I'm completely on board with you here, in fact I would actually go even more extreme as to say that the words "masculine" "feminine" and "neuter" are still weird and misleading I've always wondered why we don't just call them "Noun Class 1, 2, 3, etc." If you wanted to be frivolous you could even call them "left, right, middle" or something like that. I think it's a bit dumb that we're using words that we use to describe irl gender identity 99% of the time, to describe an aspect of grammar that we rarely discuss in our daily lives lmao
I would just name them by their associated pronouns. Thus, for instance in German "der class", "die class" and "das class". Since the German word for "class" ("Klasse") is itself in the "die class", that might cause a bit of confusion from time to time. But I deem it way less of a confusion then "male", "female", and "neutral" cause.
Yeah, we can call It for romance language "color gender" and "fruit gender", since all colours are masculine and all fruits are femenine. In fact It's a cool naming since per example in "Orange", El naranja Will allways be colour and La naranja Will allways be Fruit. Bad thing: there would be a few exceptions
@@unanec in Romanian fruit get random genders (apple is neuter, banana is feminine, grape is masculine) but I never noticed how all colors are masculine, that's wild
Wrong, words describe things. The gender of a word that describes a thing also adds to its description. When things are described as a gender that has a meaning of an interpretation of the thing itself. It is no accident. There are no accidents.
@@AmITalkingTooFast Its how words work. Its not arbitrary at all that a bridge is feminine in German and a table is masculine. This is a culturally significant understanding.
@@DubmanicGetFlazed I have no doubt that there are reasons why the particular words used to describe specific objects have specific genders, but that doesn't mean the objects described by those words are inherently assigned those genders.
I am a native russian speaker. Grammatical gender here is marked on pretty much everything. And that I think is really helpful. Because russian is a language with free word order and having a link to the noun marked on adjectives or verbs helps to understand which words are related to each other in a sentense. Especially in poems where words hop around even more.
In my research, it's been said that languages that have more flexible word order tend to have more declension as well. The declension is what allows us to understand the relationships between the words in a sentence, removing or lessening the need to use more structured word order (which holds the same function). Russian is a very good example of this!
@@yuuri9064 Flexible word order doesn't require more declension. Any case teoretically can be replaced by preposition, if there are enough many prepositions in the language. Он вошёл в комнату в пальто в клетку. He entered the room wearing a plaid overcoat. В клетку в пальто в комнату вошёл он. He entered the room in a cage in a coat. В пальто в клетку в комнату вошёл он. He entered the room in a checkered coat.
@@yuuri9064 And also. Russian is a good example, but not very good. Because accuzative and nominative sometimes are identical. For example, the sentence "Мышь держит ключ" may be understood both as "Mouse holds key" and "Key holds mouse" (or "Mouse is holding key" and "Key is holding mouse").
As someone who speaks Japanese, grammatical gender is such a wild concept. Japanese doesn't even use definite or indefinite articles, so the idea of varying those depending on an arbitrarily assigned gender makes an already difficult to understand concept even harder. However, Japanese, Chinese, and I think a few other east Asian languages have a similar concept to grammatical gender when it comes to numbers. Essentially, if you say a number of objects, the specific word for the number changes depending on what specifically you're counting, so to refer to 2 people you'd say 二人 (futari) but if it were 2 cats the the number changes to 二匹 (nihiki). There are about a dozen different types of grammatical counters that each depend on particular properties of the object, such as numbers for long objects, small objects, flat objects, machines, animals, ect. On their own, the different numbers don't actually communicate any additional information besides the type of object they're counting, but similar to the examples given in the video they can slightly change the meaning or connotations of the word they're attached to, or add further clarification incase a person misheard. it's just as complex, arbitrary, and difficult to learn as grammatical gender, so I find them quite comparable, but I think they don't get nearly as much attention in English-speaking circles, because far less people have experience learning Asian languages to even know that such a concept exists. Another really interesting point about is that despite having very few explicitly gendered terms, there is one pretty significant part of Japanese that is gendered that I very rarely see gendered in other languages. the personal pronoun (I/me) has several different variants depending on the gender of the speaker, and/or their status relative to the person they're speaking to, for example 私 is feminine or neutral formal, あたし is very feminine and casual, 僕 is masculine and submissive, 俺 is masculine and assertive, ect. Following on from what you said about trans people in the video, it does present very similar ways for Japanese speakers to express their gender identity without explicitly telling people that they identify as male or female. For example, I have an AFAB friend who describes their gender as unspecified, and uses the masculine assertive 俺 while in casual chats with our friend group.
Glad you mentioned this! It came to mind for me, too. In particular, as I understand the Vietnamese usage--I'm not a native, so I stand to be corrected--usually classifiers in Vietnamese work the way you described for Japanese, although in Vietnamese it seems they can also sometime be used a bit like definite articles as well.
what makes the Chinese measure words even worse is that there are often several different words used even when you're describing two things that are pretty similar for instance, while cat, horse, and cow are all animals the measure words used are counterintuitively different, 一隻貓(a cat), 一匹馬(a horse), 一頭牛(a cow) and sometimes they just seem so random, take 一把椅子(a chair) for example, 把 has nothing to do with chair but its just there. 一條好漢(a good/bold man) is also super weird since 條 literally means "strip" although English does have this kind of things such as a "piece" of cake they're definitely way easier than those in chinese
I wanted to point out that männlich and weiblich actually do mean masculine and feminine, while they can also mean male and female in other instances. Personally, I prefer using those words in a linguistic setting instead of maskulin and feminin because their etymology is Germanic rather than Latinate. I also prefer using sächlich for neuter for the same reasons. In any case, I just wanted to point out that using weiblich and männlich is equivalent to saying masculine and feminine and does not have to mean male or female.
I've actually never heard someone say "neutral" only "sächlich" or "Neutrum" in more academic/formal speech or writing. And technically speaking those words just mean "manlike/manly", "womanlike/womanly" and "thinglike" not male, female and neuter
Same here in Croatian. We don't have distinct native words for "being biologically male", "having male qualities" and "being associated with men". After all, "masculinum" and "femininum" just mean male and female in Latin anyway.
@@2712animefreak To be fair, as a native English speaker I found his semantic argument about saying "masculine" and "feminine" rather than "male" and "female" to be fairly pointless. These terms are already so similar that I don't think trying to force a distinction here really does much to help with the issue. If we really want to disassociate these different article and pronoun types from societal gender associations, then the better solution is to just call them "type 1, 2, 3, etc." or something else that has no connection to gender at all.
@@mayiintervene2131 I have heard people call it "neutral" but it's sadly not correct. The correct term is either "sächlich", as you said, or "neutrisch". But "neutrisch" sounds quite odd so I get why people use "neutral" instead.
