• AggressivelyPassive@feddit.de
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    10 months ago

    Wait until you hear about languages where everything is gendered.

    We’re currently debating, whether BürgerInnen, Bürger:innen or “Bürgerinnen und Bürger” is the proper way to address all citizens. This is not even about anything LGBTQ, it’s simply acknowledgement of the concept of non-male people (which is really hard for some conservatives).

    • Gilles_D@feddit.de
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      10 months ago

      I prefer the elimination of gender by using the participle because I think it’s easier to read and say, e.g. instead of Student:In you say Studierende (I guess also using the genderless plural of the participle, similar to the English concept). I’m not sure what the equivalent for Bürger would be though. Geborgene?

      • Akagigahara@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        Don’t think that works for words that don’t have a verb as a base, i.e. Krankenpflege works because Pflege is a Verb and can be conjugated to Krankenpflegende but Mechaniker:in doesn’t conjugate.

        Also Geborgene means nothing even adjacent to being a Bürger. I’d personally would have guessed Bürgende but even that is a major stretch. You would either have to create an entirely new way to conjugate nouns or you have to use synonyms that can be conjugated that way. Both ways will be a huge change to how German is spoken

      • Flumsy@feddit.de
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        10 months ago

        Why not just use the generic plural form (Bürger) as people always have? It has always been used for mixed groups so why shouldnt it continue to? And sometimes it doesnt even work (eg. for “Bauer”. The plurals would be “Bauern” and “Bäuerinnen”.

        • Gilles_D@feddit.de
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          10 months ago

          The problem people have with the Generischer Maskulinum is, that it is exactly that, the male plural form.

          • Flumsy@feddit.de
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            10 months ago

            Grammatical genus is not the same as biological gender. Or do people that are biologically neither male nor female need a third plural form?

            • Gilles_D@feddit.de
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              10 months ago

              That would be another advantage if we had a form that clearly eliminates the gender.

        • crispy_kilt@feddit.de
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          10 months ago

          “Liebe Mitmenschen”, meistens ist es nicht nötig, nur diejenigen mit der Staatsbürgerschaft anzusprechen, sondern alle, die in dem Land leben

    • Interesting_Test_814@jlai.lu
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      10 months ago

      In French we have a similar problem. Currently the most popular form is “citoyen.ne.s” or “citoyen.nes” (besides the good old “citoyens” or “citoyennes et citoyens”), which sometimes gets rendered as a website by some text displayers (e.g. les habitant.es). It’s technically supposed to be a middle dot (citoyen·ne·s) but nobody has that on their keyboard (I literally had to copy-paste it from wikipedia) so people use the point instead. We used to use parentheses like “citoyen(ne)s” but these have vastly be replaced by the dots.

      • sonnenzeit@feddit.de
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        10 months ago

        Interesting. In German typography we used to use lower quotation marks at the beginning of a quote and lower quotation marks at the end of a quote, both in handwriting and print:

        „Amazing“

        But the lower version isn’t found on the default QWERTZ keyboard layout so in personal digital communication (instant messages, emails, etc) especially you find double upper ones a lot:

        “Amazing” or ‘Amazing’

        The formal spelling rules haven’t been updated and you may still find the lower-upper vision in professional publications where the software adjusts the quotation marks according to a global setting. But most anything that is typed directly by a user will use the lazy lower-lower version.

        • Interesting_Test_814@jlai.lu
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          10 months ago

          We actually have the same issue with our « quotes » and accentuated capital letters in French, so « l’État » sometimes becomes “l’Etat”.

    • ivenoidea@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      The Austrian state I used to live in (Niederösterreich) actually just outlawed gendering words like that on any government documents. Absolutely idiotic.

    • uberrice@feddit.de
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      10 months ago

      Or, you know. Just Bürger, the generic masculinum. That all-inclusive. And it worked for a long time. It’s only because some snowflakes thought they needed something to complain about that we’re having this whole debate.

        • uberrice@feddit.de
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          10 months ago

          Ja, Kumpel * in dud * in bro* sephine. Diese ganzen Gendersternverherrlicher innen brauchen einfach etwas worüber sie innen sich aufregen *innen könn *innen.

