The Truth about Grammatical Gender
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- Опубліковано 8 тра 2024
- This is my first true video essay. Go easy on me I'm only just figuring out how to edit. Bonus points to anyone who's able to identify all the clips I used.
If any of my translations are off please let me know so I can correct them. Thumbnail illustration by Carolina Búzio (www.carolinabuzio.com/).
Timestamps
0:00 - intro to keys & bridges
1:25 - the actual research
3:19 - odd noun & gender pairings
5:01 - the phonetics of grammatical gender
6:13 - languages do not gender concepts
6:39 - how native speakers think
8:42 - grammatical gender is not gender
9:30 - similarity between nouns
11:39 - grammatical gender & gender identity
12:20 - opposing research
13:23 - correlation doesn't equal causation
14:21 - how we choose to voice a character
15:19 - what are masculine nouns?
16:06 - learning gumbuzi
17:25 - is justice a man or a woman?
19:58 - object gender in english
20:44 - boroditsky (2000)
21:25 - conclusion & final remarks
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Boroditsky's studies:
"Sex, Syntax and Semantics" (2003), Boroditsky, Schmidt & Philips.
lera.ucsd.edu/papers/gender.pdf
"Sex, Syntax and Semantics" (2000), Boroditsky & Schmidt.
escholarship.org/uc/item/0jt9...
"Can Quirks of Grammatical Gender Affect the Way We Think? Grammatical Gender and Object Concepts" (2003), Boroditsky & Philips.
escholarship.org/uc/item/31t4...
"Grammar in Art" (2011), Boroditsky & Segel.
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/arti...
Opposing Research:
"Key is a llave is a Schlüssel: A failure to replicate an experiment from Boroditsky et al. 2003" (2014), Mickan, Schiefe & Stefanowitsch.
www.researchgate.net/publicat...
"Does Grammatical Gender Influence Perception? A Study of Polish and French Speakers" (2017), Haertlé.
www.researchgate.net/publicat...
"Re-evaluating evidence for linguistic relativity: Reply to Boroditsky (2001)" (2006), January & Kako.
ruccs.rutgers.edu/images/pers...
"Bridges, gender, and Benjamin Lee Whorf" (2018), Scientific Gems.
scientificgems.wordpress.com/...
Additional Research:
"Language environment and gender identity attainment" (1982), Guiroa, Hallahmi, Fried & Yoder.
deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstr...
"On Linguistic Aspects of Translation" (1959) Jakobson. Russian days of the week study mentioned on pg. 237
web.stanford.edu/~eckert/PDF/...
Language Log:
“Boroditsky on Whorfian navigation and blame” (2010), Lieberman
languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll...
“Never mind the conclusions, what’s the evidence?” (2010), Lieberman. article mentioned in above post
languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll...
Subreddits Showcased:
/ linguistics
/ languagelear. .
/ hebrew
I'll keep a running list of any translation errors that people notice here.
4:13 - "Kvinne" isn't masculine in the same way as the others. Norwegian has 3 genders (masculine/feminine/neuter) but the masculine/feminine distinction in Norwegian is often grouped together as the "common" gender, and many dictionaries will list words with "common" gender as Masculine or as Masculine-Feminine.
5:05 - Eye should be masculine in French & Italian.
5:10 - Glass (the material) in Russian is neuter so the square should be gray. I mixed it up with a drinking glass.
6:18 - "Napf" & "Schüssel" seem to refer to two distinct things. "Napf" being a bowl for animals (straight walls) and "Schüssel" being a hemispherical bowl.
6:26 - "Auto" and "Essen" should be swapped.
17:48 - "Time" in Arabic is وقت. The word I have up there is the word for "second", but luckily they're both masculine.
17:55 - “Love” in French should be masculine. It's feminine in the plural.
19:06 - The word סכרנות is supposed to be spelled סקרנות.
19:08 - Death (מוות) should be masculine.
19:18 - “Sacré bleu” as a swear is written as “sacrebleu.”
I took out the part about "Das Bridge" because I've gotten confirmation that it was just straight up wrong. Thanks to everyone for the corrections!
I believe "Das Bridge" in German refers to the card game, not the architectural bridge.
Also, matschik(ah) is an adjective not a noun! :)
@@theavodkado actually מצחיק is the present tense conjugation of להצחיק (to amuse)! Making it both an adjective *and* a verb
5:06 shoe in russian can be both masculine (ботинок) and feminine (обувь)
And glass is always neutral
@@dasha_in_vibeglass as a material is neutral
glass as a container is masculine
As a spanish speaker, I remember back in highschool I asked my teacher what actually made nouns femenine or masculine and the answer was just really good. "It's actually just because they sound nice, just that." And, basically is just that really.
Correct. Spanish is a romantic language, much like a lot of other latin based languages like French, Portuguese, etc., and being a romantic language implies that the language has to sound good to be correct. It's relatively easy for us native speakers to realize when a noun was linguistically misgendered because it simply sounds wrong. Saying El Casa doesn't sound good, but La Casa does.
@@_nahuel320 Well, words sound good when correct because they're correct, not the other way around.
The gender of Romance words comes from gender in Latin, which if we go far enough comes from Indo-European genders.
Words tend to sound good when they fit what we've learned
I usually tried to approach it this way when I didn’t know the gender of a word; “ok, what sounds like it fits best?” Followed by repeating the word with le or la in front of it for like half a minute
@techpriestessmicaela8441 I got really confused when I learned that "o sangue" (the blood in pt) was translated to "la sangre" in spanish but it does sound better than "el sangre"
@@_nahuel320You do realize its romanic language as in romans from rome.
It's not romantic.
And every language basically goes about the same way you describe. Misgender a word in German and people notice immediately.n
Someone described gramatical gender this way once and I love it; They're similar to how we consider colors hot and cold. Red is a hot color, but if I touch a red pencil, I do not expect it to be warmer than the blue pencil.
Weirdly, though, the cool colours are hot and the hot colours cool, in terms of actual science. I've never understood this terminology.
red is hot because in natural environment, you always see full red color as shining hot dangerous object in mostly situation and also summer where is hot has more hot colors like red, yellow. Winter has something different, white snow and so on
I think it's because fire and the sky in hot days are usually red-yellow-orange, while ice and cold days are usually blueish (I don't know why green is a cool color, though)
@@stephenspackman5573Basically, the color you see is based on the frequency of the light wave that hits your eye (light is not exactly a wave, but just bear with me), with red being the lowest and violet the highest frequency (this is why burning metal is red, the light it was emmiting gained more frequency and stepped from infrared to visible light, starting at the lowest point), and the energy of a photon is higher the higher the frequency (E=hf; you can search "photon energy" on Google for more information), so a "colder" color actually carries more energy, which dissipates into more heat.
isnt that because warm colors are also the colors of the sun or fire and cool colors the color of water (not really but we perceive it as blue) or ice (same as water)
Cognitive scientist here. I'm just gonna say this much about Boroditsky: I've been studying under a professor who published a few really impactful papers with her and while she certainly is a researcher with lots of accolades and high profile, her takes are far from being uncontroversial. I remember reading several of her papers in a class under said professor and being assigned with writing essays about her claims (it was more than obvious that my professor was hinting us a the several inconsistencies in her ideas) and I remember a lot of similar points being discussed to what you said in this video. So while you might not be a linguist you certainly have an amazing instinct for scientific and critical thinking. Consider me subscribed.
ok
genderless language is the best
@@carkawalakhatulistiwa english is one of the worst languages on earth
It's interesting that "Boroditsky" is an example of a SURNAME having grammatical gender. Because of the "-sky" suffix, the surname is masculine and always used for men. A woman with that surname would be Boroditskaja, if I am not mistaken. American government just couldn't accept these gendered surnames at all, and many Slavic people were forced to be born with masculine surnames, much like probably what Boroditsky went through
Absolutely correct. A slightly better transcription would be Boroditskaya (buh-ruh-DITZ-kuh-ya).
