Language and perception

[sabotabby]

Really interesting article on how different languages shape what we think about. The part about colour and art on the last page is particularly cool.

But what I'm really wondering about is the bit on gendered words. With all the debate about which pronouns to use (in English) for people who do not identify as exclusively male or female (or persons who have not told us their gender and whom we don't want to offend by presuming), it did not occur to me that most European languages have a far more rigorously gendered grammar than English. I mean, I knew, but it didn't occur to me to bring it up in conversations about why I don't think invented pronouns will catch on with the mainstream and the singular they is the most elegant solution, though of course I will defer to an individual's pronoun of choice. In many languages, in that last clause, I would have had to have identified the gender of "an individual."

So for those of you who speak other languages: Is there a similar discussion about gendered language in, say, Spanish or French or German?

Comments

[akisawana.livejournal.com]

I speak both French and German, and I do a *lot* of slurring if I'm unsure as to the proper grammatical gender. Since my French is skewed toward Belgian accent rather than Parisian, and French is starting to mix it up with my German, I can usually get away with it.

When speaking *to* a person of indeterminate gender, I use vous/Sie backwards, forwards, and upside-down. Since that's (as of now) over the Internet, I can always play the spelling card.

I was a bit upset that the article didn't talk about formality and familiarity -I have to bite down on the reflex to replace Sie with "y'all" when talking to my mother-in-law -there's only one of her! English feels informal to me; I'm used to using case and conjugation to express politeness, so adding words to the sentence makes me feel all pretentious and condescending.

[seaya.livejournal.com]

German has an analog to our "they" I think.

[loolica.livejournal.com]

We have constant discussion about gender on our French publications. Endless. Things get edited and re-edited. In French there are virtually no gender neutral options. Worker, activist, steward, all those words are gendered. In all cases, the masculine version of the word is considered the gender neutral option. Adjectives are different depending on whether the person you are speaking about is defined as male or female. I mean, hell, even table, chair and tomato are gendered in French, right?

(On the other hand, possessives are gendered based on the thing that is possessed, not the person possessing it. So, "sa pomme"(f) and "son soulier" (m) whether the person is identified as masculine, feminine or unidentified. If, say, there is a girl and a boy and an apple, and you want to make it clear that it's the girl's apple, then you have to add another qualifier, "sa pomme à elle" (hir apple that is hers).)

There isn't even a gender neutral plural in French. Like most other languages, the default neutral is the masculine ("ils"). Unless you know for certain that the group you are talking about is all female, in which case you would say "elles," the equivalent of "they" is "many hes." I can remember as a kid being indignant that you could have a group of 500 women and 1 man, and you would still have to refer to that group as masculine to be grammatically correct.

Different places I've worked address this in different ways. Some use the neutral masculine. Some, like CUPW always use both the masculine and feminine. It's even in their French name, Syndicat des travailleurs et travailleuses des postes. Although, of course, that still leaves room for argument of whether the masculine or the feminine should come first, or if they should alternate or what. Using both is really ungainly, because then you also have jig up the rest of the sentence because the gender of the subject can be reflected throughout the whole sentence, so that sometimes people end up using slashes or parenthesis for all the adjectives and word objects and, frankly it can be so fucking ugly and impossible to read. this is further complicated by the fact that most of our French text is a translation trying to capture text that has already had this gender struggle in English. And then add to this the further complication that, on average, a French translation of an English text is already about 25% longer, and you are trying to create a publication that is as close to identical as possible in both languages, and pah.

Probably a native French speaker will have a different take on this!

[lovableatheist.livejournal.com]

Native french speaker here (French-Canadian) and I think you've summed it up pretty well. I always hate trying to include some form of gender neutrality into french texts because, as you said, the only way to really do it is insert a bunch of slashes and parentheses. Like the word 'prisoner' in english would be 'prisonier-ères', prisoniers(ères) or 'prisonierEs' or something equally ugly and confusing.

I personally think the all-inclusive approach is better than the gender neutral approach for french. CUPW's 'syndicat des travailleurs et travailleuses des postes' sounds (and looks) a lot better than 'syndicat des travailleur-euses des postes' would. But then again, gender isn't necessarily a binary, which adds another twist to the whole debate.

[loolica.livejournal.com]

We're doing a long publication right now that we are hoping is going to have some longevity, and I have suggested that we alternate using the feminine and masculine per chapters. Surprisingly, people aren't into it! Instead it looks like we are going to opt to do it all "neutral" masculine, with a little note at the beginning saying "where we say he, we also mean she," which is probably my least favourite from a political point of view, but still appeals to me from a readability and grammatical standpoint.

[frandroid.livejournal.com]

I basically give up in French.

There's too much stuff to think about. It's too wound in. Instead of trying to change the language in order to make people think in different ways, I say we just educate people to pay attention to this gendered language and how this affects our thinking. The social engineering way is kind of Orwellian, when you think about it.

It's like how I use "partner" for my girlfriend in English (which I did get laughed at for when I started using it). I wouldn't dream of using this word in French, even though "blonde" is in a way more egregious than girlfriend. I think this gender neutrality shit is pushing PCness too far. It's only because English is so little gendered that it's possible to think of wiping it out. Languages are accidents, let's not to come up with Esperanto here.