          Ausserdem, bro *sephine, hast du mein Profil soweit durchgeschaut dass du rausgefunden hast dass ich männlich bin, oder hast du gerade mein Gender assumiert? Hier hättest du, um deinen eigenen Standards zu entsprechen, ein Genderneutrales Pronomen verwenden sollen, Bro *sephine.

          Gerade nachgeschaut. In meinem Profil steht überhaupt nichts zu meinem Gender. Du hast also zwangsweise einfach mal so angenommen, dass ich ein Mann bin. Stimmt das mit deiner Ideologie überein?

          • tfw_no_toiletpaper@feddit.de
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            10 months ago

            Bro ist mir egal ob du den Stern nutzt oder nicht, du bist nur bissl cringe im Internet unterwegs und ich wollte mich drüber lustig machen.
            Dass du da nen ganzen Paragrafen schreiben musstest, ist schon telling ne

      • HerrLewakaas@feddit.de
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        10 months ago

        No it’s not and there’s scientific evidence. Studies have shown that female children will name career paths as their dream job less often if only the male version is shown to them, presumably because they think it’s not an option for them, as it’s perceived to be only possible for males to follow that path. Explicitly mentioning both genders suddenly makes girls also want to become doctors.

        You might not like it, but there’s enough evidence to show that it has merit.

        • uberrice@feddit.de
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          10 months ago

          “scientific evidence”.

          Just like the ‘scientific evidence’ that, for whatever reason, in countries where women are way less free than in the west, many more women go into STEM?

          According to https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/200758/umfrage/entwicklung-der-anzahl-der-medizinstudenten/ since at least 2010 there are way many more women studying medicine than men.

          You might not like it, but just because it’s “Die” Sonne And “Der” Mond, That Does not suddenly mean that the moon is male and the sun is female, just how “Der Schüler” Does not imply that they are male or female.

          This whole discussion about grammatical gender is stupid and biased as fuck by “researchers” who come to the conclusion they want to come to. I work in academia myself, I know how much bullshit gets pushed through.

          Don’t get me wrong, I support anyone being able to do whatever they want. Women can do engineering just as much as men can, same for medicine and everything else. The literal only upside that men have is - on average - higher physical strength. And that just means that a higher percentage of men is strong enough to do certain physical job than the percentage of women. Doesn’t mean the women strong enough to do that job do it any worse than men.

          • marco@beehaw.org
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            10 months ago

            Statista is a website that steals data from everywhere, it’s not a source as they don’t do any research.

        • uberrice@feddit.de
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          10 months ago

          I wouldn’t mind a generic feminimum just as I don’t mind a generic masculinum. Grammatical gender doesn’t have anything to do with actual gender. It’s just a quirk of the language.

  • CrabAndBroom@lemmy.ml
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    10 months ago

    In German:

    Man = male (der Mann)

    Woman = female (die Frau)

    Boy = male (der Junge)

    Girl = neutral (das Mädchen)

    No idea why lol.

    Also I’m learning French and everything has a gender but I don’t see any pattern to it at all. Pizza is female, books are male, a suitcase is female, hats are male and so on.

    Also in French, the names of numbers go absolutely mental once you go above about 50. That’s got nothing to do with gender but I want to complain it whenever I can.

    • SpaceCadet@sopuli.xyz
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      10 months ago

      Girl = neutral (das Mädchen)

      No idea why lol.

      Mädchen is a diminutive, and all diminutives are grammatically neutral.

      It’s the same in Dutch btw, and my girlfriend who is learning Dutch is frequently abusing this as a cheat code: whenever she doesn’t know the gender of a word, she’ll just use the diminutive and it will automatically be neutral.

    • Sebeck0401@feddit.nl
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      10 months ago

      I think it’s das Mädchen because it’s a sort of diminutive (by use of chen). But it’s been a while since I studied German.

    • Drew Belloc@programming.dev
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      10 months ago

      So french is just like portuguese, but in portuguese you normally know if something is male or female by the ending of the words (with a feel exceptions), for example pizza is female because ends with “a”

    • DarkenLM@kbin.social
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      10 months ago

      Ah, yes the famous quatre-vingt-dix-neuf (commonly pronounced “quatre-vingt-deez-nuts”). Numbers are quite a mouthful in French. One of the reasons I erased it from my memory the moment I didn’t need it no more.