Masculine version is used as a default form in Russian for any word that can take gender forms including surnames (for example in vocabularies you find masculine versions). Some linguists even argue that feminine and neuter forms are going to get obsolete in several centuries along with the whole gender category within the universal tendency of grammatical simplification of indoeuropean languages.
I still can't get over "Gwyneth PaltrOW". It sounds so weird
@@veschyoleg I got used to the Balkan transliteration: Y is J there
Yep. The Yanks are especially good at messing with people's names. I once knew an American whose surname was Poe. He told me that his father's surname was Podbir and his father's father's surname had been Podbirisovsky!
One concept that is never brought up in these discussions is that in gendered languages you can still refer to someone in a gender-neutral way even though there is no neutral gender in the language, and so you can be gender-neutral while still using masculine/feminine words.
For instance, if you refer to someone using the word "person" it will be gender neutral, but if you're speaking portuguese then the word "pessoa" is feminine, so later on in the sentence you might refer to that person as "she" regardless of gender, because it has to agree with the gender of the word "person", thus a feminine pronoun has been used in a gender-neutral way.
Exactly!
Personally, as another Portuguese speaker, I think this is a much better option than using those "proposed" made-up pronouns and adjectives such as 'Pessoe', 'carinhose', 'Elu', 'ótime' 'Elx', 'delx', 'Eli' or 'Amigue' these ideas just change the language completely to a point where it just breaks and completely loses its meaning.
Also, another way to refer to someone without using the first pronouns (since that's what piss so many -people- twitter users off) it's just to not use the pronouns at all (when referring to the person). If you're directly talking to the person, you're just using the pronoun "Você" or "Tu" [You], there's no need to change it since it works for any gender. Now, if you want to refer to someone indirectly, just replace the first pronoun with the name of the person or bring up the person's name in the first sentence, so you don't have to repeat it later. Afterwards, the male adjectives can also be used as gender-neutral.
Let me give some examples:
"Cris disse que iria na loja mais tarde, -ele/ela- também contou que iria passar na sua casa depois" (Cris said that would go in the shop later, -he/she- also told that -he/she- was going to pass by your house later) [not using the pronouns]
"Alex é -um homem/uma mulher- uma pessoa muito educada. (Alex is a very polite person -man/woman- ) [using the feminine noun of "educada" because of "pessoa" instead of the name's gender]
"Sam, você é muito bom nisso" (Sam, you're very good at this) [although Sam may not identify as a man, "bom" (the male adjective) is used as a neutral to the feminine "boa", which if it was used instead would have implied that Sam would be a woman]
It's the same in German "Person" is feminine and has to be referenced using a feminine pronoun. In a similar vein the word "Mensch"(human being) is masculine
O mesmo acontece às palavras: testemunha, criança, vítima etc., etc....
@@ponteirodorato the same in Spanish, you can use their preferred noun instead of a pronoun and you don't have to gender anything else in a sentence outside of adjectives or some nouns which if you put them in masculine it's the neutral noun, but people don't really see that. People are making a fuss about nothing
@@ponteirodorato honestly i also don't like the idea of the made-up pronouns, but using this other form seems so much more of a hastle that it's just better to use the neo pronouns.
And, i don't think it breaks the language (besides the already gender neutral words, it's just pointless to change these), it's just a third noun added to the list.
Why do you think it's that bad?
/Genuine question
It is perhaps good to note that "Gender" is being used more as it's etymological sibling, "Genre".
In spanish, both are the same word.
I'm gonna go mad
@@Not_TailsFrench too
In German „Geschlecht“ can mean sex/gender but also a (noble) bloodline. It's also used in formulations like „Menschengeschlecht“ (the human race) or „ein frei[es] Geschlecht“ (a free people). Additionally, the Latin word "genus" is also used for classifying animals. So I agree that you could interpret "gender" as generally referring to a group of related things distinguished from other groups.
Same in Portuguese. And "genus" (Biology).
@@Not_TailsBrazilian portuguese as well and I hate that it's the same word
As an Italian speaker I also find it interesting how English has (or had, until the last few years) adjectives that you would usually attribute to people of a particular gender. For example, "handsome" and "beautiful". To me every adjective can go with every noun, just make the noun/adgective genders match, as said in the video, mostly for musicality
This is still very much the case: a 'handsome woman' and a 'beautiful boy' have very specific, and highly nuanced meanings. Broadly speaking: if you hear *anyone* using either term;- stay away from them.
@@chrisoneill3999?
@@chrisoneill3999"Beautiful" is an adjectives often used by English speakers to describe both males and females since it's literal definition is "pleasing the senses or mind aesthetically".
"Handsome" has two meanings: 1. (of a man) good-looking. 2. (of a number, sum of money, or margin) substantial. ~ Oxford Dictionary.
So yeah, "Handsome woman" sounds a little strange, but "beautiful boy" is not.
From reading a lot of 19th century novels “handsome woman” was used for older and or married women. Rarely for young women and I don’t remember ever seeing it associated with girls. Not being a native speaker I am not sure if the nuance applies today.
or "blond" and "blonde"
I feel like a lot of the words that are in English that they describe as “masculine” or “feminine” differ for the most part in their origin. The masculine words “long, big, strong” are Germanic, but “elegant, beautiful, extended” have romance roots. Interesting how that connotation is made…
Very interesting observation.
i think that study is full of s**t, might be ideologically motivated and probably not worth the paper it was printed on.
þis is also sortə þe case wiþ swearwords (if i’m not much mistaken) - my understanding is þat when þe normans did þeir big ol’ invasion , english started using french ( / romance) roots as þe polite / (‘)edible(’) versions , and þe germanic ones as þe crude / animal form -
defecate / relieve vs sh\*t / poo(p)
poultry vs chicken
beef vs cow
sex vs f\*ck
@@anterrobang9298 that’s exactly right. It’s almost like an honorific system.
@@anterrobang9298 neat way of typing, I probably would have felt like you were too pompous if not for the fact that I was actually able to read what you said and enjoyed the challenge.
Vsauce's video "why are bad words bad" goes into detail on what you said, though I have a feeling youve seen it already so this is more for others that read my reply
the part about grammatical gender making people more conscious about gender identity is so fascinating i never thought of that.