Italian speaker here. I understand how difficult it must be to even understand the concept of grammatical gender, let alone use it fluently. It's an innate thing we don't even think about. I really understood that when I was living in China and was struggling to remember the tones of words. One day I asked my Chinese friend: "is it easy for you to remember the tone of a word you hear for the first time? Do you ever get confused?" And she said "no". It was at that point that I truly understood that every language has features that native speakers don't even consider while people learning that language struggle with. One day a Chinese student asked me: "isn't it weird that Turkey is both a bird and a country?" And I replied: "isn't it weird that you call it literally fire chicken?" He was baffled by my answer cause he had never thought about it before. My advice for people who want to learn a gendered language is to not overthink it. I've recently realized that in Italian "il tavolo" and "la tavola" (masculine and feminine for "the table") have different meanings. The first il the object itself, the second refers to the table ready for a meal. I've always used them being subconsciously aware of the difference but consciously realized it in my late twenties. The problem with non native speakers is that they must make a conscious effort every time they use a word. I guess it's just like learning an instrument: give yourself time, with a lot of practice the gender of nouns will become automatic
@@ЮраН-ь2к "Venti" and "venti" sound exactly the same to me, but it may depend on region. Different Italian regions have slightly different pronunciations. I pronounce those two words identically. In fact, jokes exist relying on "venti" and "venti" being identical.
Daaaang you re right, i also thought about il tavolo/la tavola when he brought the example of il frutto, but i thought la tavola was just tuscan for il tavolo. Well, your explanation makes sense, we only use la tavola related to food
Coming from a Cantonese-speaking family, we were never taught tones. In Chinese school, they still did not teach us tones. We were just suppose to read aloud the written the text and if we pronounced it wrong, we were suppose to mimic the correct pronunciation spoken by the teacher. However when learning Mandarin in an English-speaking environment, we were taught the four tones in Mandarin.
imo that's because the ways tones are taught is just bad. Westerners learners think tones are categories sylables fall into rather than a "real" sounds like p, k, z. It's as if an English learner had no concept of voiced consonants and saw /z/ and /s/ as two categories of the same sound.
I'm a closeted trans person speaking a language with grammatical genders my biggest struggle is talking about myself. I often have to choose between misgendering myself, making weird sentences to avoid gendered words or not saying what I wanna say at all.
I feel that as I’m taking a language class with a gendered language, and we often do first person sentences. So I have to decide if I want to use my birth gender, the other one that feels better than that, or the controversial gender neural one that fits the best but may not be accepted.
For the meaning part I would like to add that it's easier to understand what someone is talking about without them actually saying the exact word. For example my dad often forgets words and he'll just say "pass me him" (translating literally here) and knowing he means an item of the male gender I can immediately rule out a lot of items that are feminine gender. It can also speed up communication. My mom could say 'where is that..' (that here is in female gender form in my lang) and I could much easier and faster infer what she wants before she even says the word
I agree. Frases like "give me that" or "where is it" are very common in laguages with grammatical gender. My mom has some brain problems and she very often can't come up with the exact word when talking but it still quite easy to understand what she's trying to say.
A funky quirk of the language I grew up with is that it's not uncommon for feminine nouns to get referred to as 'he' when the noun itself isn't present
They do this in some dialects of English! In South-West England/"the West Country", tools and other objects are masculine, so people will say "Pass he over here" if they want you to pass the salt. I think it's because they used to speak Cornish in that region, which had masculine & feminine genders but no neuter.
1:54 (since we're already talking about fruit) Little fun fact about Italian fruit names: many fruits are feminine and the respective trees from which they grow are basically the same word but in the masculine form. For example: la mela (the apple) - il melo (the apple tree) la pesca (the peach) - il pesco (the peach tree) la pera (the pear) - il pero (the pear tree) And the list goes on; arancia/arancio, mandorla/mandorlo, ciliegia/ciliegio, banana/banano, albicocca/albicocco, castagna/castagno...
The same in spanish, except in some cases and when the fruit is masculine pera and pero manzana and manzano naranja and naranjo olmo and sámara viña and uva (although viña is thot to come from vino) mora and mora (the tree and the fruit are the same word)
Grammatical gender also has the added bonus that (at least for words that have roots long in the past) you can sort of extract some historical information about the people who spoke that language and the society they lived in. For example, the fact that "earth" or "land" in many Indo-European languages is feminine is very likely rooted in ancient beliefs around earth being a maternal deity kind of figure. Another useful linguistic property is that sometimes grammatical gender indirectly informs about the existence of a certain (former) grammatical characteristic that might not survive in the form of the language as it is studied. For example, besides the number 1, the only other number with a grammatical gender distinction in Latin is 2. The latter is a residue of the dual grammatical number that existed in an ancestor of Latin, as it was passed down from PIE. Alternatively, some words have a certain grammatical gender because they imply another word right beside them. When the Romans or the Greeks marked every region around them as feminine (Gallia, Germania, Hispania, Italia, Africa, Asia etc), the implication is that they are referring to "land" which is feminine. So even when individual words survive, grammatical gender allows someone to deduce a probable way of thinking those peoples had when naming things.
It is interesting how grammatical gender or lack of there of can affect translations. As example, there is Japanese novel series called "Kara no kyoukai", which has been translated in Polish officially (don't ask why specifically to that langauge given it barely has been released outside of Japan, but that's my first langauge so I'm not complaining). In those novels, the protagonist is a girl that after certain event stats to refer to herself in a way as a man would be. In Japanese it is done by using masculine "ore" as her "I" of choice. Japanese "I" pronouns have some gendered connotations, but are not strictly linked (you can have, especially in songs or ficiton, girls using more masculine "I" and it wouldn't mean they consider themselves to be men for example). In Polish there is just single "I" without gender connotations, so this aspect of her is done by speaking of her with masculine grammatical gender (conjugating verbs to be in masculine form). Difference between the two is that in Polish it sounds as if she considered herself to be a man. It is not out of place given her backstory, but it could cause more confusion about her gender identity. During the translation, this aspect of her wasn't lost, but instead became stronger (not perfect solution, but at least translating it was possible). I didn't watch movies based of novels (novels themselves are not translated to Egnlish officially), so I cannot directly compare how it was done in English, but... I can image keeping this aspect of the protagonist would be basically impossible, since it is present only when she is speaking about herself.
It was certainly a problem in the English translation. The official adaptations went for SHIKI and Shiki denoting the male and female part respectively and it gets really weird if you consider Shiki's third personality, which is just void, written as " " (that's where the 空, kara in kara no kyoukai comes from). The characters name is then written normally, but set inside Japanese parenthesis, i.e. 「Shiki Ryougi」. KnK is a pretty good example why grammatical gender can help massively with the understanding of the inner workings of a character in a concise manner. The current approach works, but can be missed if the subtitle timing is fast, or the reader spaces out for a few lines and then have to backtrack a few seconds in the video or pages in the novels.
@@Ruhrpottpatriot "The official adaptations went for SHIKI and Shiki denoting the male and female part" In Polish version, name of Shiki's masculine personality is written in italics rather than ALL CAPS, which is looking way more natural in text written in latin alphabet. Third personality is refered to as just two Japanese brackets with an empty space inside. Also, I am not refering to this problem (as it stems from problem of converting ideogramic scripture to more phonetic one), I am refering to the fact that Shiki after losing masculine personality starts speaking in masculine way to compensate for the lack of it.
That hurt me deeply… Russian KnK translations are a big meme here, since the translators couldn’t choose the right words just for everything! It’s so hard to translate word plays and metaphors from one language to another, especially if one of the languages is Japanese…
even though Portuguese has genders I can't think of any way to transmit this same idea of changing the speech to a more masculine or feminine way only through words, sad
Dunno about other Slavic languages (it's probably the same), but in Polish not only nouns and adjectives change with gender, but so do verbs. While you can say "he/she/it drank tea", you literally cannot say "I drank tea" in a gender neutral way - you have to specify your gender as masculine or feminine. People have come up with some workarounds, but they all sound very artificial, especially when "x", a letter nonexistent in Polish, is used in a verb suffix.
