Comment by TheOtherHobbes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TheOtherHobbes | Hacker News Reader

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This seems to be conflating grammatical gender - which includes differences in pronouns, adjectives, sometimes verbs, and pronunciation, but is still based on relatively minor variations in a common vocabulary - with full dialects, which can have very distinct vocabularies and may include words with unique meanings.

English is at the de-grammarised end of the spectrum. There are gendered clues in English, but they're (mostly) not baked into the grammar. The differences are more about specific idioms and expressions that one gender is more likely to use, and they're really a kind of variation on other subgroup slangs - like teen slang, other age-related indicators.

Most languages have far more obvious grammatical distinctions. The Romance languages have obvious gender in the grammar, but it's... just there. It doesn't do much except to indicate that the subject or object is male or female. Beyond that, there are some rather random associations of gender to specific nouns.

Fully distinct dialects/languages are incredibly rare and are often artificial and/or more likely to be created by a subculture than as a direct result of gender differences.

Example: English has Polari, which was entertainer/street slang and often used in gay subcultures. It also has Cockney, Estuary, Northern, Scottish, Urban, and others - all differentiated by culture.

I used Japanese, like the article did, as an example for this reason. Japanese has no grammatical gender like French. But Japanese is gendered. There are patterns in Japanese, where men and women use pronouns differently, and have slightly different patterns to which grammatical forms they use, and when. Women tend to use polite forms, in pronoun and noun choice as well as verb conjugation, more than men do. Small differences in sentence final particles, and so on. In practice the standard language becomes nearly gender-neutral in formal, polite contexts. Still, there's a real effect in Japanese, where men and women do speak and even write slightly differently. Male students of Japanese can even suffer a problem where they sound effeminate because they have modelled themselves on teachers who are mostly women.

I was just observing this general effect is probably true, to some degree, big or small, for most languages. It's probably a little more pronounced in Japanese than English. In neither case is it anywhere distinct enough to call it a separate dialect for men and women.

> Most languages have far more obvious grammatical distinctions.

Grammatical gender like French or Arabic is pretty unusual, really. It's common in the Indo-European and Semitic languages, which are prominent by number of speakers, but grammatical gender is fairly rare when surveying the world's language families as a whole. It's completely absent from many of them. The whole Sino-Tibetan language family (including modern Chinese), for example. They get along fine with a single third person pronoun (in speech) and no grammatical gender.

I don't see how is grammatical gender relevant to this. Czech has it, and both males and females speak it the same. Different suffixes are used to refer to yourself but nobody would think of that as "men/women language" as it's exactly what the others use when speaking about men/women.

Turkish, an indoeuropean language, has no grammatical gender markers.

Turkish is not Indo-European

Oh, is Altaic, it's grammar and structure is so similar in many other regards to indoeuropean languages that I did not reliazed it wasn't. Thanks.

If you took any Indo-European language and created a new language completely contradicting it with respect to any aspect of the language, you'd get something pretty close to Turkish :-) I am really surprised you think Turkish is similar to any Indo-European language. Btw, the Altaic language family is also disputed. The most accepted theory is that Turkic languages are an isolated language family by themselves.

I am sure I had learned (long in the past) that they were in different families; but my little exposure to Turkish led me to believe (having forgotten what I had learned) that they were related; why? because the conjugations and tense modalities evoked to me an analogy to those of romance languages, and the declination cases and flexible word order evoked to me those of Easter European languages; while at the same time dismissing the greatest difference: it's agglutinative character.

That’s correct, grammar wise Turkish is closer to Japanese and Korean than to Indo-European languages, but there’s an incredible amount of French loanwords (partly because of Ataturk’s obsession with French).

French loanwords started came to language in first half of 19th century, during the attempts of reforms by Sultans and with the influence of people who had French education. I would argue most french loanwords were adapted earlier than 1920's where Ataturk had an influence on Turkish language. Roughly ~4% of Turkish words are French loanwords.

Turkish has little structural or grammatical resemblance to Indo-European languages from the perspective of its main features (extreme agglutination and vowel harmony).

(Edit: reduced absoluteness, because lack of grammatical gender feature can be found in some Indo-European languages)

Interesting fact is that very early Indo-European likely didn't have grammatical gender. The (extinct) Anatolian languages (Hittite, Luwian) split off before Indo-European really gelled, and they didn't have gender but instead a system of animate/inanimate.

> and they didn't have gender but instead a system of animate/inanimate

But...that's gender, linguistically speaking.

Yes, it's gender, technically -- not but not in the way other Indo-European languages practice it.

This has shown up in the responses to my fan-fic. More than once I have been told I used suffixes wrong because I have someone of the wrong sex used -chan -kun to the other sex.

