be from a parallel dimension where you don't use he and she (for male and female) but whe and ble (for white and black) to highlight the absurdity of language making gender explicit.

My daughter is very young and currently refers to everyone, including Disney princesses as he/him which sounds totally weird to me, but I guess it is one option for phasing the distinction out.

Thank you - I hadn't seen that before, and this is basically how I feel about having to attach a gender to anyone I refer to in the third person.

Here's the first-principles argument: Most people grow up and learn the language in a family group, which has a mix of ages and of sexes. Saying "he" vs "she" here usually cuts the number of people you could be talking about in half, it's very informative, one bit! It will often let you omit the name, or shorten the sentence elsewhere.

Whereas always marking what continent you're all living on, or what race you all are, usually doesn't convey any information. So it seems entirely unsurprising that languages tend not to build this in. Many do build in markers for what species, because again this was useful information, since most of our ancestors spent a long time farming.

This sounds like working backwards. Up this thread, people have suggested that the reason is that gender matters more to society than height (this is why we don't announce people's height). When this argument is defeated by race, it switches again to what "seems reasonable".

What evidence, beyond "this seems reasonable" is there for this argument?

Sometimes multiple things are true, and none are "defeated". It seems beyond obvious that our ancestors 1000 years ago did a lot more gossiping about who was going to marry who, than about anything we'd today describe as racial distinctions.

I'm not debating whether it was true 1000 years ago. I'm saying that today, it is a linguistic quirk of English. Of course English is a language that was in use in some form 1000 years ago - and we don't use all the same words we did then, because some of them don't have value to us today. (Singular you, for instance, was much rarer back then!)

Sure, but order 10^3 years is the right time scale to think about linguistic features. People lived in villages and farmed. They speculated about other people's sex lives a lot. Argued about legitimate descendants and inheritance. Could not afford to ignore the difference between cows and bulls. And many (though not all) of their languages have gender deeply built in.

None that I'm aware of have anything resembling our modern idea of race built in. For the obvious reason that approximately nobody in said village had been 100 miles, nevermind to another continent. If a language had such a feature, the next generation would probably never have heard it used, and thus would not know what it meant. (I wonder whether any languages have grammatical markers for slavery or caste? That would be the closest thing I could imagine, divisions that many people would have talked about every day for millennia, in some places.)

Forgetting features seems to happen much quicker than acquiring them. Post-1066 English lost a lot of complication which German retained (including grammatical gender of nouns, IIRC). As you say, singular you is much younger than that, but importantly it's about forgetting a distinction we used to make. I'm not an expert on why this happened, but I didn't think it was some great shift in what needed to be communicated, just a mutation/simplification.

Gender matters more than race or height (I.e., race doesn’t make one markedly stronger or un/able to birth children or any of the social roles that emerge out of those properties), and as I mentioned elsewhere, multiracial societies weren’t a universal reality (and aren’t today) such that it would leave a mark on grammar.

Wealth, education, and any number of other categories also matter a ton. We exclusively use gender and perhaps age to label people. Why?

Because education didn't exist for most of the last few thousand years. Wealth did, but I guess it wasn't worth modifying your speech of every day to encode that today isn't the one day a year you happen to encountered a nobleman.

We don't. We use titles like 'Professor', 'Captain', 'Pastor', 'Doctor', and 'Congressman'.

> When this argument is defeated by race

What do you mean? You mean that racist societies might be expected to distinguish between races with noun classes? Seems to me this might well have happened in some language at some time, or at least a variation on it: distinguishing between those inside the clan, and those outside.

It looks like the sex distinction is the one most commonly reflected in language, which strikes me as empirical evidence that it's generally the most valuable one.

> Common gender divisions include masculine and feminine; masculine, feminine and neuter; or animate and inanimate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender#Gender_of_p...