Polish has neuter, that was used before non-binary people became the mainstream (you can find these forms in JPII speeches). My grandparents used local dialect which also often used neuter forms like 'przyszłoś, byłoś, czytałom'. From what I have seen most non-binary people also use these forms. I would say it is more artificial problem infected by newspapers than a real day to day issue.
@@adapienkowska2605 Every Slavic language has neuter. But, for instance, Russian has a stigma about neuter gender. It's used for mocking transwomen and transmen and using it is considered rude. So, it's out of options for cultural reasons. The only way is using plural forms, because unlike some other Slavic languages, plural forms in Russian are not gendered. But it just feels awkward.
Some languages go far in the "no classes" thing. Finnish (my native lang.) didn't for long differ animate and inanimate things. We just used "it" for everyone, and it's still done in colocial speech
Hungarian i know is mostly similar, although the personal third-person pronoun (ő, he/she/sg. they) is only really used for people, and objects get referred to as the equivalent of this/that (ez/az)
Grammatical gender is just really well-known because it's an Indo-European feature. The absence of it is just as popular, if not more, outside IE languages.
I think you may have made a small grammatical mistake. "didn't for long" implies that what you are describing didn't go on for a long time. You might want to say "didn't for a long time" which means that the amount of time when you didn't differ between animate and inanimate things was a long time.
In Korean, it is generally rude to use 3rd or 2nd person pronouns, as you should call people by their occupation or position or by name (depending on your relative status).
I see what you did there with the flags! Especially that American flag for Spanish really threw me off for a second there, just to realize that I am myself a native Spanish speaker in Florida lol ...And, of course, the U.S. being one of the countries with the most Spanish speakers in the world. That Ukraine flag for Russian, though... Daring.
While K-klein does use obscure flags to represent languages as a jab against the trend, using flags for countries associated with their majority language to represent a minority language does show the cognitive dissonance. But I bet even with a trend like that, putting the israeli flag to represent the arabic language is too much out of their comfort zone...
I assumed the flags indicated where those studies had been made. So the study of Spanish-speaking people was probably done in the US and the study of Russian-speaking people was probably done in Ukraine.
05:48 - 05:55 Thanks!! This is something I keep telling people all the time whenever they want to change the language (Spanish speaker) to get rid of its "sexist nature". The problem is not the language, it's the people and just (horribly) changing words in a language won't magically make people less sexist.
I fully agree with you that changing the language will not directly make sexist people less sexist but importantly when people talk about the "sexist nature" of a language they typically mean the language was formed by sexist people thus reflecting their biases. I am going to invent an extreme example to try to show my point: if maley in the english language meant "dominant" and femaley meant "subservient", I believe this would quite clearly influence english speakers using these words, especially children learning the language, to more often associate women as subservient and men as dominant by the simple similarity of the words. And if the language doesn't change, these ideas will be transported onto anyone learning the language. It's kinda like having the world explained to you by centuries of sexists. So our understanding of social gender influencing our understanding of words only alters our understanding of the word, while the way our language functions influencing our understanding of gender is imo significantly more problematic. This influence of gender on our understanding of words could also alter our actions, i.e. germans investing more ressources into making sure bridges are stable then italians because of the gender of the word, but it is far less clear whether this alteration is negative compared to when we pidgeonhole roles onto social gender.
Definitely, to add on to that, languages are alive and bound to the people who speak it. If people in my country suddenly started speaking Turkish in an entirely different way, because they want to, who is anyone to silence them? I feel like people should be more patient with these topics, instead of going crazy like some comments i’ve seen here
It also has different depths in different languages. I'm German and in a deep conversation with a French lady. We're writing in French. When saying eg "I'm happy" we write the happy part different according to our genders. We wouldn't do this when writing in German, though both are gendered languages.
Same in Polish - the gender of the person/thing we're talking about impacts the verbs, the numerals and some other partd of the sentence. As I'm native, it's not difficult for me, but I appreciate the languages that don't do that as they're simpler. But then it allows me to write/say a sentence that in English would be 4 words (I will be cooking) in only 2 words (będę gotowała) and that's neat as well.
Yeah, gender in German is easier than in many other languages when it comes to that. The gender of the speaker doesn´t affect the grammar. In Czech, I spoke is "mluvil" if you´re a man and "mluvila"if you´re a woman. In Japanese, "it can´t be hepled" is "shou ga nai ne" if you´re a man and "shou ga nai wa ne" if you´re a woman (at least according to my gf) There´s tons of differences like that in many languages.
@@8is yes, but it's the same for me. I occasionally, by mistake while trying to say something fast, will say he or she for inanimate objects or animals.
@@andrebrait Interesting. As a Swedish speaker, that doesn't happen to me. I guess that is because Swedish has two grammatical genders that aren't associated with the masculine or feminine gender. Swedish have "den" and "det", which are only understood as "it" and not "he/she".
I see what you mean when you talk about how gendered words don't necessarily exist for some sexist or patriarchic reason, but as a native french speaker, I was told that in a sentence where there is one adjective connected to multiple nouns (such as: trois gars et une fille sont beaux) the "masculine" wins. Later on, I learnt that this was not the case until the 17th century, and the invention of the Académie Française. Before this, adjectives would take their gender from the nearest noun. The change from "do whatever you want with it" to "masculine wins" was a conscious one, and a situation where rules should change. I feel like applying strict guidelines to language often leads to many problems. Perhaps we should let them evolve a little more.
I mean don't you give an argument for forcing some change in a positive direction? If that sexist reform in the past now has become uncontroversial I'd expect a reversal of the change (or some other measures aiming at more gender neutral rules) to be accepted within some decades. Which would leave future generations with a fairer language.
As someone learning Latin, Italian and French...I have never had any strong negative feelings about grammatical gender. In fact I am quite fond of grammatical gender. Besides, how boring would language be if they all worked like English?
Yeah people think Latin is hard with all the cases and declensions, but if we didn't get the clues from relative pronouns introducing clauses ten lines into the giant run on sentence, we would be dead.
yeah. tbh learning italian, latin and now starting french too...gender was pretty low on my list of grievances with a language. I mess it up from time to time, obv. But I would still happily take three more genders if I could get rid of the conjunctive instead.
Native Spanish speaker here. For all my life I thought of grammatical gender as a given, neither good or bad. After seeing your video I've learnt to genuinely like it and appreciate its intricacies.