I also found how, at least in my gendered language, the primary progressive thought is not to eliminate gendered words (like in English), but instead to create new "femenitives", female gendered words used to describe, for example, professions that used to be considered stereotypically male.
@@YA_LUNNAYA_PONIYep, it seems to be happening in some languages. Yet it’s a pretty dumb reason tbh. Just like the video says, these are two groups, not actually genders. But if it makes the speakers think they’re being more progressive then they should just go for it. Language is ever changing and changing a few grammatical genders is not the end of the world. It’s just sorta unnecessary.
@@Luis-fd2bi but doesn't it sound clanky to use "[male noun] [female verb]"? "водитель (он/его) поехала (она/ее)"? even that i think is a good reason
also in russian (which is most likely the language they're talking about) there's already a ton of feminine nouns that were made from male nouns: студентка, барыня, попадья, пионерка, комсомолка, водительница... it's not something new, people are just trying to make this rule apply to more words
there's also masculatives such as швей (man who sews, from швея (woman who sews, she/her)) and балерин (male ballet dancer, from балерина (ballerina, female ballet dancer, she/her)) so its not one-sided
Yeah, it does. As an NB it makes you very conscious of the fact that in your language there's no way to use non-gendered words when talking about yourself.
Like, you say "I was going to..." and you already have to gender yourself as either masc or fem
@@Luis-fd2bi Human Language loves redundancy. Redundancy means that if you miss one part, you can usually put the rest together purely from context.
Thank you!!!! As a linguist and Spanish speaker this has always driven me crazy because it feels so counterintuitive and completely unrelated how I actually use gender when I speak Spanish. Monolingual English speakers will make the most wild baseless claims about features not present in English and act like it's totally crazy and weird when in reality it's easily explained by other things that are just like, core processes of language.
genderless language is the best
Same way I feel about cases. English speakers going nuts about how there are so many cases in an XY language, but it's the same thing as using a bunch of prepositions.
They have this bizarre idea that Spanish speaking people think a chair is a woman. 😂
@@carkawalakhatulistiwayeah, sure buddy. Try translating "la diferencia entre el mar y la mar" and let me know how your genderless language needs a paragraph to convey a similar enough idea.
After learning Latin and Spanish, I’m convinced that anyone who conflates noun genders with human genders never bothered to learn a Romance language.
As a native speaker of a gendered language, I also don't think we think about the grammatical gender of nouns when we speak. I still remember how surprised I was as a little kid to learn in school that nouns have genders. That was something that hadn't even crossed my mind until I heard it in school. I remember how ecstatic I was to tell my mom that this noun is a girl and this noun is a boy and so on... Obviously that's nonsense. Grammatical gender and gender have next to nothing to do with each other.
you already had known about that cuz without that you couldn't use it. That's not excactly how normal genders work so you just didnt know how to name it
They probably had something to do with each other in the early days, until everyone gave up thinking about it.
they have everything to do with each other, which is why mental gender was coined after the linguistic term. before then, it was sex not gender.
Then why were things like spirits, the Holy Ghost, mythical creatures you can barely make out, abstract concepts, etc. given gender?
Not to mention inanimate objects in languages 📜.
@@kazekagekid
genderless language is the best
Great video on an interesting topic, thank you.
As a native German speaker I'd like to add that words can change gender when you add specific suffixes. The diminutive suffix "-chen" /çən/ makes all nouns it is added to neuter. You could take the word "die Katze" (feminine; the cat) which becomes "das Kätzchen" (neuter) or "der Hund" (masculine; the dog) which becomes "das Hündchen" (again, neuter). This can be applied to most nouns (hesitant to say all, there might be exceptions that I’m unaware of).
Furthermore, there are words that change meaning based on which gender you use for them. Not many of those exist, but you do come across them from time to time. For example the word "Schild" /ʃɪlt/ can mean "the sign” (in the sense of street signs etc) when neuter (das Schild), or "the shield" (thing used for protection) when masculine (der Schild).
So gender really is just a grammatical category that can be influenced by simple suffix-use, or in some cases it helps to avoid ambiguity. I don't think that my perception of gender changes when I put a suffix behind a word, or change its gender for the purpose of clearer understanding
If the word ends in -ch you wouldn't usually add -chen because it makes it very hard to pronounce. It still makes it neuter of course, you just use -lein instead of -chen. So the diminutive of "Bach" is not "Bächchen", it's "Bächlein" (-lein can of course be used for words that don't end in -ch too). It's also why "Mädchen" is neuter.
@@user-es7ui5mc1m
true, but not because it makes it harder to pronounce. Adding the diminutive to bach just is pronounced like bächien, which is not hard to pronounce. The real reason is that it is perceived as looking and sounding odd with a lot of words. Bach is arguably one were it still works.
Portuguese can also be gender fluid based on the suffixes attached to the word.
The word for _“socks”_, _”small socks”_ and _“big socks”_ are _“a meia”_, _”a meinha”_, and _“o meião”_.
Some may say that’s because small is fem while big is masc, but Car is consistently masc (_o carro, o carrão, o carrinho_, for regular, big, and small Car)
@@user-es7ui5mc1m Certain regions also have the "-erl/-al"(same suffix, just with the vowel shifted) diminutive suffix.
Finally the video we all waited for
As a native Italian speaker, that "study" about bridges and keys always made me cuckle thinking about masculine nouns that become feminine as plurals in Italian (l'uovo/le uova, il braccio/le braccia etc), and how those would totally mess with the study's premises and conclusions LMAO
The same thing happens in German, all nouns get the "feminine" article in plural, although the verbs and adjectives surrounding them have their own unrelated plural forms. It doesn't seem like the study took that into account anyway
Or adjective's gender is choosen by speaker in most of languages
It happens in Romanian as well. We call those neutral nouns
@@alexperper6390in Italian they end in -a just like the Latin, neutral nouns from which they derive. Ovum, ova in Latin become uovo, uova in Italian. The fact that plural eggs are considered feminine in Italian may be more proof that "genderization" of nouns is made by sound association.
On the other hand though, this got me thinking about words from non-gendered languages that are used in gendered languages. In Italian we say "il mouse" as in "the mouse" (m.) because mouse is topo and topo is masculine, I guess? But then how does the "sound association" theory work with that? There's no final vowel in "mouse", which should be what's causing the gender association, according to this theory.
I hope OP reads me - they've done a great job with this video and hope they have more info on this.
In russian there is not only neutral(or middle) gender, but also general(unspecefied) gender. Job titles are general gender for example, but they follow rules of their phonetic gender.
So in russian sentence with femine actor, femine adjective musculine job title and musculine adjective is gramatically correct. Example: Девушка умная - врач замечательный.
Fun fact about Russian - coffee in Russian is masculine, but it ends with 'e' which makes it looks like neuter, and for a couple last centuries there's a lot of discussion about coffee shifting from masculine to neuter - while some language purist says it's impossible even to think about changing words gender from one to another, the more and more people just use it with "wrong" gender and it becomes more and more popular, and I think with time dictionaries will just change it.
More fun facts - it originally was borrowed as neuter and behaved like море (sea) in a sentence. Then it was standardized as masculine and now there's a popular joke that “if it's a good coffee - it's he, but if it's a bad coffee - it's it”.
