If we were to remove the gendering of nouns and pronouns from all languages, would we lose anything that is actually useful? I am not asking here about the poetic beauty of languages as they have grown through the ages or any sop to tradition, so please, if that’s your take on the subject, start your own thread?
I am asking here about actual functional information. Is there anything useful achieved by dividing nouns and pronouns into gendered groups? I can’t think of a single reason to keep it.
It can reduce ambiguity in some cases. For example the difference in meaning of the two sentences “John told Mary that he needed to leave” and “John told Mary that she needed to leave” depends on the gendered pronouns. Without them, as in “John told Pete that he needed to leave”, the meaning is ambiguous.
This could be done in other (and better) ways, such as in Loglan, where “free variables” take the place of pronouns and make such sentences unambiguous regardless of the gender of the subjects. But in English as it stands, gendered pronouns are the only tool we have.
Not really, IMHO. Not much should be lost.
I’m really only still a beginner at the Finnish language, but, perhaps famously, one uses the personal pronoun “hän” for all personal entities.
More or less equivalent to my preferred taste in the English language to calling people “it,” unless they have some specially deserved status. Rare these days.
Of course, more rigorously applied grammatical cases would need to be employed in English for such a pronoun to be useful, and I very much doubt any kind of evolution would occur quickly or soon. Of course,one would have to invent some new easily identifiable grammatical cases, as well as resurrect some of the traditional, but disused, or abused ones.
However, context would seem to resolve most cases, including all important ones.
I vote for calling people “it.” It is egalitarian, unambiguous provided one is careful to supply ample cues, where necessary, and avoids any political unpleasantness, whatever that may be.
Reducing ambiguity seems to me to be an essential role. The clearer and more precise, the better I’d say. The fact that some languages, such as Finnish (or Malagasy), don’t have gendered pronouns doesn’t mean that it’s optimal.
Now, languages such as French and German could do away with grammatical gender for nouns. This wouldn’t impact communication at all ; it could even make it clearer actually.
I’m pretty sure that some languages do something similar. That’s an elegant possibility.
Can I also turn this around? What would we gain, from a purely communicative basis, by getting rid of grammatical gender?
I don’t think anything would be lost. As @markn_1 shows, while gendered pronouns can be useful in some cases, if both subjects are the same gender, you already need another way of disambiguating them.
In fact, I wish we had a non-gendered pronoun that wasn’t also the group pronoun, because I find sentences with a singular “they” to often be quite confusing, “John told Mary that they were no longer welcome.”
Just saw this. I don’t think it matters from a purely communicative basis – the fact is that lots of folks are of ambiguous gender in person, and of course when communicating by email, especially with or about people with foreign names, I don’t know the gender of the person. It would be great if there were a less awkward way to reference people without using the plural and without accidentally insulting them.
That’s the thing.
From a purely communicative point of view, grammatical gender, like the difference between definite and indefinite articles, has an obvious disambiguating role and makes language more efficient.
But language isn’t just about communicating. It is also about building a community. And indeed, the more people feel included, the better.
The real question seems to be how do we strike a good balance between clarity and inclusiveness?
In German, babies are referred to as “it” (sometimes in English, too). Then, girls are “it” and boys are “he”, and then eventually, women are “she” and men are “he”. Why? Does a baby’s gender not matter? Not really, but why does anyone’s gender matter?
We got rid of lots of gendered nouns (waiter/waitress became server, policeman became police officer, etc.) and nothing of value was lost. With the number of unclear situations where you’re referring to several men or several women, adding one more little bit of unclarity for when you’re disambuating between a man and a woman seems like a very small step.
Which again boils down to the main question. Is clarity of communication or inclusiveness the most essential role of language?
Well, inclusiveness, I think.
My point is that the amount of additional non-clarity is tiny, since the English language already has problems with clarity in exactly the same situations, even with gendered pronouns. It only adds clarity if there are actually multiple known genders in the situation. Where everyone is the same gender or the genders are unknown, English already has that clarity problem.
That makes sense.
Imprecise language usually only leads to annoyance and occasional misunderstandings, but can once in a blue moon have catastrophic consequences.
Insensitive language, however, hurts some people on a daily basis.
Well it is the sort of insane virtue signalling bullshit that leads to people like Donald Trump getting elected. “No, I don’t really like his behavior or mannerisms or policies or his fundamental nature as a human being. But at least he isn’t trying to Newspeak the country into a bunch of woke asexual carbon blobs in the name of social justice”
Let’s put this “problem” in perspective. Less than 2% of Americans identify as non-binary. That means for 98% of the people, traditional female and male pronouns work just fine.
So which is easier. Rewrite thousands of years of literature to accommodate gender-neutral pronouns? Or simply ask the less than 2% of non-binary people “what do you like to be called?”
People who vote for Trump because firemen are now called firefighters were voting for Trump anyway.
Not exactly. Sure gendered pronouns work fine for 98% of people when you’re talking about whether a particular, known person should be referred to by “he” or “she” . But that’s not the only circumstance. Suppose I’m referring to someone who I don’t know , like your assistant Chris. Should I use male or female pronouns ? What about when I’m talking about a non-specific police officer or mail carrier ? Should I just use generic male pronouns or should I always use “he or she” or should I alternate?
Different languages have different pros and cons. In English, it’s easy to distinguish between Mary’s book (“her book” ) and John’s book (“his book”) but it’s not so easy to decide which pronouns to use for Chris’ book or Pat’s book. In other languages “his book” and “her book” are exactly the same - so you can’t exactly say “John told Mary to take her book rather than his book.” You have to say something like “John told Mary to take the book that belongs to Mary” .
And, let’s not forget people with Asian or other foreign names which, for this English speaker, are not clear at all in terms of gender. I work for an international company and there are lots of people I interact with and refer to where it’s not clear to me whether they’re men or women, assuming they fall into one of those categories anyway.
They absolutely do not. Everyone, in everyday usage, has to refer to folks they don’t know yet, and nothing about their relationship depends on gender. Get that nonsense out of the language, the sooner the better.
De-gendering occupations is fine. I don’t see a need to make a distinction between “pilot” and “lady pilot”.
Isn’t there a sense in which de-gendering is a bit like misgendering? I mean not as bad, obviously, because it would not be happening to a minority that is oppressed in various ways, but if you feel you have a right to be referred to as they/them (and I don’t disagree with that), then it’s wrong to subtract the same right from someone who wishes to be referred to a she/her.
(eta obviously I’m not talking about situations where it is unknown. We already have a mechanism for that)
I agree. There may be a few exceptions, but if so, they’d be rare.
One place different terms maybe does make sense is for animals, like “cow” vs “bull” or “hen” vs “rooster.”
He and she are pronounced the same in Chinese also, although the written characters are different.
他 / 她 = tā
If people don’t know my gender, it’s not taking anything away from me or insulting me to use a neutral pronoun up until the point where there’s an opportunity to communicate my preference. Continuing to use a neutral one (or other gendered) when addressing me specifically after my preference has been expressed can be seen as disrespectful misgendering; it’s the same act, isn’t it? Whether I’m cis or trans, deliberately misnaming or misgendering me is disrespectful.
The difference for cis people is we are so used to being correctly identified, that it feels much more foreign and rude to be identified in another way. There’s some level of insult attached to it, because society has used gender as an insult (calling women masculine or men feminine as if these are bad things). The problem isn’t the pronouns, it’s all the garbage societal sexism we’ve piled onto them.
I’m not sure I’m expressing this well. I just feel it doesn’t take anything away from me to use inclusive language, to address people as they wish to be addressed and it doesn’t bother me at all to be identified neutrally even though I identify as female.