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Comment by earnestinger | Hacker News Reader

Lot of languages assign gender to objects.

One should control for foreign language knowledge.

A lot of languages assign nouns to a noun class. They are (usually) not ascribing a biological gender to an object. "Gender" is a horrendously bad name for the concept.

"Gender" referred only to grammar before it gained its modern meaning. The modern meaning was introduced in the 1950s/60s to differentiate social aspects (gender) from biological (sex). Of course people then started using it to just mean "sex", but if you use social definition I don't think it's a bad name for the concept.

Are you sure? That’s almost the opposite of what I heard, which was that “gender” being used to refer to -inity arose as a euphemism to avoid using the word “sex”, because the word “sex” came to be more associated with specifically “sex-acts” (and that prior to it being used as a euphemism in this way, it essentially meant something like kind/type/sort), and only after “gender” began being used as a euphemism in this way, did people begin using it to distinguish between “gender roles” and “sexes”.

It's not the worst name for the concept when you include "a male" and "a female" as prominent nouns in that noun class. If you adjust your language depending on whether you are addressing a man or a woman (or speaking about a man or woman), then it's definitely also social gender (as well as grammatical gender), even if those two concepts are separate.

Except there's no mandate that "a male" and "a female" are of different noun classes, nor are the nouns for man/woman abnormally privileged in most cases. I know Dutch has fused masculine/feminine nouns into a "common" gender, leaving the language with effectively only the common and neuter genders. If I remember correctly, a similar thing has happened in Swedish and Danish. Some languages have various concepts of animacy driving the system. Some languages have shitloads of noun classes.

You can adjust your language depending on the biological gender of who you're addressing in English, but English doesn't have grammatical gender in any meaningful way. The concepts are largely orthogonal.

Calling it gender really is just a bad, misleading name in the grand scheme of things.

Except for all the languages that actually call the grammatical concept: gender

Edit: see German example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender_in_German

Yeah man, I know that it's traditionally called gender, and I know that German has a gender and case system. I don't understand what the link you've posted has to do with my point, I'm really not sure what there is to misunderstand about what I'm saying.

To come all the way back to what my original comment was about -- a German speaker is not ascribing any sort of sociological femininity to words like Freiheit or Bundesanstalt, nor any sort of sociological masculinity to Anschluss or Wein, nor any lack thereof to Sicherheitsrelais or Volk. The objects in the language have a grammatical gender, not a sociological one. It would be interesting seeing research on what sociological gender speakers of a language with a gender system choose for an object they're personifying (especially inanimate ones), but I don't think a German necessarily thinks "I'm personifying this key, and it's a man because the noun is masculine". Does anybody here have any anecdotes?

Link was used to establish that this concept is usually called “gender”. (I felt there was a dispute on that; might be my projection)

Regarding anecdotes:

In my native language all objects have grammatical gender (feminine and masculine).

If I would write a children book natively, about objects that come to life, I would automatically assign their social gender based on grammatical gender.

Because language hints it that way. Pronouns, adjectives, participles, all must be adjusted based on objects gender (exactly like it would be done when talking about a person).

There is some research that goes in the opposite direction. I.e. that especially in german the lack gender in the word for girls ("das Mädchen") is actually quite problematic and can lead to girls not thinking they really have a gender before they grow up. At least up to a certain age, where children learn to separate between grammatical gender and social gender or biological sex.

French and Spanish literally use a contraction of the Latin for he and she for different objects though. This is also done in Swedish.

Hon slår tolv. 'She strikes twelve', referring to the clock currently striking.

Are you talking about direct object pronouns? At least in the case of Spanish, lo/la is the pronoun for a masculine or feminine noun. It would obviously follow that it's the pronoun for a man and woman, respectively, the same way they would be the pronoun for any other masculine or feminine noun. I don't see how addressing men and women (as a noun) the same as you would any other noun in the language (save some irregularities) means that the cart is pulling the horse.

le/el/il = ille, la = illa.

It literally means he and she in Latin. Then people started using these to indicate that something was a specific object instead of an object in general.

Grammatical use came first by far.

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