Also, in an attempt to rationalize the gender, people sometimes say кофий which actually sounds masculine. That's how my grandma pronounced it :)
@@zhulikkulikkofiy is just a predecessor of kofe, and in that way it was borrowed and thats why language purists rooting for masculine form
Кофе оно МОЁ
You did a really great job with this video Yuval!
As a native Spanish speaker I think you made a really great point when saying that having gendered words doesn’t mean we actually see those things as the assigned “gender” ( I say “gender” because I don’t think that “una puerta (a door)” is a woman, it’s just a word with feminine gender, which is different from the social gender). Sometimes I see masculine words as gender neutral things. If I have to personify something as the days of the week (all masculine in Spanish) I would imagine them in a more gender neutral way, because they are just days and not men or women.
Also, just to add another example to this point 17:37 there are masculine personifications of feminine words in Spanish . LA muerte (death) is a feminine word that tends to be represented with masculine traits or seen as more masculine. Or EL amor (love), a masculine word that tends to be represented either with a boy (Cupid) or a women ( making a reference to the Greek goddess Venus).
Using the word "gender" in grammar is a little bit less weird in french, just because the word for "gender" is "genre", which basically means "category" or "kind".
It's also used for music, books, movies, etc. It was borrowed in English in that context (music genre / book genre / movie genre).
So basically, in french, a gender for people is just a kind of person just as a movie genre is just a kind of movie. And a grammatical gender is just a kind of word. Makes more sense.
yeah, exactly, we just say "type" in Polish so feminine type and masculine type
Exactly the same in Spanish, "Género".
I like that alot more then gender when referring to objects. I'm trying to wrap my mind around why inanimate objects were gendered in the first place. Very odd concept as an English speaker.
In Norwegian we have a three gender system like German, but for traditional reasons all feminine words can essentially be treated as masculine in writing essentially making it a sort of pseudo two-gender masculine/neuter system. In some very few dialects, people also speak like this, but it’s mostly just a thing in writing, and it’s completely optional. Just thought it’d be interesting to share this information! :) Great video btw, I really enjoyed it!
So you mean, that you speak with two genders but write with three?
@@jonathanlange1339 Ok, maybe my wording was poor. I meant to say the three gender system is FAR more represented in speech, while the two gender system is more of a thing you find in writing, but even in writing it's optional.
This is highly imprecise.
Norwegian has three genders (masculine, feminine, neuter). It also has a very wide variety of dialects and sociolects, and for historical reasons, people closer (geographically or socially) to the circles of power tend to speak dialects heavily influenced by Danish, which only has two genders (common and neuter). In those dialects, indefinite forms are always masculine (“a woman and a girl” = “en kvinne og en jente” rather than “ei kvinne og ei jente”) and definite forms are _almost_ always masculine with a few exceptions: “the woman and the girl” = “kvinnen og jenta” instead of “kvinna og jenta”, “jente” being one of very few words that keeps its feminine definite form almost everywhere except in Bergen.
Since these dialects are favored in bureaucratic, academic, and journalistic communication, they are also perceived as more formal and authoritative and therefore people tend to emulate them when writing. Hence, many native speakers who use the feminine orally do not use it in writing, but many native speakers do not use it orally either.
@@Squossifrage Yeah. Thanks for explaining more thoroughly. Personally I just didn't want to go into the whole tangent about multiple written languages, and Danish influence and all of that. It just seemed like a bit much to me personally.
Was looking for that in the comments. En kvinne and ei kvinne are both correct, so the word can be masculine or feminine
in my (german) school my teachers always said "genus" instead of "gender" or "geschlecht" (which means sex/gender like youd use in biology class) making it clear to me that grammatical gender =/= gender.
Even in English, "grammatical gender" is only called that when the actual "genders" are two or three-otherwise, they are noun classes, which starts making a lot more sense when those classes indicate things other than natural sex or linguistic quirks, like age or origin or animacy, etc.
One example of how our thinking influences grammatical gender: In German, girl (Mädchen) is neuter because the diminutive always is.
So a "correct" sentence would be: The girl and it's dog (Das Mädchen und sein Hund) but the neuter possessive coincides with the masculine. So most people say: The girl and her dog (Das Mädchen und ihr Hund).
In Polish, KOPCIUSZEK "Cinderella" has masculine gender and MYSZKA MIKI "Mickey Mouse" has feminine gender.
If that "cognitive researcher" (with all her partial claims) knew that we call an adolescent girl coming out of childhood (between twelve and sixteen years of age) as PODLOTEK (which is a masculine word), she would probably claim that Poles think that children are born without gender (we also have neuter -Ę for 'young', so DZIEWCZĘ 'a young girl" is neuter) but then there is some transfiguration that change all them in males and with menstruation some of them became females ;)
[Even while writing it, it sound like BS that, that person with a Slavic surname claimed - she obviously never heard about Slovene language, in which it is "a common phenomenon that some nouns switch gender either when declining or in all cases altogether, depending on the declension, dialect, and case. In formal contexts, the change occurs in plural, while the dialectal changes occur more sporadically" ;)]
Great video! Your style of teaching translates really well into longer format video essays. I personally would love to see more content like this from you. Also, I've never realized how funny your TikToks are out of context. Got a good laugh out of me.
I participated in a psych student's version of this study (as an English speaker in a made up language) and completely messed up the data. Part of the "made-up language" section of the experiment was memorizing the "genders" of several words, so when we got to the "similarity" section of the experiment, I thought it was more of the memorization, and thus marked several words as "similar" to men and women because I remembered that they were classified with that gender.
that's pretty funny actually, I think it's really hard to do a study on this subject that doesn't bias or mislead its participants in some way
you didn't mess up anything, if you ask people meaningless questions you will get meaningless answers
You didn't mess it up, your experience just shows how a study--including one that people are taking seriously--can be badly designed.
Lera Boroditsky comes from Belarus, a slavic languages speaking country, Russian, Belarussian, Polish and Ukrainian are the most common ones. These laguages recognize the grammatical "gender". You see, all nouns in these laguages have it, and derivatives of nouns like surnames have it as well. Her surname written in English, "Boroditsky", is in masucline gender according to any slavic language grammar. There is a tradition in the Unite States to switch feminine slavic last names to masculine, most likely because women who get married take the last names of their husbands.
Funnily enough, if you go to her wiki page and switch the laguage to Russian it would list 2 versions of her last name - "f. Бородицкая (Boroditskaya)" and "m. Бородицки (Boroditski)".
Umm, you're mistaking grammar cases with grammar genders
This isn’t really a gotcha so much as a “people don’t always stick to the naming custom” thing.
@@KatouMegumiosuYou are the one mixing something up here. Grammatic cases are not even touched in that comment.
as a native german speaker i've always doubted that study. i feel like grammatical gender is a second thought and, as you said, grammatical gender has nothing to do with actual gender. native speakers don't really think about the grammatical gender (not even subconsciously i feel like) which is why i think saying that it affects your perception on certain objects is completely wrong
Spanish here agrees with you.
Yea we do lol never heard of Poetry you pleb
Oh yes, we do think about grammatical gender. We even discuss it with passion.