In Persian (an Indo-European language), not only is there no grammatical gender, but also there are no gender pronouns [1]. You can write text that is technically gender-neutral.

[1] http://sites.la.utexas.edu/persian_online_resources/pronouns...

Sounds like cannot possibly write a nonneutral text!

It’s still possible to explicitly mention the gender. For example say “that woman” or “the man”. The reader also might get some clues from the context, for example, saying “my dad said…” will reveal some clues about the gender of the subject. It’s optional.

Interestingly, I heard a podcast or read a book not long ago (I'd guess John McWhorter, but don't quote me on that) that touched on this, and the author attributed this simplification from the Indo-European norm of heavy grammatical gender to the fact that both Persian and English achieved their modern forms largely as languages learned by adults - the Vikings mixing with Saxons, the various subjects of the Persian Empire - and thus they tended to simplify endings.

> Most languages have far more obvious grammatical distinctions. The Romance languages have obvious gender in the grammar, but it's... just there. It doesn't do much except to indicate that the subject or object is male or female. Beyond that, there are some rather random associations of gender to specific nouns.

I can't speak for all Romance languages but my native Spanish: it's true that we have gendered nouns (most if not all of them, I think) but it has nothing to do with the speaker, so it's not a language for men or women. For example, a chair ("silla") is always female, regardless of whether it's me saying it (a male) or my mother. It's a bit like how ships in English are a "she" regardless of who's speaking, only more enforced and for all nouns.

An interesting Romance counter-example is "Obrigado" vs "Obrigada" ("thank you", in Portuguese). I'm not even remotely fluent, but if I recall correctly, the gender is dependent on the speaker, not the person being addressed.

Oh, yes, but those aren't nouns. I didn't mean Spanish isn't gendered -- it obviously is -- but that gendered nouns aren't indicative of the gender of the speaker, so that particular observation was unrelated to the topic under discussion. Your example is indeed an example of gendered language depending on the speaker, and has similar examples in Spanish (e.g. "contento" / "contenta" for "happy").

Well, practically all adjectives in Spanish/Portuguese/French/Italian change depending on the grammatical gender of the noun they refer to. And, of course, if the noun in question is "I" (as in your case), then they reveal the (physical) gender of the speaker because usually

    grammatical gender of a person == physical gender of that person

But compared to the differences in, e.g., Japanese that some people here are discussing, this seems rather minor.

I've heard of this example before, and this is speculative but I wonder if it's because the speaker is counter-intuitively also the object of the phrase.

The root "obrigad" sounds a lot like the English word "obligate". If this is more than just a coincidence, then a more direct translation is "I am obliged" rather than "thank you". Said this way it makes a lot of sense why the verb is determined by the speaker.

Yes, this is exactly the reason. (I am a native speaker)

Can it be extended with a reference to the (self-)object? Like "me llamo" being "I call myself" in Spanish for "my name is".

In Spanish, "me llamo" carries no gender information.

The difference between the "obrigado" in Portuguese example and the "me llamo" in Spanish example is that "obrigado" is probably an adjective while "llamo" is a verb. An equivalent Spanish example would be "estoy obligado" ("I am obligated" with male speaker) and "estoy obligada" ("I am obligated" with female speaker).

As an aside, I don't think Spanish has a word that's quite like "obliged". Maybe "endeudado", but that's just "in debt" and is not particularly about favors.

We can say "muy agradecido" or agradecida in formal context. It's unusual, but works as an example

The most obvious English case would be "beautiful/handsome".

I am handsome.

I am beautiful.

Those words are differentiated on the object, not the gender of the speaker.

I was trying to give an example similar to obrigado/obrigada in English.

OK, but neither are examples of language being different based on the speaker, they are both based on gender of the object, whether is is contextually yourself, or another.

Handsome being a male adjective is a recent development though. Read some 19th century novels and the women are routinely described as handsome.

I told my girlfriend she was handsome the other day and she objected strenuously.

https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/355908/why-is-ha...

There are other little things in Portuguese:

I did it myself: Eu fiz eu mesmo/Eu fiz eu mesma.

And most adjectives. Actually, "obrigado" is "obliged" so the phrase "much obliged" is equivalent to the Portuguese "muito obrigado".

"Obrigado" is a contraction for "I am" obrigado. ("I'm indebted to you"), so you need to use the gender appropriate for the speaker

Seeing that "obrigato" is used to say thanks kind of makes me wonder if Japanese's "arigato" has a similar etymology.

Apparently not:

http://www.accessj.com/2014/05/etymology-of-arigato.html

I don't think you understood what you're responding to as it was not talking about grammatical gender, which is why it mentioned the use of statistical methods. The claim was that men and women do write in different dialects although they are less pronounced than in other languages.

I thought I read about one such study. IIRC it said women use more personal pronouns in academic papers. Take with grain of salt.

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