Hello Klein. Nice video, but I'd like to contribute to the ending. I suppose English is your native language; mine is Italian. Italian has masculine and feminine, and there's an ongoing debate about inclusive language here in Italy. Two main school of thought: those who claim masculine is the basic form for every noun (unmarked, technically speaking), and those who think that should change. The innovation proposed by these people is the implementation of the asterisk or the schwa as "neo-suffixes" (does this term even exist? dunno, it's cool, though...). So for example the most widespread greeting in Italian "Ciao a tutti" (masculine, currently considered unmarked) should become "Ciao a tutt*" or "Ciao a tuttə". Some years ago, people who were in favour of inclusive language greeted "Ciao a tutti e tutte", masculine + feminine, but that was leaving out non-binary people, so currently this form is no more considered "new", just a bit long, and it's used just at the beginning of a discourse. For exapmple, our president currently greets us "Cari concittadini, care concittadine" (dear citizens) masculine + feminine, then during the speech he uses the unmarked masculine "un saluto a tutti", (greetings to all of you). Neo-suffixes in Italian are very controversial outside the web, especially the schwa. Linguists says they are being forced into the system, since first and foremost it would be invasive in the agreement chain ("lə miə amicə è molto simpaticə"). They signed also a petition against the schwa. They encourage people to continue using the unmarked masculine (since they say this form doesn't literally mean "masculine"), or just avoid it by using synonims or other solutions. People in favour of inclusive language don't agree, and they are still using their own solutions, at least in the written texts, which are more controllable. The debate remains open, imho. What do you (and your followers) think? 🙂
i don’t know much italian, i stopped studying it a while back, but i find this super interesting. german is in a similar situation, where many people hate the fact that people have been trying to add and asterisk to “one who [verbs]” nouns. “maler” is masculine, “malerin” is feminine, and then “maler*innen” is gender neutral (these words all mean painter). for italian, it must be very difficult. with articles like la, il, lo, le, gli, i, what else is left to make gender neutral? just off the top of my head, what would you think about using “-u”? like lu for the, and adding -u as a gender neutral suffix? edit: i accidentally used an umlaut in the word malerin!
As an other native speaker, the main issue with ə Is that is quite hard to use as a sound at the end of a world. Reading It Is really Easy, but the compention part Is quite hard. At the end the real solution in my opinion Is to separat the concept of grammatical gender with sexual gender. Like instead of "femminile" and "maschile" we could call them "classe 1" e "classe 2" At the end the link between the 2 is quite vage. We have no reason to implay with "il gatto" that Cats have male attributes and viceversa 😅
Yeah, Spanish is in the exact same position, except that the suffix is "e" (for example the word for citizen would be ciudadano (masc) ciudadana (fem) ciudadane (neutral)) and a new gender neutral third pronoun "elle" (and "elles" for plural). Personally, I'm in favor of it, I like the practicality and inclusivity this new feature adds and I don't think it would complicate grammar. We can debate as much as we want but, if it's to become "official," it'd had to be naturally, by having people actually using it. I recon its adoption would be slow, first on niche groups and then spreading across the youth first. I encourage this new form of inclusive language and I hope more and more people accept it specially as non-binary people gain more and more recognition and representation on media. I disagree with snob academics that argue it's being forced. Nobody is forcing anybody to speak a certain way, it's just being argued that there's a legitimate necessity for this feature, if anything it's these academics the ones that try to prescribe from the get go that such a feature is not necessary.
coming from French, and having a similar situation, I’d have to side with the linguists. Everyone uses the masculine as an unmarked default, even those who would call that sexist or transphobic (at least in daily speech, when not actively trying to make a statement). Really, it makes more sense to just start calling the ‘masculine’ ‘neuter’ instead, since it marks anything that isn’t strictly feminine as opposed to marking the strictly masculine. Also, since the word ‘ièl’ is a failure that noone ever uses and most people don’t even know exists, this would allow for the pronoun ‘lui’ and it’s clitic counterpart ‘il(s)’ to become acceptable for everyone (and in practice it is, using the masculine for a woman is considered more of a stylistic choice than a mistake). I think viewing things this way could make everyone happy: the language isn’t forcibly changed And everyone can be referred to appropriately without conflict. But i’m not optimistic that those in favor of change would ever see it this way unfortunately
@@princessdiana1229 I'd say it is "Malerin", maybe a regional thing... Then again, like the main comment mentions, there is the problem of including non-binary people. "Maler*innen" to me is just male and female. While "Maler" would be the generic masculine, wich would contain every person. So instead of using the historically correct, but male form, that contains every person, we now use a made up form wich - to me - feels even more excluding. But this is just my personal view...
Even the old English word for girl, mægden, is neuter, because it consists of mægþ meaning girl (which is feminine) and the diminutive suffix -en, which makes it neuter.
this is very interesting because the old german (not literally “Old German” but an older form of the language, the name of which is escaping me right now) word for woman is “Magd” and then they added the diminutive suffix “-chen” and the word became “Mädchen” to mean girl! Magd was feminine (the word still technically exists it’s just rarely used) but Mädchen is neuter
The arguement against grammatical gender usually boils down to "it's arbitrary and brings unnecessary complication", but that's like 90% of language features! Declensions and conjugations, irregular formes, formalities and phatic phrases, heaps of synonims, weird spelling, most colloquialisms, exclusions from rules - so much is unnecessarily complicated and could be replaced by something more efficient, but isn't that what makes languages interesting? Isn't that the beauty of language? Without such arbitrary, nonsensical complications human speech would be like sets of commands or lists of product requirements. Sure, it would be more efficient, but that's just not what language is about.
I mean, all those examples, besides like phrases and stuffs(which could carry meaning), are a deadweight on mental resources while speaking/writing a language. I'm not saying we should enforce a "correct" was to do these things but, recognizing that they aren't useful can be done separately.
There's also the question of usefulness, difficulty and time investment. I really don't care if it took me 10% longer as an infant to learn a language because of the feature N, if a few decades later I'm using that feature just fine. Tough luck to the new learners. The biggest downside of gramatical genders is that you need to edit/retype more of the declinations, if you changed a word and the form no longer matches.
Just as a person who dosen't have gramatical pronouns in their first language find them hard to learn. As a non native English speaker I can tell you than English as it's fair share of oddities. First of all the spelling, I've been learing English for over 6 years now and I still get it wrong, coming from Italian where evry letter has a single universal sound (with the exeption of a few very well makred cases, like "C" becoming "K" when you find "CH" ) It's truly a nightmare. Add to that the fact than we never use the letters "J K W X Y" and "H" without "C or G" unless they come from an imported word. In elementary school we are forced to learn pages upon pages of verbal declinations than varies based on the pronouns used, the time of possibility "Congiuntivo" it's so hard than many peopole never master it (the funny thing is than it's actualy easyer to catch someone else makeing that misktake, than corecting yourself). So the way English replaces all of those with the super simple frasal verbs, it actualy makes it harder for us.
Yes, the gender thing does make learning other languages difficult. In English you see or hear a word and that's it. OK, you will need to know which random way it's spelt, or pronounced, or where the stress is, or if it's countable or non-countable, how the plural works, if it's two words, one word or hyphenated, ... But other than that it's simple.
The thing with gender only being grammatical and not semantic really got me. In Sanskrit, one way to say friend is मित्रम् (mitram) which is neuter gendered regardless of what gender the friend is. Also, one way to say wife is दाराः (dārāh) which is always plural regardless of how many wives you've got☠️ (Sanskrit has 3 categories of grammatical numbers: singular, dual, and plural). The list goes on.
As much as I should have thought this out earlier, divorcing the term "gender" from biology allows you to see some languages as having "grammatical gender". The best examples are Polynesian (Austronesian) languages such as Hawaiian and Maori, where gender only appears when talking about "alienable" (a) vs. "inalienable" (o). (Note that this can overlap with languages that have "traditional" categories of grammatical gender, but it's common enough to be of highlight.)