Though only when we don't agree what gender to use.
(Die Nutella)
@@Sternburg *Das Nutella
Sorry I couldn't stop myself. 'Die Nutella' just sounds so wrong.
@@Silverpoplar as someone who has no experience or knowledge ln the subject, it's das. die nutella doesn't sound or look right
As a Castillian speaker who studies linguistics ¡Thank you y muchísimas gracias amigo! Even here amongst people of my country we've started to have these perceptions of language brought over by people who do not speak our language and it has caused many people to overthink things that honestly, we should just not think that much about. Grammatical Gender is just that, categories that happened to have man, woman or something else as the most defining one. Also, on a note: in language families it is very common for what you described with the e, o and the combinations of consonants or vowels, specially in indo-european where e and o served the same purpose, to conjugate the specific gender of something.
you mean SPANISH
@@bourbon2242 its the same bro
@@faziarry I know
im so glad you got into longer content too, i could listen to you for hours!
Spanish has words with both genders too, like el mar or la mar, there are also female nouns that use male pronouns, like el águila. They have their rules of course, mar is the only noun that comes to mind that uses both male and female pronouns, but there might be others. Also, the other example only applies to female nouns that start with a stressed a, el águila, la arena.
always appreciate your well thought out, and wonderfully worded videos, with some solid editing skills to boot.
keep on chuggin my guy, i hope your journey is fruitful
Full length content is amazing ! Pls do more !!
As a Hebrew speaker, whenever someone talks abt gendered language, I think about the fact there is dumb shit like ביצה (egg)(pronounced beytza) being feminine but ביצים (eggs)(propounded beytzim) ends in ים )im) which is the masculine ending for plural and three are many more (שולחן, כיסא,נעליים...) wnd no one talks abt it!
7:56 it recently happened in Portuguese!
Words ending in "-agem" are feminine (ex: A filmagem, A carruagem, A passagem).
"Personagem" (character) was also feminine, but since we started calling "O personagem" for masculine characters, the Linguistic Authorities declared this usage as acceptable, even tho it doesn't follow the "-agem" rule.
amazing video! its great to hear your thoughts in a longer form video :D
Great video! FYI Norwegian 'kvinne' isn't really masculine, at least not in the way presented here. It's just that feminine and masculine nouns in Norwegian Bokmål can be optionally grouped together as common gender. This has to do with Bokmål effectively having two interacting grammatical gender systems: a three gender-system with masculine, feminine and neuter, which has its origin in the system found in native Norwegian dialects, and a Danish-like system where only common gender and neuter are distinguished. So it's not that 'kvinne' is optionally masculine, it's just that you don't have to distinguish the feminine from the masculine. Dictionaries often list common gender as just 'masculine' as the endings for the two are the same, which can be misleading. Hope this clarifies things!
in Nynorsk (the other written norwegian language) you can't opt out of of the feminine as you can in Bokmål.
God thank you so much for this video. I watched that Boroditsky Ted Talk some time ago and was astonished at how everyone in the comments was like “wow this is so interesting and true” and nobody was calling her out on it. As a Spanish speaker, if I think about a “key” I just think about how it’s metallic and I hate touching metal cause it makes my skin crawl lmao. Nothing about it being feminine or delicate. I agree with everything you said👍🏻
They love the Ted Talk because they want it to be true, it 'confirms' their preconceived notions on gender and language.
@@regenen yeah, just a lazy way to feel smarter
people happily latch onto things that are superficially plausible. Even better if it is a pretentious TED talk that makes the claim
I remember watching that Ted Talk I thought it was plausible and didn't think much of it. It's interesting to find out that it wasn't true. So you have grammatical gender but the gender isn't really a gender it's more like a device between different kinds of words.
Do you know what the purpose of these genders is?
@@avivastudios2311 exactly, i would say we only notice gender when it applies to people or animals (el profesor - the male teacher ; la profesora - the female teacher). For objects, the grammatical gender doesn’t have any implications of meaning.
I wouldn’t say it has an intrinsic purpose as languages aren’t created but rather they just happen and develop naturally, but the most practical “purpose” when we communicate is easing ambiguities.
Imagine we’re talking about 2 things (a flower, in Spanish female, and a watch, in Spanish male), and I say “Give it to me” In English, you would need to ask: “the flower or the watch?” but in Spanish you would already know cause female “it” is “la” and male “it” is “lo”. So the main purpose I would say is making communication faster & more efficient. Same way as English probably has some features that also achieve an efficient communication that Spanish doesn’t. All languages are different but efficient in their own ways :)
A note: The origin of the word gender is from Latin, wherein the word meant literally "type / kind", which is why we use the concept to describe human sexual dimorphism and to group similar sounding words together.
I want to thank you so much for making such an in-depth video about the flip side of this very tropey topic. I am not sure why people today are so eager to go back to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, even after we've already disproven it.
We literally do. Using a descriptivist lens the word gender is synonymous with the word sex for the vast majority of people. The redefining of the word emanating from narrow disciplines under the liberal arts umbrella which has been forced onto many doesn’t undo that.
This was truly a really great video, Yuval! Keep it up! I love it!
This is a fantastic video, probably the best I've seen on grammatical gender. I'm glad someone is keeping tabs on us all when we get things wrong!
But since you did use a clip of mine in the video, I hope you'll indulge me as I defend myself a little bit... I think I do overstate Boroditsky's ideas' validity to make the case, I concede that. But I did so in order to really steel-man that argument, assume it was valid, and then say that it wouldn't really matter anyway. The tendency of classifying feminine objects with certain traits would not be a case of grammatical gender shaping how you think, it would be an example of the cultural norms around us (in this case, sexism) infiltrating our language. Grammatical gender, there, would be no more than a conduit. That's more the point I was trying to make.
Again though, great video, subscribed and looking forward to more content :)
Hey! Thanks so much! Really glad you enjoyed it. But yes, I responded to someone else who mentioned this, but I wasn't trying to frame you as someone intentionally misleading anybody. Just as an example of how prevalent the myth behind Boroditsky's claims have gotten. Apologies if I came off negatively when bringing you up, I really liked your essay on grammatical gender as well and I think I would categorize it as a similar position to mine.
@@YuvalTheTerrible thanks, as I said, really appreciated this video and your comment :)
@@YuvalTheTerrible thanks, as I said, really appreciated this video and your comment :)
Hey Yuval, I found you on TikTok and wanted to see your longer content and it's great! Super interesting topic and it was an adorable conversation with your dad :)
Wonderful video! The title had me ready to comment about how strong Sapir-Whorfism gets often touted because it's something that *sounds* true and we want to exist. But I was pleasantly surprised; I loved your analysis of the gender studies and the ways you tackled this topics from a wide variety of languages
Wish you had more long videos 😭😭 cant wait for your next video 💕
I've been questioning how grammatical gender is talked about. Thanks for giving more clarity
I hope you keep doing more of these. I've seen your tiktoks and just happened to stumble upon this video on my recommended; Very pleasant surprise. The editing and writing is already really well-polished, keep it up man
Really great first vid Yuval. The editing was fantastic and I enjoyed every moment :)
As a Turkish speaker my language is genderless so I have always found this consept very interesting. I didn't questioned English at all but when I started studying Arabic and German at the same time, I got curious and thought about that bridge study thing a lot which confused me a lot. This video helped me to understand better, thank you.