    • sonnenzeit@feddit.de
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      10 months ago

      No idea why lol.

      This always confused me, even as a native speaker so I looked it up some. Ultimately it’s because modern German is the confluence of multiple older, historic languages one of which came from a tree with a strict male/female rule for nouns while the other one’s grammar defaulted to a neutral case.

      As languages merge or adopt from others they often becomes a conjoined mess of multiple rules coexisting at the same time. A contemporary example is that in English the plural of a word is usually formed by attaching the suffix “s” to the singular form, aka house becomes houses. However there’s plenty of exceptions (mouse, mice) in particular if the words stem from a different language (octopus, octopi but nowadays octotuses is also acceptable). In that sense to people not privy to the etymology of words and who only study/learn the language per se there would be no perfectly accurate mechanism to predict the plural of a word.

      • sonnenzeit@feddit.de
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        10 months ago

        Also bonus content:

        singular: “das Mädchen” (neutral) - the girl

        plural: “die Mädchen” (female) - the girls

        So in the plural form you have to use a female article again, but the actual spelling of the word is unchanged. Go figure 🤷‍♂️ 🇩🇪.

        • Holzkohlen@feddit.de
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          10 months ago

          The simple past of read is read, but you pronounce it like red. I assume ever language on earth has its quirks.

          • sonnenzeit@feddit.de
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            10 months ago

            Well at least it consistently unlogical. But wait: it actually depends on the grammatical case for example:

            die Mädchen = the girls das Haus der Mädchen = the house of the girls // the girls’ house

            So depending on context male, female, neutral articles are all used (der Mädchen, die Mädchen, das Mädchen) 🤷‍♂️

        • Flumsy@feddit.de
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          10 months ago

          “Die” is always the plural article:

          DAS Auto - DIE Autos / DER Baum - DIE Bäume / DIE Fliege - DIE Fliegen /

        • Harrison [He/Him]@ttrpg.network
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          10 months ago

          That’s a misrepresentation of old English. Man used to be neutral, and was modified by were and wif respectively for man and woman. Wife comes from woman, not the other way around.

    • supercriticalcheese@feddit.it
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      10 months ago

      Ohh oui, french numbers I think they go mental after 69 ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

      70: 60+10 (soixante-dix)

      91: 4x20+11 (quatre-vingt-onze)

      Why? No clue I am not french.

      • jarfil@beehaw.org
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        10 months ago

        May or may not have some relation, but next to France/part of, lies the Basque country, where all numbers under 100 are base 20+10, except 11 and 19…

        57: 2×20+10+7 (berr-ogei-ta-hama-zazpi)

        79: 3×20+19 (hiru-r-ogei-ta-hemeretzi)

        French (in Belgium, Switzerland, and former colonies) also allows simple base 10:

        70: 70 (septante)

        91: 90+1 (nonante-et-un)

        …so the geographic location seems to have an impact.

        And just next to it, in Spain, everything is base 10… except 11 to 15 change the order from n×10+m, into 1+10 to 5+10.

        Italian does the same, except it’s 11 to 16… just like in French.

        English has a hiccup with eleven and twelve, then goes to n-teen, before going base 10 with n×10+m above 20.

        German does the same, except it goes to m+n×10 above 20.

        Overall, 20 seems to be a magic number, France just seems to have mixed in different ways of using it.

        https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vigesimal

    • crispy_kilt@feddit.de
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      10 months ago

      Mädchen is neuter because it is diminuitive.

      Das Häuschen Das Bäumchen Das Hügelchen

      and so on. Diminuitive is always neuter, and Mädchen is diminuitive of Magd (or Maid, I forgot).

    • VikingHippie@lemmy.wtf
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      10 months ago

      Reminds me of a famous quote from Danish humorist Jacob Haugaard:

      French is an easy language to learn: a horse is called chevalle and it’s like that all the way

    • wewbull@feddit.uk
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      10 months ago

      They obviously ran out of fingers and toes at fifty, so they traditionally never went any further.

    • TheHottub@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      I only speak English but I have always thought we should pronounce 11 through 19 as tendy one, tendy two, tendy three, tendy four… tendy nine, twenty.