@@algotkristoffersson15 Grammatical Gender literally comes first than, for a want of a better word, "Sex" Gender. The former came from Roman times and the latter meaning only on the last few centuries. It'll be hard to change it with that much corpus, when we can't even change horrible false friends like "Perfect" and "Perfectives" That said, some people *do* use different term for non-"traditional" gender groupings, "Noun classes". It's rather controversial though, as it implies "Noun classes" and "(Grammatical) Gender" are different systems, when they're just a different grouping of the same system.
I love it when the thesis contained in the title of a video makes me recoil, but then when I click on it anyway and watch the video, the analysis/argument is actually really good. Great video!
Your channel is the best. I really don't have anything else to say. You're one of the few channels I feel my heart skip for a second when I see they uploaded.
In galician (a language of a region in Spain) gender is often used to signify size or shape, for example, "un bolso/unha bolsa" or "un porto/unha porta"
In Venetian we have quite a few couples where the feminine is a larger version of the noun: muro/mura = wall(of a house)/wall(around a property), baile/baila = spade/shovel, fior/fiora = flower/squash flower(as a food), and others. Also albero/albera = tree/poplar.
@@libertariantiger No, it is a port. Also, in German, we can see that ports, gates, and doors are all related, and they are just the same thing, but with different genders, as all 3 refer to "openings that allow you to cross areas that can be closed", as ports can make you cross different countries overseas, gates can make you walk back on your yard, and doors can be used to walk into a different room. Ports, gates, and doors can be closed. Here's a way for you to recognize the genders of ports, gates, and doors in German by using the "transgender MtF trick". der Port: cisgender male ♂🌊🪵 der/das Ort das Tor: non-binary ⚧🏡⬅ das/die Toor die/das Tör die Tür: transgender female ♀🚪
Second-language German speaker here. Grammatical gender took a bit of getting used to, and even native speakers sometimes make mistakes with it. I was amused when my German boss once accidentally referred to a library as “das Bibliothek”
This sounds completely apochryphal. For words that are completely unfamiliar or rare that MAY happen but no adult native would ever say "das Bibliothek".
@@spellandshield Not a native German speaker here (native Spanish speaker tho) it does happen sometimes but it's really really rare. The kind of thing you say and you get made fun of in the group chat for the ages.
That's definitely the case in Bulgarian. Nouns aren't a certain gender, because we see them as being male or female. It all depends on what syllable a word ends with. A good example would be "Момиче", which means girl, but is in fact in neuter. Another example could be "Армия", since the army has been historically been linked to masculinity. The word itself is in femine, because it ends in an "ия" syllable.
Wonderful video-I really enjoy the editing style and the way you conveyed information! And the points you made all have my full approval as a nonbinary speaker of a ridiculously gendered language, lol
Excellent video :) I´m a German teacher and learner/speaker of French, Czech and Russian (both have 3 genders, 4 if you count the two types of masculine) but not a linguist, so here are my thoughts when it comes to learning languages with grammatical gender: It might sound weird but I recommend not focusing on gender too much. Listening and vocabulary are a much bigger issue. Like, waaaay bigger (gender is not that relevant for communication) and the thing is, that a learner´s accuracy with gender (and grammar in general) very strongly correlates with their listening skills and vocabulary size. I have talked to 1,000 German learners and everyone is bad at genders in the beginning, no matter how much they try to memorize articles. People with (overall) fluent German are somewhere between good and (almost) perfect, no matter how they got there (even those who never bothered memorizing articles!!!) It makes sense though. At some point, you´ve heard "der Tisch" so many times, that "das Tisch" simply "feels wrong". At some point, you´ll have heard so many words ending in "-tion" that are feminine, that "das Inspiration" feels wrong as well. The exceptions are usually common words, which means you hear them a lot, which makes it easier to learn what sounds right.
this was really informative and i genuinely love what you’ve created here. ngl i was doubtful going into the video, but your explanation of the misconception between grammatical and real life-applicable gender completely cleared up all my questions! im very excited for the next part!
In norwegian, the word "ball" means different things based on the gender "en ball"/"ballen" - Masculine is the usual round object "ei balle"/"balla" - Feminine is slang for a testicle "et ball"/"ballet" - Neuter is the one with dancing
In German "der Ball" refers to both the round object and the dancing party. In this case, context is vital in order to understand which one is being talked about.
Yeah, German does this a bunch too, though not with the word for "ball" (that one's always masculine) :) der Schild, pl. die Schilde = shield das Schild, pl. die Schilder = sign der Kiefer, pl. die Kiefer = jaw die Kiefer, pl. die Kiefern = pine das Steuer, pl. die Steuer = rudder, helm die Steuer, pl. die Steuern = tax I don't think German has a word that comes in all three genders though, that's pretty neat!
@@HeadsFullOfEyeballs the best one I can think of is "der Band" - volume, "das Band" - ribbon, "die Band" - band (just homograph, pronounced like in English but with final devoicing).
About non-binary people and grammatical gender: it does make it harder. I have a cousin who recently came out as non-binary. Where in English I can say "my cousin [insert name] is non-binary", in French (my native language) I have to do the awkward "mon-ma cousin-ine". It's not impossible, but I can see how it creates even more friction with people who don't really understand the concept of being non-binary, like older generations. Where English speakers would juste need to adapt to the "they" pronoun and possibly a new name for the person, in gendered languages it's a whole new way of talking that you have to adopt. Even for my cousin themselves it gets tricky, because instead of saying for example "when I was little" they have to go "quand j'étais petit/petite" or "petit...e", which makes speech awkward and cluttered, and attracts attention to their gender identity pretty much anytime they speak about themselves. In writing it's somewhat easier, but in oral speech it's a pain in the ass.
Lmfao, mentally-ill individual identify as a fictional gender cause they are not comfortable with their assigned gender, so they decided to whine about grammatical gender. Anyway, when was the last time you groomed children?
I like grammatical gender. It makes writing and speaking in German really precise and helps pack alot of meaning in single sentences. I often struggle with doing the same in other languages (mostly English, but also Dutch and Japanese) and obviously this has not only to do with grammatical gender and my proficiency in my mother tongue is definitely higher than other languages.
When I first clicked on this video, I thought it would be some monolingual American talking about how gender is confusing, and got a video that actually was ok. My native language is Hebrew which has a gender system very similar to Spanish or French with the added bonus that verbs get conjugated by gender also. The parts you said about it being easier to tell who is doing something in a sentence is definitely true. Also to touch on the part at the end, gender neutral pronouns are definitely a challenge when every pronoun except for “I” and “we” gets conjugated by gender including “you”, so most people just say “I identify as non binary but you can use male or female pronouns on me” or “I identify as non binary but use male/female pronouns on me”, which is a the simplest solution in my opinion.
I find it funny how the only people I ever hear complain about grammatical gender are Anglophones. Often times they read way too deeply into it and therefore have a skewed idea of how little it actually means.