[loolica.livejournal.com]

I totally disagree that languages are accidents; I think they absolutely reflect power structures.

But I pretty much agree with the rest of it! And because I think that language reflects power structures, I think we should worry about changing the power structures, then the language will follow. Doing it this way puts the cart before the horse, really. I do, of course, defer to people's own choice about their own pronouns, I just don't think that pronouns go a long way towards social change.

As a brunette, I've never really understood the blonde thing. And the first time someone I heard someone use partner to refer to their lover (like, twenty years ago or so) I actually asked them "Oh, what kind of business are you in?"

[marnanel.livejournal.com]

The only European language I speak fluently is English. However, here are two things I've run into in my life:

1) You know how Spanish sometimes has masculine words ending -o and feminine words ending -a? I have met people who wrote @ instead, because it contains both.

2) In Welsh, "his" and "her" are both "ei", but you change the next word in different ways according to gender. ("Car", a car. "Ei gar", his car. "Ei char", her car.) I asked a Welsh speaker what to do about people of other gender, and they suggested not mutating the word at all, so you got ^?"ei car". I don't know whether anyone has ever really done this.

[sabotabby]

@ is unofficial editorial policy in Solidaridad, the currently on-hold Spanish Wobbly newsletter that I did.

[marnanel.livejournal.com]

Oh, nifty!

I thought that NYT article was so interesting that I went to tell the little one about the "voice of a fork" experiment. She said "I think forks would have a high piercing voice because they pierce things. But I think knives would have a boy's voice because there's a stereotype that boys are in charge, and knives cut things." (Edit: "stereotype" was the actual word she used, not my interpolation.)

This led into an interesting discussion about gender stereotypes. But I was quietly amused by thinking that managers are dangerous and should be kept in a safe place.

[bike4fish.livejournal.com]

Two of my offspring, probably at the ages of 8 and 9 (who were taking German) decided to gender English nouns on a rational basis. But an object's gender was mutable, depending on its current state and possibly past state, and even its potential future state. For instance, a frozen pizza that one bought with the intention of eating in the frozen state was masculine, while a frozen pizza that one intended to heat up was feminine.

(The "rational basis" for the whole system was the arbitrary determination that "popsicles are masculine".)

[marnanel.livejournal.com]

That is so wonderful. Someone could probably get a fair chunk of a psycholinguistics thesis out of it.

[joxn.livejournal.com]

Japanese and Hungarian have no grammatical gender and no gendered 3rd person pronoun, but I would say their cultures exhibit strong gender binaries, even in language. Japanese has an entire feminine mode of speaking (women use a "softer", "politer" register usually). Hungarian has nearly no gender-neutral professional nouns; there's doctor and doctor-woman, lawyer and lawyer-woman, even king and king-woman.

Chinese also doesn't have grammatical gender or gendered pronouns; I'm not as familiar with the other language aspects as I am with Hungarian and Japanese, but from a cultural point of view China has not been a traditionally gender-egalitarian society.

[kadath.livejournal.com]

Yeah, Japanese tends to force you to gender yourself, but not others, unless you're speaking in a formal setting, where everyone will use the polite form. A guy'll get laughed at for using the polite/feminine "I" in casual company. I'm a bit selfishly glad that I'm a woman, so no one's going to expect me to navigate polite/plain form switches in order to avoid sounding weird.

[joxn.livejournal.com]

My strategy fop that, as a guy, is to always use the hyper-polite/formal "watakushi", which nobody has yet laughed at me for. I'm too old for "boku" and practically never am in an informal enough situation for something like "ore".

[kadath.livejournal.com]

I'm in class with a bunch of 20 year olds, so they'll pretty much have to use "boku"...except the teacher won't let them in a class format. At least no one's tried to bust out "ore" yet. (Today in "Signs You Learned By Watching Anime...")

[eumelia.livejournal.com]

Hrbrew is a fucking nightmare when it comes to gender nouns and pronouns. Everything is gendered, and the default gender when speaking of a "test subject" is "He", unlike "One", if you catch my drift.

"You" is gendered. Inanimate objects are gendered. There's a bit of gender fuck going on in some queer circles I'm in, trying to imbue both male and feminine pronouns into plural pronouns (which I cringe at, because it just looks terrible).

Numbers are gendered FFS. I like English's neutrality sometimes, though I do at times, use a gendered term for an inanimate object and my parents look at me funnily.

[queerasmoi.livejournal.com]

...the singular they is the most elegant solution, though of course I will defer to an individual's pronoun of choice. In many languages, in that last clause, I would have had to have identified the gender of "an individual."

There are, however, some words such as "un individu" or "une personne" which always have the same gender regardless of the actual person's gender. But yes it is harder to de-gender a gendered language.

Adding to which, the "gender" concept in French is used largely for grammatical gender and trans people are more likely to talk about their identity in terms of "sexe" rather than any translation of "gender" in English. So when drafting legislation to add "gender identity" to the grounds on which Canadians are protected from discrimination, the French text of the same bill becomes a site of language conflict. (I've heard many words about this from a franco trans friend of mine...)

[lienne.livejournal.com]

oooh.

(I like singular they but it doesn't do the job I want from a GNP. Also, I am gay for Spivak.)