  • alaxitoo@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    As a consequence my Taiwanese husband calls his mum “he” and his male friends “she” in English lol

    • what@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      My Chinese wife does this all the time.

      It can make following a story so hard because people with gendered pronouns hang so much of the story on she said that to him and when the pronouns switch mid story even though she is still talking about the same person I am instantly like wow this doesn’t even make sense. How is he now saying stuff to her, I thought he blocked her or something similar.

    • ZILtoid1991@kbin.social
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      10 months ago

      I also do this from time to time, but I’m Hungarian. Our politicians however will “save” us from the decaying western liberalism, which is more important than schools, heath care, etc.

  • cicapocok@lemm.ee
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    10 months ago

    My native language is genderless so I really dislike all the gendered grammar and words in different languages. English is very easy but in other cases when you start to have a male and a female version of each word which sometimes can be irregular and give you the clue that ohh yeah this should be male but noooo it’s female and in many cases there is just simply no logic behind them it is just the way they are.

      • sergih@feddit.de
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        10 months ago

        Plus 4 cases which makes it so that there are 16 (Masc, Fem, Neutr, Plural X 4 cases) different ways of typing an article depending on the gender of the word and what the word is doing whereas in English this is all replaced by “The”. And don’t forget about declining the adjective and the noun in some cases.

        Rant over.

        • interolivary@beehaw.org
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          10 months ago

          And then like half of the articles are “der” and you just have to use context to figure out which one it is

          Edit: I was randomly reminded of this graffiti I saw in Berlin:

    • AccountMaker@slrpnk.net
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      10 months ago

      English is barely gendered. In Slavic languages, as someone said, verbs are conjugated differently based on gender. In Serbian for instance, to say “I saw him”, you would say “Video sam ga” if you were a man, and “Videla sam ga” if you were a woman. In Arabic I think even more things vary based on gender, like “to you” has different forms based on whether “you” are a man or a woman. It might not be specifically that, but I distinctly recall Arabic using gender-based forms for something that Slavic languages don’t.

      • balderdash@lemmy.zip
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        10 months ago

        Hell, German has three genders. “The” is translated der, die or das depending on the noun

        • PastaGorgonzola@lemmy.world
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          10 months ago

          Three genders, and 5 words for “the”: der, die, das, dem, den. Depending on the gender of the noun and its function in the sentence.

          • letsgocrazy@lemm.ee
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            10 months ago

            And uses some of those words for “the” to be different versions of different genders in different cases.

            Der nominative male, der Dativ female.

            But call also be “that” or “which” or “who” depending on context.

            Not to mention declension of adjectives.

            Different declination for all three genders plus plural, plus differences for negation, no article, definite article, indefinite article all in in nominative, accusative, dative, genitive, version

            If Excel spreadsheets for different versions of “the” turn you on, then German is your language.

    • Dicska@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      … Aaaand as it turns out, most European languages are gendered. At least more gendered than ours.

      • wewbull@feddit.uk
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        10 months ago

        In most European languages you have to worry about misgendering a table.

  • deus@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    Yeah, this is a whole thing. In Portuguese, like most other Romance languages I believe, every single noun is gendered, so cars are male, houses are female, and so on and so forth. We have the male pronoun ele (he) and the female one ela (she), and besides these there’s also a neutral isso (it) but using that to refer to someone is very rude and dehumanizing, so we basically have no neutral pronouns (when talking about multiple people you generally use the plural male pronoun eles unless they’re all women, but some people think that’s kinda sexist I guess).

    Some people have been trying to create new pronouns to fix that, such as elu, elx and ile, all of which have seen very limited adoption. I like to consider myself a progressive and inclusive person but I just can’t bring myself to use these new words, they all sound terrible, it’s like I’m butchering the language. So yeah, when talking about someone you don’t know in Portuguese you basically have to guess their gender or just ask them what they like more.

    • devfuuu@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      I was just going to come and say basically the same. Portuguese has everything gendered, all words, impossible to speak without it. I would very much like to a have a non-gendered language.

      • bjfar@reddthat.com
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        10 months ago

        On the other hand I kind of feel like if a house can be female and a car can be male then there can’t really be much argument against using whatever gender any human prefers for themselves.