I have noticed this too. Although my language (Urdu/Hindi) has grammatical gender, our pronouns are neuter. We have one word which means he, she, it and they (Vo). Crazy right? And yes, some people think way too much about grammatical gender to the point of forcing change in a language through artificial means just so that it can be “inclusive”
@@lightscameras4166 this exactly! ive started to feel ashamed when using grammatical gender even though its literally just speaking properly & communicating best what i mean. it doesnt need to mean more than that
Literally means that most words start with one of 3 syllables, instead of randomly with combinations of 26, you just DROP the gender part in some use cases. Americans could use the simplicity, instead of having the vocabulary of 1% of the words in English language and struggle to pass higher education because they couldn't remember how to speak English. Do you know why spelling bees let you ask for language of origin? Because EVERY language of origin is its own grammatical gender.
I'd say less Anglophones, and more people whose native language lacks it. Which in Europe, is basically just English. And that last sentence is probably the main reason people find it frustrating. It makes a lot of languages disproportionately more difficult to learn compared to how little it seemingly does.
Ahhh just discovered this channel yesterday and have been binge watching, I wish there were more videos! Been searching for a good linguistics UA-cam channel ever since I saw Tom Scott’s little series - this is perfect!
any discussion about grammatical gender always reminds me of a conversation i had about a breakup between two non-binary people, wherein it became very difficult to keep track of whether “they” referred to one of them in particular or the both of them.
This happens with we (me and you) and we (me and someone else) all the time too. Besides, the best way to not confuse who you're talking about would neoprounouns for everyone. Shortened names let's say for convenience. /jk it would solve the problem though technically.
I'm French, and it's just natural for us to have grammatical genders for words, it's only since I started surfing the English side of the internet that I've noticed a bunch of Americans complaining how it doesn't make sense and we shouldn't be using them. Who the hell do you think you are telling us how we should speak. And like you said, I've never in my life heard a French person describe a word as male/female or a boy/girl, we say masculine and feminine, this is a misconception from the Americans.
"Who the hell do you think you are telling us how we should speak" what's a bitch gotta do to be allowed to have an opinion? 😭 But for real though, you do realise that misconception comes from the fact that the words masculine and feminine are inherently linked to the concepts of masculinity and femininity, right? The fault of this in the first place lies with the association of word genders with social gender. Not to mention that a word's grammatical gender does have a demonstrable link to the cultural associations with the real-world-people gender as pointed out in the video. A system of (semi)rigorous noun classification is perfectly fine, not something I have a problem with at all. But we can and I believe should remove the association between grammatical and social gender
I'm someone who doesn't fit neatly into one of two boxes. I don't give a fuck if your language uses noun classes, but *tying them to human gender* is definitely a huge mistake.
My native language has genders, and I like it. It's like the words have their own little personalities. Though I'd be hard pressed to come up with a practical/useful reason for having them.
When I was studying Spanish, the gramatical gender cause some disconnect in me, like the word persona is feminine, so we can a phrase like "persona masculina". Eventually, I just thought of gramatical gender as a language mechanics that happens to overlap with real world gender most of the time.
In Polish the grammatical genders are, *męskosobowy, niemęskosobwy i nijaki* (osobowy is an adjective meaning relating to a person, so: *man-person-ly, non-man-person-ly, and neuter* ) However, according to Wikipedia, the non-man-person-ly gender is simply called _żeński_ , ( I was taught the person-ly thingy) meaning feminine. This makes kind of sense since it's used to talk about women. There are also technically 2 more genders (masculine vital non-person-ly (e.g. animals) and masucline non-vital (e.g. Objects), they exist because articles and some words can fluctuate whether you are talking about an object or animal, but only if it is masculine What's also interesting, in Polish any word ending in "a" is feminine/non-man-person-ly (there are probably some exceptions with words from a long time ago but I haven't seen any) any word ending in "o" is neuter (for example, _Dziecko_ meaning child) any word ending in anything else is masculine. In my opinion grammatical gender in Polish makes a lot more sense, than say French or Spanish (thankfully as a native French speaker I never had that issue). Animals are masculine, except if you their feminine sex counterpart (ten Lew, ta Lwica -- that Lion, that lioness ). It's _consistent_ a -- feminine, o -- neuter, anything else -- masculine *I used the translation: man-person-ly, actually_męski_ reffers to manly traits, not man as a sex
Well, if you're looking for exceptions in Polish, then don't worry, we have you covered. Marek to mój (m) kolega (m). Mark is my (m) colleague/friend (m). „Prawdziwy (m) mężczyzna (m)” to głupie (n) pojęcie (n). “The real (m) man (m)” is a stupid (n) concept (n). We also have some imported ones as in “poeta” (m)/ poet, but the same thing happens in Italian (il poeta), so I blame Greek xd
That's not what they are - it's way more complicated in Polish. In singular we have 3 genders: nijaki (neuter), żeński (feminine) and męski (masculine) with masculine having a different main declinations depending on being animate (humans, animals) or inanimate (objects) so you can argue it's really up to 4 genders. We also have 2 genders in plural and those are męskoosobowy (masculine personal - just for male humans) and niemęskoosobowy (non-masculine personal - everyone and everything else). Note that męskoosobowy doesn't equal masculine or even masculine animate as animals land in non-masculine personal in plural. And non-masculine personal in plural includes all that was feminine, neuter and masculine except for that referring to male people (or groups including male people). Also the endings are a big simplification. Yes, 'a' is generally feminine (big exception is the word for man - mężczyzna that is male despite ending with 'a') and 'o' (and 'e' and 'ę' and 'um') is a neuter ending but not everything else is masculine. There are a whole classes of nouns ending with a soft consonants - 'ś', 'ć', 'dź, 'ń' - that can be either masculine or feminine and you just have to memorise them - eg f-m pairs - gęś - łoś, kość - gość, gołoledź-niedźwiedź, dłoń - koń. Nothing is simple in Polish grammar.
@@Ellestra Okay thank you for correcting me hah, I was just sharing knowledge I learned a while ago. I still stand by what I said that grammatical genders in polish are more logical than in other languages. I admit I made a mistake with the word endings, but im sure there is some explanation to all of them (like mężczyzna being masculine since it means "man"). Solely the fact that there are some rules with exceptions already makes it easier than say french. What I have heard is the hardest in polish for non-natives, is the grammatical cases: when does the word end in -ów and when do we remove a letter and when.... anyways thank you again for correcting me
There are five grammatical genders in Polish: masculine personal, masculine animate, masculine inanimate, feminine and neuter (in plural it collapses into masculine personal and everything else). And it is this way, because personal/animate/inanimate differences collapsed in feminine and neuter (I think that proto-Slavic had all 9 grammatical genders). World "niemęskoosobowy" is used to described all the collapsed genders in plural (so it is sometimes said that in plural you have two genders: męskoosobowy i niemęskoosobowy), but I never heard of using this term in singular.
In italian la frutta and il frutto also border on that latin-neuter-changing-gender-when-plural thing you went over in another video. Semantically, "la frutta" is a collective noun, like flock, while "frutto" is a regular singular. Again in italian, coming directly from latin, and other romance languages too, the name of a fruit is usually female, while its parent tree is the same word but male. There are a few exceptions, including of course most fruits the romans didn't know of, and figs for just the most hilarious reason (involving them looking a bit like vulvas)
More on figs: In latin, ficus (m) is the tree and fica (f) is the fruit, as per pattern. Fica though ended up becoming a euphemism for the vulva, thus becoming itself a somewhat bad word. Some romance languages just went on with it as it was in latin but some changed it up a bit as a way of censorship: italian started using fico (m) for both the tree and fruit, sardinian uses figu (m) for the tree and figu (f) for the fruit, creating an unusual -u ending for a female, calabrian does the opposite with ficu (m) for the tree and fica (m) for the fruit. If you all have other examples I'd love to hear them tbh
@@scaevolaludens679 You're wrong on the gender of Latin trees (or rather trees in Latin). Trees are *always* female in Latin even if the word endings 'suggest' otherwise, such as "quercus" (oak) or "ficus" (fig tree), where you see the gender when adding an adjective that has to be changed accordibg to the noun's gender: quercus rubra or ficus carica.
