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Guy labeled “languages where everything is gendered” hovers menacingly, while a different guy labeled “non-binary people” runs away
Guy labeled “languages where everything is gendered” hovers menacingly, while a different guy labeled “non-binary people” runs away
English is worse in that it’s half assed genders, it’s so inconvenient like here’s an example
Convo example/rant
-Person 1: Hello how’s was your day?
Person 2: It was alright but there’s was traffic and I couldn’t get back home on time.
-Person 1: Did you get time to do your little home project?
Person 2: No, it was dark when I got back, only had time for dinner and sleep.
Now let’s say you want to ask Person 1 about Person 2’s project, in a heavily gendered language (for example Arabic) you would’ve known what to refer to them based on the pronouns used in the conversation (ex: in Arabic there’s gendered versions of the pronoun you), and in a language that doesn’t use genders you wouldn’t have to worry about misgendering Person 2 because you simply can’t, But in English because the pronoun for “you” is gender neutral but “He/She/They” isn’t neutral you have to either ask about the Person 2’s gender or risk misgendering them.
I guess, but the general convention is to just use “they” if you don’t know. Shakespeare did it, and we still do it.
Amen
Funny enough this isn’t true where I come from. In my native dialect, a person of unknown gender is referred to as “he”, a fact I vehemently defended before I discovered that I was trans (because being referred to as he hurts less if it’s a gender neutral pronoun)
Boy was that some stuff to unlearn
And people who speak Swahili (which has 18 noun classes/genders) might complain that with only 2 genders, there are many examples where its still ambiguous.
There’s an infinite amount of extra info you can append onto any part of a language, you have to make a cutoff somewhere. I’m just glad English didn’t go with a feature that made me want to kill myself in most conversations when I was learning Spanish.