😊
Llmll
Lk
Whenever I believe there is no possible way for Turks to be worse y'all manage to point out another way you suck.
As an Italian speaker, I don’t think the genders of the words ever affected the way I think about them. Every word has a gender so you don’t really think much of it. Maybe English speakers, while learning a language like Italian, would think about it since it’s something new but with a native speaker that probably won’t happen. Plus there are words that have a gender in the singular form and the other in the plural form so the experiments wouldn’t really hold at that point
Been following you on tiktok for a while, great video!!! Can I just say i love your editing style this entire video seemed so clean and satisfying just to listen to!
Your first essay video? That's already good to me and it seems you did well.
As a Romanian native speaker, I always assumed the thin and low (female and male) voices are the definition of grammatical gender. That was the answer I lived by.
This a great video!
I feel like the whole idea of this study is very english-centric, the ideas presented only make sense if explained in a language like English which has only one grammatical gender and people are left to assign gender to words strictly based on cultural context. I speak Polish which has three grammatical genders, if I'm going to describe feminine noun as "strong" then I have to use a feminine version of that adjective because in order to sound natural an adjective has to follow the grammatical gender of the noun it's describing. In Polish I could describe a tower as beautiful and strong ("piękna i mocna wieża") and in my mind I used two feminine adjectives to describe a feminine noun, by the time someone translates it to English they might think that I used a one feminine and one masculine adjective to describe a masculine noun.
Which brings me to another issue with this which is that translation is not just changing words one for one. Polish has a handful of words that depending on the context could be translated into English as "strong". When talking about a person in most contexts it makes more sense to use the word "silny" (fem. silna) which is strong as in able to lift a lot, when talking about a bridge I would probably us the word "mocny" which also translates as strong but as in well build and resistant to damage. So if the conversation is about how the grammatical gender of nouns affects our use of adjectives the conversation needs to be about the exact adjectives used in the language they were used in and the culture that speaks that language, not the English translation of it.
If this study had something to reveal about how language affects our thinking then well... it all got lost in translation 😎
thanks for having all the sources in the video description, super easy to look it up myself
I've never been more into a language video. Great job. The amount of research is astounding.
10:49
I was today years old when I discovered that “penny” plural is apparently “pence” and not “pennies”.
a british penny pluralizes to pence, an american penny pluralizes to pennies
Pennies is the plural, when you are talking about physical copies of the penny.
Pence is more like the way we use cents, in the US, where it refers to the monetary unit, regardless of what group of coins represent it. Pence is based on the British pound, and cents is based on the US dollar.
As an example, if I ask for 10 pennies, I'm expecting 10 coins with a copper surface and Abe Lincoln's face on them. If you hand me a dime, or two nickels, that wouldn't be what I'm asking for. Maybe I'm using them for something other than representing money, such as a coinflip game, and I actually need 10 identical coins to do it, and pennies is the coin I chose.
Whereas, if I ask for 10 cents, I would accept this either as 10 pennies, or 1 dime, or 2 nickels. They all mean the same thing as the monetary value they represent, and they are all ten cents. Or, if I ask for 10 pence, I'm expecting any combination of coins that add up to 10% of a British pound.
Great video! I love this kind of essays keep it up.
17:55 Time in Arabic is وقت (usually referring to the time of day) or زمان (usually referring to longer stretches of time like an era), what you have in the video means a second/short amount of time. they are all luckily masculine so no need to change the color!
Great job on the contents. I also really liked the rapid fire clips you chose when illustrating a list of words. That was fun.
Loved the video, Yuval! I could see how much you researched before making the script, you've gained one more subscriber!
Well explained! I speak 2 different gendered languages natively and I've NEVER thought about the gender of gender words! And i am sure >90% of people out there don't!
For your first true essay video, it was amazing. For a 400th true essay video, it was amazing 👍
This was honestly great. I loved watching every second of this video and as someone who process information VERY slowly this was very clear and easy to follow. I love your kind of content Yuval please make more of this.
i've been frustrated about this exact study for so long, thank you for making this lol
I feel like if the experiment only included people who aren’t native speakers of a gendered language, then there would be a higher correlation of the object being labeled male or female just because they are thinking whether it is a feminine or masculine word. If the experiment only included people native to their gendered language, then I predict that there would be little to no correlation of them picking male or female based on its grammatical gender.
כיף לראות אותך מצליח גם פה! Keep it up!
Fantastic editing work. The spoken content is solid enough to stand with extremely basic visuals but your editing was smooth, engaging, and helpful.
i’m so glad you’re on youtube i love your tiktok content and i love literally any linguistic youtube content i can get my hands on
As a portuguese, yes, I do think of dress aka "vestido" as masculine. It is not related at all to being associated with men or women more, but it also doesn't give any significant meaning to the object, it just makes me think of them slightly differently. Like I said in another comment, for me it's about contrast in pairs. Dress is masculine, but skirt is feminine. and it feels right to have a pair like that, one long for more serious occasions and one short and cute. But in reality, you can use dresses cutely and casually, and I know that, but from this pair I instinctively think of dresses as formal first. And these pairs of masculine/feminine make me think of the other word. If you say dress, I also think of skirt. Same goes for:
- Shirt (f) / jacket (m)
- pants (f) / shorts (m)
- walls (f) / ceiling and floor (m)
- chair (f) / bench and stool (m)
- van, scooter, bike (f) / car, bus, train, airplane (m)
- house (f) / building (m)
These last few examples show something interesting too. Yes gendered objects don't impact our way of thinking in extreme ways, but why are they that gender to begin with? The fact is that there *is* a contrast being transmitted between a small and cute house, and a building, when speaking portuguese, because language evolved to trasmit that. Same for cars and scooters. And even though vans are bigger than cars, it makes me think of family and summer trips because it is feminine in portuguese.
I would like to know if other gendered language users with different genders for these words have different perspectives on this.
Also, publications not being published and parts being removed is so common, and most times the reasons are bureaucratic, so that doesn't mean much in my opinion.
tl;dr: I think the study is overblown for sure, but it doesn't necessarily mean it's completely false. For me it creates contrasts and pairs between objects. It just depends on the person honestly.
I would like to add on, that the word for ocean in German can NOT ONLY be masculine or feminine it can ALSO be neutral with "das Meer" (which is also actually the most common way to refer to it in normal everyday speech)
so it can be:
"das Meer"
and
"der Ozean"
AS WELL AS
"die See"
Love this video! As someone enjoys word and language history, this was so interesting! Great job
I didn't know you made full length videos! This is revolutionary
was never so hyped for a language lesson
A funny case happens with our anthem here in Brazil, the Brazilian National Anthem, sung in Portuguese.