I'm currently learning Danish, and it's so wild to me that while Danish has a common gender/neuter gender setup, Norwegian (in most dialects) still has three. This baffles me, because it makes it seem like Norwegian would actually provide me with less immediately useful information about a word than Danish. What I mean by this is that common and neuter gender are (usually) correspondent to animate and inanimate. So, if I see an unfamiliar word with -et, I can (typically) assume that it describes an inanimate object, which can give me a lot of context clues as to what the word means. But, since Norwegian has a masculine/feminine/neuter setup, I don't think I'd get the same sort of information. (This isn't a value judgement on either language; I'm just pointing out this difference.)
Danish speaker here. Your analysis would be true if it wasn't for the fact the common gender is a collapse of the previous feminine and masculine genders. If you hear a Norwegian word which is either masculine or feminine it has about* the same probability of accurately describing an animate property that a Danish word in the common/utrum. The reason I say *about is that there are a few gender disparities between the two, but we agree on the gender of most nouns. I should also mention that, in mainstream Danish, there is a trend originating from Southwestern Jutland, (where this is the traditional gender system), where we use the neuter gender for mass nouns and the common gender for count nouns. This might cause confusion sometimes because a lot of mass nouns are utrum, but I would almost always use the neuter gender about them in casual conversation.
@@SpaceMonkey15 I don't really speak Norwegian, but I did learn a bit of the bokmål standard. During that time I was taught that with words like 'kvinne' I could really choose whether I want to say 'en kvinne' or 'ei kvinne'. So if that's correct then you can still do the same in Norwegian - 'et' for inanimate, 'ei', 'en' for animate. You actually would get more information since you'd also know if the word is feminine
Also, if you come to vestlandet and cant even bother to learn to speak like us you can fuck off back where you came from or to the eastern wankers who have presided to speak danish except gayly
Since spanish mainly differences gender with the "a"/"o" endings, there were many people years ago that wanted to include a new ending, "e", as a neutral gender. Of course, people got angry, and even the authority of spanish, La Real Academia de la Lengua Española, said that such changes were innecessary. For words that change if the receiver is masculine/feminine (abogado/abogada) the masculine plural is neutral. So if I say "abogados" Im referring to: - A group of male lawyers - A group of lawyers Whereas if I say "abogadas" I can only refer to: - A group of female lawyers This made it seem like including a new case would be innecessary, since there's already male plural. However, there is no neuter case for singular words. "Abogado" always means male lawyer, "Abogada" always means female lawyer. So there is a place where a new neuter case would be useful: "Abogade". Other than that, I don't think that adding a new case (or allowing it in other places of the language) would be necessary. As you said in the video, "Persona" doesn't really have a gender, so "Persone/Persones" makes no sense, and we already have other ways to refer to someone in a neutral way. But then of course came the USA and decided that we should use the X as in latinX as a neuter case even though I can only thing of a word that uses "x" and it's difficult to pronounce and it undermines the case proposed by actual latinos and ahhhhh 😡😡😡🤬🤬🤬 (general sentiment towards "latinx")
Oh don't worry, the X thing is just as foolish in English. Check this out: the already gender-neutral word "folks" is regularly re-spelled as "folx" to make it gender-neutral... again? doubly neutral? Sigh... once again my country doesn't stop to think for as many as four seconds
At least in Spanish you can have an elegant way to create gender neutral terms with the -e ending. In French, "inclusive writing" is a complete mess that can't even be pronounced orally and which gives huge clusters written down.
Yes english native speakers have no respect towards hispanics. I feel like they have made a cult out of the “latino” identity and heritage. It is so weird.
In Polish masculine gender can be divided into 3 groups: personal, animate and inanimate; inanimate masculine words decline differently. In the plural, there are 2 genders: virile (masculine-personal) and nonvirile, all words that aren't masculine-personal fall into the latter.
from an aesthetic perspective, i love grammatical gender. it’s very interesting to me! but if there was a language that i had to learn, i’d prefer no grammatical gender
@@shelookstome8727 I'm pretty good at learning the pronunciation/fonology of a language, being able to pronounce words accurately enough in around 8 languages while knowing only 2½. But when I tried learning turkish fonology out of curiosity I noped out of it almost instantly out of pure dread. This is a trap, Mike, be careful.
The problem trying to artificially "fix" grammatical gender in languages that have it, is that it usually hinders comprehension and creates bizzare structures to the native speaker. Take for example Spanish, where the method of getting rid of gender is by substituting -o/-a suffixes by -e. The odd thing is that the suffix -e is feminine in catalan/valencian, so it can lead to confusion for speakers of both languages. I think the only this can work is if the language naturally evolves into a language with no grammatical gender, as it has happened many times before.
Absolutely. In English ‘they’ works because people already used it when they didn’t know someone’s gender, so applying it to certain people who don’t want to be categorized by gender wasn’t much of a change. But in romance languages our grammars often demand strictly one gender or the other, and trying to force another gender in would simply break the rules that people know and use. Language evolution has to be natural to its speakers, it can’t be forced no matter how much we want it to.
That isn’t true for French. Many more people are using the gender neutral pronoun “iel” to refer to others or themselves. Even the young people are doing it, and my two cousins who happen to teach French are also teaching more inclusive ways of writing and speaking French after their students asked for it. You say we shouldn’t impose such ways of speaking to these “naturally gendered languages”. Yet the argument falls flat when you take a look at how modern French has been shaped by sexist grammarians who erased feminine forms of professions and titles, and even erased the proximity agreement rules (the last noun of a noun group should give the agreement) and imposed the “masculine form over the feminine form” rule, where if one masculine and one feminine forms are together, no matter where in a sentence, the masculine form takes over the agreement. Their reasoning was essentially “boys rule, girls suck”. All in all, I think it’s neat marginalizes groups are reappropriating their language and finding creative ways around the arbitrarily named masculine and feminine grammatical genders. It can’t work if you impose it though, only if other people get exposed and curious about it. And so far it’s working
@@mf5779 Not saying we shouldn't impose, but that languages will naturally adopt these changes if they allow for unambiguous communication and there is a critical mass of speakers willing to include them. For what you are saying it seems this is the case for French.
@@mf5779 Are you French? If so, maybe we have simply different experiences but if not then i suggest you go to the country and talk to people, rather than just seeing what a few people do online. As for your point on the grammarians, that’s true about the standard language but people don’t really pay attention to it in speech (only ever in writing does it impose itself). Sure, some people will be assholes and always try to correct your speech but most will understand and use words as they please and true changes only happen gradually over the course of decades. Maybe one day the grammar will adapt itself to a new gender class, although truth be told it’s more likely in the case of french that the feminine simply falls out of use and we are left without gender entirely. The point is we can’t force that to happen, we can prescribe all we want but at the end of the day the language will evolve by itself slowly over time. French is in fact perfect evidence of that, given how different the standard language and spoken language are (in grammar as much as in pronunciation, that is).