    • GamesRevolution@programming.dev
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      10 months ago

      Exactly, it’s painful because I want to be respectful and use a more neutral pronoun but none of the ones people created really feels natural to pronounce and it’s always awkward when someone tries to use them in conversation. Now the they/them in English rolls off the tongue and I use it all the time without realizing.

      My current strategy is to address someone by whatever pronouns I think is correct and if they correct me then I just ask for forgiveness and use the one they prefer

      • Wogi@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        My strategy is to look grumpy and hope no one talks to me.

        It was my strategy before pronouns became a thing and it suited me fine then, it suits me fine now

    • guts@lemmy.ml
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      10 months ago

      Same as Spanish but we do use neutral nouns, I am not into bastardizing my native language when this same people can not speak good grammatical Spanish. The best we could have is a linguistic academy as RAE.

  • Ertebolle@kbin.social
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    10 months ago

    Interestingly, written Chinese does have a gendered ‘she’ pronoun, 她, but it’s pronounced the same as the male one, and it’s a recent invention meant specifically to improve compatibility with Western languages.

    Also, if you want a sample of how this works in English, the narrator / main character of Ann Leckie’s “Ancillary” trilogy doesn’t understand gendered pronouns and constantly gets them mixed up.

  • N-E-N@lemmy.ca
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    10 months ago

    Honestly I wish English was less gendered than it is.

    E.g. Nephew/Niece, why is there no proper gender-neutral one. This isn’t just for LGBTQ stuff, just seems silly to have everything gendered in general

  • TimewornTraveler@lemm.ee
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    10 months ago

    yeah debates over Neo-pronouns are always a really tedious Anglo-centric thing. it’s not something that the majority of trans people worldwide are even able to care about

    • escapesamsara@discuss.online
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      10 months ago

      Yeah I feel some groups would have been better served getting on the gender abolition train rather than gender overspecialization; but it’s nicer to feel like you can pinpoint exactly where you belong than let go of the sillier social constructs in a world so invested in making them artificially important.

      • TimewornTraveler@lemm.ee
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        10 months ago

        well artificial or not they are still important. it could be argued that our connection with reality itself is a social construct, at least insofar as we think in language and comprehend the world through language.

        pronouns aren’t just jewels bedazzling our language. They’re a fundamental grammatical part of it. the language through which we understand the world only holds up with some basic underlying structures. so how we choose what words to use to stand in for something really shapes how we understand that thing.

        It’s even more complicated by the fact that English pronouns have historically tended to be a closed class of words. the language has never readily coined or adopted new pronouns in the way we adopt new nouns and verbs (i.e., “google it”). that’s not to say it’s impossible for pronouns to become open-class and for neo-pronouns to work, but it’s fighting a battle against not just modern biases but also centuries (millenia?) of fundamental structure.

    • Chunk@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      If you don’t use someone’s preferred neopronouns you are LITERALLY committing genocide against trans people. That’s right, not using the preferred neopronouns is as grave a sin against humanity as any famine, plague, or murderous policy.

        • TimewornTraveler@lemm.ee
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          10 months ago

          They are neither being sincere nor joking. They’re creating a strawman through hyperbole to suggest that anyone who cares about pronouns is deranged. In reality, usually when someone gets upset about pronouns it is not because their neos weren’t used, it was from being deliberately misgendered as an attack on them despite knowing the preferred he/she/they pronouns.

        • corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca
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          10 months ago

          The person used “literally” so even if it were serious then it can still be completely ignored as per the “litchally” policy.

          Same for anyone who says “action the ask to reduce the spend”, although those poseurs are hunted anytime they leave the car lot.

    • Thetimefarm@lemm.ee
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      10 months ago

      It’s a little known fact that men were created in 1925 by a marketing company tasked with selling urinals.

  • Kyoyeou (Ki jəʊ juː)@slrpnk.net
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    10 months ago

    I’ve stopped learning Chinese when I left the country. I’ve only had HSK 2, but man do I miss no conjugation, you ate an apple pie for breakfast this morning? Well “This morning breakfast I eat an apple pie”.

    You already told it was this mornings breakfast with context.