Throughout the anthem, Brazil is associated with the attributes of a woman: By having a bosom
at the first stanza: "Em teu *seio,* ó liberdade, [...]" [In thy bosom, O Freedom, ...]
and in the second: " "Nossa vida" no teu *seio* "mais amores." " ["Our life" in thy bosom "more loves."] (Which by the way, is under quotation because it was taken from another poem, also, a funny thing is the word 'seio' in here, which Yuval briefly mentions at 4:11)
And also being referred as a gentle mother to her sons (the people of the country) in the chorus:
"[...] *Dos filhos deste solo és mãe gentil;* Pátria amada, Brasil" [... Of the sons of this soil; Thou art kind mother; Beloved fatherland, Brazil]
and at the end of the second stanza:
"Mas, se ergues da justiça a clava forte; Verás que *um filho teu* não foge à luta; Nem teme, quem te adora, a própria morte." [But if thou raisest the strong gavel of justice; You'll see that *a son of yours* don't flee from battle; Nor do those fear, who loves you, their own death."
Despite this, we never refer to Brazil as "A Brasil" in the feminine, but as "O Brasil", using the masculine article, this is because Brasil is a masculine noun.
Also, note the "Pátria" in the chorus, literally translates to "Fatherland", the meaning of FATHERland is kept in portuguese. The word apparently comes from the latin 'Patris', which comes from 'Pater', means father. Still, the word is a feminine noun, so it's referred to as "A Pátria", not "O Pátria", it would just sound strange, and this happens because of this rule explained right here in 5:25
Also, in both stanzas of the anthem, Brazil is briefly referred with masculine adjectives:
At the end of the first stanza is "Gigante pela própria natureza; És belO, és forte, impávido colosso; E o teu futuro espelha essa grandeza [...]" [Giant by thine own nature; Thou art beautiful, strong, a fearless colossus; And thy future mirrors that greatness ...]
and in the second stanza:
"DeitadO eternamente em berço esplêndido; Ao som do mar e à luz do céu profundo [...]" [Eternally lying on splendid cradle; To the sound of sea and under deep sky light ...]
Joaquim Osório Duque-Estrada, the writer of our anthem, could have used the feminines "Bela" and "Deitada", but he probably chose the masculine nouns due to how it sounds combined with "impávidO colossO", since there is no such a thing like a "ColossA". And also because, at the end of the day, it probably won't really make that much difference, we're talking about a country after all, the meaning of the anthem remains the same even if it briefly uses both masculine and feminine forms: Brazil is a country that act just like a gentle mother to her people, and because of this, her sons would do anything to protect their mother(land), even if it means losing their lives.
Isso foi lindo.
@@allejandrodavid5222 Obrigado. Apesar do Brasil estar cheio de problemas intermináveis, o hino nacional além de ser uma carta de amor, é um desejo otimista de esperança para o Brasil.
Tem uma parte que eu gosto muito do hino que é "E diga o verde-louro dessa flâmula, paz no futuro e glória no passado"
Se for parar para pensar, isso não é o que o verde da bandeira significa, ela foi usada porquê representa a Casa de Bragança, uma família Portuguesa. Porém, o autor do poema altera o significado dessa cor na bandeira, transformando esse símbolo europeu em uma mensagem otimista. E eu acredito que isso foi feito de propósito, o verde está em todo lugar, na natureza, nos esportes, nas bandeiras, nas culturas, e não para.
Ele alterou o significado do verde na bandeira para que toda vez que você olhasse para essa cor se lembrasse desse verso, da mensagem que ele passa e não consegue ser mais clara: "Paz no futuro e glória no passado"
Prosperidade e tranquilidade para frente. Conquistas, vitórias e guerras no passado, nos livros de história e na memória. Ele tenta focar de forma que lembra para que o futuro do país não repita os erros cometidos no passado.
Independente das ideias, origens, culturas, etnias e conflitos de cada filho, a mãe-gentil como um símbolo acolhe todos, biológicos ou adotivos. Mas infelizmente, suas mãos são governadas por outros, que como descreve Chico Buarque em Vai Passar, "engana a pátria mãe distraída e cega os seus filhos que andam perdidos"
glad to see you're on youtube. love your content
this is a very good video, great job with your first true video essay! After studying languages in college I felt that a lot of people overemphasize how much language shapes thought, especially those from outside the field of linguistics (for example, I have seen countless articles from popular media publications discussing the non-published study referenced in this video and taking it as fact). I have long said that, yes, language shapes our thoughts, but it doesn't *dictate* them.
This was an amazing, seriously enjoyable video, thank you
I actually watch K Klein a lot but realising the truth behind that one unpublished study was something I really needed tbh. This video clarified a lot of things so I'm looking forward to seeing more longer videos from you in the future I hope!!! Also I think that you really kinda solidify what you say well, like the segment of words with contradicting genders... and the compilation of your own tiktoks was funny too lol
The Wagen (m) - Auto (n) - Karre (f) and Fraß (m) - Essen (n) - Speise (f) triads are quite interesting: In each case, the three words refer to the same thing, but with different connotations. 'Wagen' (m) sounds quite plush, and so does 'Speise' (f), while 'Karre' (f) and 'Fraß' (m) are colloquial and more or less derogatory. The neutrum words are most frequently used and non-evaluative in both cases.
Added this to my watch later without even seeing who'd made it! Needless to say, looking closer only excited me more... your videos on TikTok have been super interesting and educational, and I'm so thrilled to see you've started with more long-form work!!! This was great stuff, entertaining and informative, and I can't wait to see more :))
i am a linguist and i think you did a great job! lots of evidence and research cited to back up every claim you made, pointing out flaws not just in the concepts of boroditsky’s study but also with the bureaucratic side of it, incredible!!
this is so cool!! ur the reason i got into language and i love it!!
I love watching video essays, and you did great on this one. I hope you do more stuff like this. Also, I feel calling a boat a "She" makes sense, they are strong and sturdy but also elegant and beautiful. Although you can use "He" or "She," I believe people tend to label objects based on their appearance, and being elegant and beautiful is particularly noticeable for most people (at least in my opinion).
'She' is usually given to things that keep us going on a large scale. Ships, states, justice, nature. Anything that's an analog to a mother
@@JonahNelson7 I think most vehicules are called she because of traditional masculinity. If you take the most cliché, traditional, (sexist) nuclear family you can imagine, easy to see the man, the father, seeing his car/boat/motorbike as something he owns, he loves, he has an intimate relationship, is a prized posession and an exteriorisation of his masculity (car dude, biker, sailor : very masculine archetypes.) In those ways, the vehicule can ressemble a wife or daughter, so boom, she ("She's a beauty ain't she ?). I wouldn't immedialty go "she" for a bicycle like I would for a car, motobike or ship, probably because it's less associated with those very traditional, very masculine archetypes.
And yet in Portuguese boats are "He"
boats being "elegant and beautiful" is entirely subjective
saying that "oh it only makes sense" is worthless because it makes sense to YOU (and probably the culture you grew around), not everyone
She's a beaut.
Ayo this is great stuff, I don't have time to watch the whole thing rn but it's really well written and edited! You deserve more subs man
Great video. Your tiktok content is really good and I feel like this longer format works just as well. I hope you continue making videos like these! Awesome work
A lot of people don't seem to realise that the word gender just means category. It comes from the latin _genus_ which means family.
