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Comment by mastazi | Hacker News Reader

There are studies that show that polyglot speakers tend to think in slightly different ways when they switch languages. It is probably true that speaking a language where every noun is gendered might slightly change the way you think, but in my personal opinion not in the way you imagine.

What I mean is that when masculine or feminine are used to describe mundane everyday objects, it's very well possible that the idea of masculinity or femininity might be de-emphasised in the mind of the native speaker, rather than reinforced.

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Totally agree with your "other side of the coin" assessment that this gendering of everyday objects could diminish the importance of gender overall.

To my original point, one of the most interesting examples that I can think of is how you gender groups of humans in Spanish or Portuguese. If I understand correctly, no matter the distribution of the group, the group becomes masculine once there is one man in it. It could be 999 females and 1 male and the proper way to label it is masculine.

Yes the group becomes masculine no matter the distribution, this is also the case in Italian. If I remember this correctly, this is because the old Latin neutral gender, in those modern languages, has been assimilated into the masculine gender. (If you study Latin you might notice that in many cases the neutral terminations are more similar to the masculine ones so, in a way, it makes sense that at some point the line started to blur I guess).

I'm learning German at the moment. Everything is gendered. Such a strange way of looking at the world.

And the unfortunate "das Mädchen" [0] - the German word for "young woman" is neutral gender (because it's a compound noun and the "-chen" suffix is neutral). I wonder how that affects German society when all young women are objects. Does this de-emphasise their femininity, or increase their "sexual object"-ness?

[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/M%C3%A4dchen

Interesting I didn't know that. In Italian there is no neutral gender, Latin had it but in modern Italian it has been lost.

> Does this de-emphasise their femininity, or increase their "sexual object"-ness?

My hypothesis is that having it might de-emphasise the link between grammatical gender and gender identity of a person, this link is very strong in the English language because in English the only time you use gendered language you are talking about a person, in those other languages you use gendered words to refer to a pot or a chair :-)

Theres also “das kind” (the child). And I’m sure other examples. You simply don’t understand how other languages work, and you’re projecting your own ideas onto them.

And German is a whole different class than Latin and Slavic languages - AFAIK there’s now way to “tell” the gender of a word in German. In contrast, in Spanish, Italian (not sure about French) and Slovenian words actually “sound” either feminine or masculine (or neutral, but those are rarer and mostly for inanimate objects), because gender is based on word endings.

Yes. I am projecting my own ideas on them. That's how brains work. Also the wonderful nature of travel is being exposed to other cultures and their strange ideas about the planet. This isn't negative.

Yeah, I gather that Germans intuit the gender of a new word - it just "feels" masculine or feminine (or neutral). Fascinating.

> AFAIK there’s now way to “tell” the gender of a word in German

That's incorrect, there are rules. (These rules have a few exceptions.)

m: -en, -er, -ig, -ismus, -ist, -ling, -m, -or

f: -ät, -e, -ei, -enz, -heit, -ie, -ik, -in, -ion, -keit, -schaft, -ung, -ur

n: -chen, -lein, -ment, -nis, -tum, -um

That makes the proposed contrast weaker than you initially thought.

If anything, the contrast is stronger.

Slovenian: -a feminine, -o, -e neutrum, rest masculine. (Again, some exceptions.)

Italian and Spain is probably even simpler, since there’s no neutrum.

> the contrast is stronger

That's mathematically impossible.

> Does this de-emphasise their femininity, or increase their "sexual object"-ness?

Or secret option c): it has absolutely no effect on how they treat their women because they aren't actually that dumb.

Things that are “different” are not “strange.”

they are to me. Is there a problem with being "strange" to someone from a different culture?

The word strange implies otherness and inferiority.

not to me. I love strange things. They challenge my status quo.

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