    This is something you really see when discovering another language that is not yours. I’m on Modern Speaking Arabic right now and I see it a lot

    • WtfEvenIsExistence1️@lemmy.caOP
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      10 months ago

      Technically it’s:

      今天早上的早餐我吃一个苹果派

      Today morning breakfast I eat(了)an apple pie

      You have to put the “了” to be correct

      了 is kinda like past tense

    • BCsven@lemmy.ca
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      10 months ago

      Then you have Welsh where a lot of things are double affirmed in sentences removing ambiguity. even for the word yes you conjugate your reply as it depending on the quesrion they asked you.

      Wyt. (Yes, you are. when asked as Am I?)

      Ydw. (Yes, I am.)

      Ydy. (Yes, he is.)

      Ydy. (Yes, she is.)

      Ydych. (Yes, you are. when asked as are We?)

      Ydyn. (Yes, we are.)

      Ydyn. (Yes, they are.)

        • BCsven@lemmy.ca
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          10 months ago

          Oh boy, Welsh is fun. Y is sort of an UH sound, W is a OO sound and CH is A hard back of throat noise you make for the real scottish LOCH

        • tehevilone@lemmy.world
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          10 months ago

          Seems to be like “Eh-dew”, “Eh-dee”, “Eh-dich”, so eh- or uh- for the Y at the start. Welsh IPA guide on wiktionary says Y at the start is like the a at the start of “about”, when it’s not either a single-syllable or in the last syllable of a word, in which case it’s an “eee” sound, like the end of “happy”.

    • st0v@lemmy.zip
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      10 months ago

      doesn’t Chinese have pronouns though?

      她 she 他 he 它 it

      or am I missing something ?

  • meteorswarm@beehaw.org
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    10 months ago

    Ok but in writing you do, at least if you’re my college professors and want to make your students sad

    他 third person singular, neutral 她 she 它 it (non-human, especially inanimate) 牠 it (animal) 祂 third person singular (divine)

  • Ejh3k@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    Reading through the comments is making me interested in the difference in transgendered people in cultures with gendering versus ones that keep it neutral.

    Like if there are more trans in neutral cultures because gendering isn’t as important, and where gendering is cultural there are less due to an ingrainedness of it all?

    • deathbird@mander.xyz
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      10 months ago

      Gender variant expression is found across all human societies (probably gender/sexual dysphoria too), but transgender identification (and third genders) seems highly culturally dependent.

      Hard to know what impact language has. It’s perfectly possible that in cultures without as much linguistic gendering, there’s less trans identification because there’s less gendered language to attach to or push away from.

    • randint@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz
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      10 months ago

      I don’t think there is much relation between a community using a language with no genders and its transgender population size. Take China for example. The nouns in Chinese are not gendered, and the pronouns used to be gender-neutral until about a hundred years ago when “她” (she) emerged. There are few transgender people in China, partially due to the fact that they are not officially recognized, but I don’t think there would be many transgender people in China even if the government legally allowed it.

        • randint@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz
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          10 months ago

          Because transgender is a concept that started in the western part of the world. It still has a long way to go to make its way into the East Asian countries. Take Taiwan for example. They legalized same-sex marriage a couple years ago, making them one of the most open places in Asia to the concept of LGB, but there aren’t many transgender people there either.

          • Ejh3k@lemmy.world
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            10 months ago

            Oh, so we are just going to completely ignore the long history of thai lady boys and them being a sign of status.

            • randint@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz
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              10 months ago

              Thai culture is pretty different from Chinese culture (compared to other cultures in Southeast Asia). I did somehow forget the existence of Thailand when making my previous comment though, sorry about that.

              • Ejh3k@lemmy.world
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                10 months ago

                So are you going to adjust your statement about transgender being a western creation, or are you just going to keep being wrong?

                • randint@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz
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                  10 months ago

                  I am not going to adjust my statement. I feel like you are just looking to start an argument and I would like to politely refuse to participate.

  • iByteABit [he/him]@lemm.ee
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    10 months ago

    I recently started very casually learning Chinese, this absolutely blew my mind along with the fact that verbs don’t have a billion different forms depending on time and the object of the sentence like all the other languages I know.