I recommend reading about the etymology of different words, it's really interesting to understand a bit more about how our languages came to be. :)
A lot of people don't seem to remember that language is more descriptive and adapts with culture than presciptive.
The word gender didn't come to be associated with... well gender in English until the 70s
In Polish we call it rodzaj which is exactly genus, like in biological classification.
6:20 In German, the word for ‘ocean’ can also be neutral! There is ‘der Ozean’ (masculine), ‘die See’ (feminine) and ‘das Meer’ (neutral)
I’m super happy the algorithm brought me here. hope you continue making this kind of content!
Finally, someone looked into this! I haven’t heard of the original study but I’m sure it’s been passed around because as a French teacher this is one of those age-old defences for English, the indisputable champion for progress (sarcasm).
Your reasoning seems solid to me. Anyone who says something to the effect of “Look into this and check my findings” inspires some confidence. If a scientific study isn’t repeatable in varied contexts, it’s not a valid premise to begin with, so thanks for taking TED speakers to task if we don’t know the authenticity of their ideas!
Great video. Thanks for putting it together!
A Bulgarian speaker here (3 genders - masculine, feminine and neuter)! I just want to say that when I was still learning English in school, quite often I would refer to a specific object using a personal pronoun in the gender of the object in Bulgarian. So, for example: "Yesterday I bought a new house. She has two floors...". This mistake was not exclusive to my speaking abilities, but also to my peers'. So I guess genders of concepts and objects stick with you for a long time, and still, now that I am aware of that, whenever I try to "feel" the gender of a random object without thinking about it in Bulgarian and translating the word, my feeling never lets me down
Same with me, I am Slovakian and some people on the internet went as far as telling me I am misogynistic because I assumed somebody is "he", while in Slovak the gender for person is masculine. I feel like English natives should give us a break and they should stop overthinking BS.
Yep, tho I'd say “he has two floors” cuz дом is masculine in Russian.
It does stick, tho I didn't have a problem remembering English rules.
Learning Spanish, I remember being told “words have gender, not what they represent”. La gente (the people) and la persona (the person) are feminine, singular and require this agreement with adjectives, regardless of who you are talking about.
Fascinating video, Yuval
Love the research you did for this!! Subscribed :)
I'm German and I'm speaking German in my day-to-day but also English in most of my free time, and I've done so for about 25 years. I can confidently say that when I speak and think in English I'm not mentally associating words to genders at all. "I've lost my key on the bridge" does not prompt my mind to think or feel "I've lost the masculine on the feminine". Even when speaking and thinking in German it's not really like that. I would say the vast majority of gendered objects are just learned. You probably know the feeling when you started using a proper name for a thing because somebody happens to have named it that way and only much later do you notice that you've never even thought about why it has that name, you just learned it that way. There are even words with a grammatical gender I would say goes fundamentally against how they feel. "Der Schmetterling" is the butterfly and is masculine, but never has any butterfly felt masculine to me.
You haven't met the right butterfly yet
In Germany we say: Don't trust a study you didn't fake yourself
This is one of the most important youtube videos I have ever watched!
I hope it gets the attention it deserves.
The amount of research made for the video is impressing! The way of explaining the logical concerns are, too. The man is really more than just a funny multilingual dude as he puts himself in the end.
5:54 It's pretty easy actually: all (the vast majority of the) the nouns that were masculine in Proto-Germanic or in Latin or French are also masculine in German: "der Zirkus" is from latin "circus", masculine. Those endings determine the gender of the noun because that's literally the part that gets declined
The russian language does technically have rules for telling the grammatical gender, as I eventually learned from a book; but we were never taught these rules in school or from parents, it's just something most of us understand naturally.
But I do have to point out something. While the grammatical gender of a word is just the gender of a word... When it comes to fairytales, wher3 you can have fantasy creatures, or inanimate objects come to life, then the grmmatical gender actually becomes real gender in such stories.
For example, the word Смерть (Death) is female. So if Death is an actual character in a fairytale, she would be female in Russian; and I find it weird to see Death refered to as He in english stories.
Owl becaome female in the russian translation of Winnie-the-Pooh, because the word Сова has grammatical female gender.
Волшебник is male, and Волшебница is female, both meaning Wizard.
However, Ведьма (Witch) is always female, and I don't think there's an equivalent.
I've actually seen several times, particularly in the Nintendo fandom, where people see witches like Gruntilda and Cackletta, and are unsure if it's a boy or a girl, and I'm always like - well, duh, you can clearly tell that's a female character from it being called a witch.
(Not to mention, the name ends with the letter A, which, while not always, typically happens if female names in Russian, and thus immedietly makes me think that the name belongs to a female character).
And by the way, as far as verbs having gender, our verbs have gender, but only in the past tense. So in present and future tense, the verb sounds the same, but in past tense - it would have to match with the grammatical gender of the word it belongs to.q
This applies to Ukrainian as well
It's annoying when a word ends with а або о but doesn't match female or male, and is instead the other way around. Idk it's kinda hard to learn so many different forms of words, and having so many different classifications for different use cases.
great video 😁 hope it takes off more this is a gem
Love the vid! Very thought provoking points :)
Oh man, the amount of things that people got wrong on such elementary points is astonishing. I'm surprised this video wasn't filled with roasts, edits, and just general dunking on people.
But i respect it a lot that you kept it strictly civil and educational.
Thanks for your work man.
I absolutely loved the video. Thank you.
As a person who speaks five languages (Ukrainian, Russian, German, Spanish and English), four of which are gendered, I would say that grammatical genders did not really influence my perception.
It is actually interesting that amongst the speakers of the Ukrainian language there is an issue with genders because of the influence of Russian.
For instance, pain in Russian is боль (feminine), but in Ukrainian it’s біль (masculine). But since the USSR the Ukrainian speakers often perceive pain as feminine using feminine conjugation of adjectives and verbs.
It doesn’t mean, however, that Ukrainians used to associate pain with men in the past, and now suddenly chose to associate it with women, because it is absurd.
These claims about the correlation between grammatical gender and perception are inconsistent to say the least.
Totally! Also in Ukrainian the same way to refer to the “gender” of words is not called *gender* but birthplace, рід. It helps when you think about it because there is not a connection between the ideas of man and woman but rather the place where the words originated from.
English speakers take notes!!!
Yep, in Russian there are long(длинный) for musculine, long(длинная) for feminine and long(длинное) for middle(I don't think calling this gender neutral because it IS a gender and can be confused with unspecified(general) gender).
it's interesting how even tho russian and ukranian are very closely related languages with very similar words, some words are still masculine in one and feminine in the other. the same thing happens with spanish and portuguese, for example "o leite" and "la leche" both mean milk, they have the same etymological roots and almost the same pronunciation but in portuguese it's masculine and in spanish it's feminine
I don’t know Ukrainian, but in Polish there are few words that may describe pain: ból - masculine, cierpienie - neutral, boleść/bolesność - feminine. So it´s another example how gender is attached to word and not to concept. In plural they are all non-masculine (apart from male humans everything is non-masculine in plural form).
This was an amazing video I can’t wait for more!
I found that a really interesting video to watch, thank you for making it,.. cheers 😊