My question is specifically about Japanese and how DPRK is claiming that these counters/classifiers are adding an element of gender to that language.
There are no counters/classifiers in Japanese which designate gender.
Gender as in sex, no. Mea culpa if I caused a misunderstanding by using the word “gender”. Jragon may be right that the original question was not about grammatical gender. (By the way, could “彼” not also refer to a female in older-style Japanese?)
I was suggesting what Wendell Wagner said, that since Japanese counters are classifiers that must be used when counting things, that they add an element of having to know which noun goes with which measure word, which is not completely unlike the grammatical feature of assigning nouns to distinct classes, aka “grammatical gender”.
Swahili is another language on the list of (largely) gender-neutral languages that was posted. No question that people, plants, animals, fruits, liquids, etc, belong to different “classes”, so some might say the language has a complex gender system. Yet, personal pronouns do not indicate the sex of the referent.
More to the point, if you’ve only looked at languages in one or two separate families, you have no idea how much languages as a whole vary.
Linguists treat grammatical gender and noun classifiers separately (although I think the distinction between the two gets fuzzy). Some languages have noun genders and, independently, noun classifiers: , e.g. Mian of New Guinea has four grammatical genders (masc., femin., two inanimates) AND an independent system of at least six noun classifications that dictate verb prefixes.
I continue to think Thai is the least gendered language mentioned here. (In Thai pronouns are generally avoided altogether!) AFAIK there is only one 2nd or 3rd person pronoun which clearly denotes gender — หล่อน (/lawn/, ‘she’, 2nd or 3rd person) — but in our dialect this is heard most commonly when the speaker or referent is a ‘lady-boy’ (transsexual).
My apologies for disappearing from this thread. For reasons I don’t understand, the SDMB was not sending me updates when new posts were entered. I thought the question had died on the vine, and was coming back to bump it and see if anyone might respond!
Thanks so much to every one who provided such thoughtful and detailed information.
The germ of the question was in wondering whether languages were helping or hindering the societal push toward equality between the sexes. My thought was that in areas where the language does not differentiate, people would be less likely to be held back or helped by their gender. But I didn’t know enough about the languages to start researching the question, and I didn’t want to derail this discussion by raising the larger questions too soon.
The idea that gender in language affects social equality of the sexes is dubious at best. Turkish, for example, is a gender-neutral language while English is not, but I doubt anyone would argue that Turkish women are treated more equally with men than English women are.
I don’t suppose that it is causative; language is the result of thousands of years of social mores after all. I do suppose though that it can help or hinder, speed or retard, social change.
Whether those two things can be separated I’m not sure. But we learn language at such a young age that it seems differences are embedded almost before conscious thought. Whereas in a gender neutral language, we would be older when the questions are considered and “new” ideas of equality would be processed differently.
Do you have any evidence that ideas of equality would be processed differently depending on one’s language? This sounds like a version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Do you think gender equality is likely to progress faster in Turkey than in countries like England, Sweden and Germany, which use gendered languages?
However, in partial support of your idea, you may be interested in reading Douglas Hofstadter’s “A Person Paper on Purity in Language”. It takes a little while to understand what he’s doing.
https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.html
Well, if you look at the derivative, you get a different picture.
English as she is spoke has become less gendered over the past century, as a form of conscious linguistic reform was done to de-gender the language in ways older speakers found ridiculous. Whether that process had or is having any positive impact is debatable, but it does serve as a statement of intent: We are changing “chairman” to “chair” or, sometimes, “chairperson” as a conscious decision to show we’re more open to women filling that role than we were previously. That change can be used as a marker for a specific social climate.
What is interesting is that we got the gender out of English, but we can’t get some of the other crap out, like irregular plurals, due to Grammar nazis.
I mean, there is nothing inherently wrong with “Mouses”, we all can see it means the plural of mouse.
But to make it worse, the GN try to make irregular plurals where there are none, such as “octopi”. :mad:
And then they insist that Latin is so super marvelous that we have to keep the latin plural on words that have been part of English for centuries, like “fungus”.
Well, when you actually know the person at hand, there’s nothing wrong with a gendered pronoun. However, then you can say- “Frank should pick up Frank’s own books”.
Hungarian is an example of a language without gendered pronouns. My Hungarian parents often mix up the words “he” and “she” when speaking English. That sounds absurd to us, but in Hungarian they are the same word.
Note on Finnish while it does not have gendered pronouns there is still what aspects that some people may call gendered
puhemies == Chair(man) but it is used for both.
And while it is not so common in usage the actor/actress or näyttelijä/näyttelijätär does exist in the language.
And the good old father land (isänmaa) and mother tongue (äidinkieli) do apply.
isä or isi is similar to saying pappa and äiti is mom, mommy or old lady :smack:
As a country Finland is doing far better than most on this subject, but the lack of gendered pronouns or even personal pronouns due to the one-size-fits-all hän doesn’t mean it is genderless. I guess you could say that some of these are loan words though.
But Paula Risikko is currently the eduskunnan puhemies or the parliamentary chair(man)
I love we even have a expert on Finnish.
No, I sound like a toddler trying to speak in person.
I just need to know enough to know if one half my family is talking about me or not at the dinner table.
If these questions move up to even a reading rainbow level of difficulty I will be way past my abilities.
Sidebar on this: IME people whose first language is not English very often mix up “he” and “she”, regardless of whether their own language is gendered.
They’re just not distinctive enough sounds.
I’ve had conversations with people whose English vocabulary was probably larger than many native speakers’, yet they would sometimes be on the wrong “track” when referring to a person and consistently call a man “she”, or a woman “he”.