The -e Spanish/Catalan misunderstanding reminds me the case of the use of schwa in Italian for create gender neutral words, that lead to the problem that the words started to sound like the broken version of Neapolitan, that makes large use of that vowel by default. (Other than the fact that most Italian are not used to that vowel)
Are "male," "female," and "neutral" terms that one hears in foreign language classes in the UK? Because I've never heard that in the USA--it's always "masculine," "feminine," and "neuter."
As a counterpoint, I (also UK) have only ever heard talk of masculine, feminine or neuter from language teachers (French, German at comprehensive school in the 90s, Spanish evening classes in the 2000s), to the extent that hearing "male" and "female" in the video sounded a bit weird to me. I guess (as with a lot of things) the answer must be "It depends"!
@@kklein Well... Männlich (er/sie/es ist männlich) = the characteristics of a male = masculine (he/she/it is masculine =/= Mann = man Weiblich (er/sie/es ist weiblich) = the characteristics of a female = feminine (he/she/it is feminine) =/= Frau = female neutral is neutral It´s really meaningless to use "Maskulin" oder "Feminin" instead of "Männlich" or "Weiblich" if we still know that they are really the same. In class the terms männlich/weiblich and maskulin/feminin can and are changed interchangeable.
@@AlbertTheGamer-gk7sn Sorry, but neuter is "it," not they/them. They/them is plural, and in the plural, all English nouns fall into a single class called the "common" gender because it's common to all nouns.
I'm a native speaker of two gendered languages (Catalan and Spanish), and while I agree that gramatical gender in other languages may be confusing for me, since they are different, I have to ask "So what?". Languages exist for native speakers of those languages and no one else. Wanting to learn a foreign language is a decision you actively take, and you agree to participate to some extent in that culture. Spanish doesn't owe you being easy. Native Spanish speakers are comfortable with a set of patterns (I prefer this word over rules), and you don't have a say in them. You may have an opinion on those patterns, and that's OK. But languages shouldn't change because they're confusing to you. That's such a narcissistic mindset, IMO. PD: Yes, I understand that people are and have been sometimes forced to learn a language. But the problem here isn't language itself, it's cultural imposition.
Thank you so much for acknowledging gender language issues trans & non-binary folks face! I was so happy when I heard you talking about this topic! I'm enjoying your videos!
I'm very happy with the end of the video. As a non-binary person who lives in a country where all day-to-day communication is done in two very gendered languages in which I have no comfortable way of describing myself or talking about myself, during the entirety of the video the one thought that was sitting on my head was "what about non-binary people?" So it was really nice to see you acknowledge that at the end of the video
I appreciate the bit in the end, because it reminded me of a youtuber I follow who once complained that English is "the most gendered language ever", and as a speaker of Hebrew, that sounded hilarious.
Couldn't the difference in how German and Spanish speakers see bridges be (at least partly) explained by the different geography, climate, materials and architectural styles found in Germany and Spain?
Another often-cited example from this study and similar is 'key', which is masculine in German and feminine in Spanish, and was described in matching gendered terms as with the bridge example. However, I would find it interesting to ask native speakers of languages without grammatical gender the same questions - then any bias would surely have to be cultural.
Native German speaker here. I suspect one aspect that contributes how much the gender can color a word is how much of a blank slate that word is. To take examples from the video, with human (der Mensch, m) and person (die Person, f) I feel no effect of the grammar articles at all, probably cause humans in my mind already have clearly defined gender properties. Compare this to knife/fork/spoon (das Messer, n/die Gabel, f/der Löffel, m). Now, this is totally my subjective impression, but with 'fork' I totally feel the influence, this is a female object thru and thru. But for some reason, I feel a knife is male and a spoon is neutral, even though their grammatical genders are the other way around. I would never use the wrong articles for those, but somehow a knife has such a strong male (phallic? violent?) aura that the grammar takes no effect. Another interesting aspect that can contribute is that, when adding personalities to inanimate objects they tend to follow their grammatical gender. In most German children's books the sun is a woman and the moon a man, while in French it's the other way around. The lamp in The Brave Little Toaster is a woman in German and I was surprised to learn it isn't in the original, of course a lamp would be a woman. Maybe some of the study participants read books about talking bridges as kids and were thinking of those characters, rather than a specific bridge they knew.
I am German and nonbinary, and I have no idea how to refer to myself in German, haha. The environment I'd been in hasn't exactly been conducive to gender exploration, so I've never heard of those pronoun options. I don't think I like any of them, though. Formal addressing in German is very difficult as well since you don't have an obvious symmetrical option as in "Mx" instead of "Mr" or "Mrs" in English, or "señore" instead of "señor" or "señora" in Spanish. I really like the Spanish '-e' affix in general and use it whenever I talk about myself. Since then luckily I've moved to the UK, the most trans-friendly country in the solar system, and I can refer to myself as they/them unhinderedly. Thank you for making this video! It's lovely to have someone look at the trans people aspect of grammatical gender.
I didn't click on this video expecting trans ppl being discussed and how gendered grammar affects them, but it's lovely to see it acknowledged because of how much a system like this impacts a lot of people in day to day life
Let's all just agree that 99% of the griping and confusion about gramatical gender comes from the decision to refer to it as gramatical gender. Gender as a concept has meaning that is in no way reflected in how grammatical gender works, it was just a lazy title because people noticed the classifications happened to also contain nouns for men or nouns for women.
What confused me for a long while in French was when in a story about animals, when we refer to them as the animal species, they have fixed gender, like "le chat est arrivé" (the cat has arrived), no matter if it's a male or female cat. But when we refer to this cat character by their name, or simply as a person (il / elle), now we use their actual gender.
Also an article (determiner) can turn to a pronoun to just refer to something directly and the other person will understand to what you are refering to by the gender ( in a conversation in which you have mention masculine and feminine concepts in one sentence). As you explain in 9:11
I didn’t think you’d bring up nonbinary people! We’re often not mentioned in these discussions. Being enby in Russia is hard enough with the Very Not Good politics + bigotry, but the language makes it almost completely impossible lol
I'd say, not 'impossible', but 'unusual' for the most of Russian speakers personally, I don't think using 'they' when talking about one person (f.e. "я сделали") breaks the rules, it just feels... unnatural for the first time? but after a time your brain is like, "haha, I'm totally ok with this" *sending support from a Russian queer folk :)*
@@minttea527 it's doesn't feel unusual It's just that when you refer to yourself as plural in the past it meant that you are a land owner Because or that using plural words to yourself feels like you have a giant ego
@@aster2790 I didn't know about that, thanks for sharing/gen It was unusual for me, bc I never heard about singular they and was kinda shocked people can use pronouns except for 'he' and 'she'
@@minttea527 well yeah... It is like that In russian "they" is never used as singular, neutral pronoun Russian neutral pronoun is "it", but using it also feels weird cuz it's used only for objects or when insulting someone
@@aster2790 It's pretty similar in English. While "they" is both singular and plural, at least until recently the singular use wasn't as popular. "It" is also used to dehumanise people in English, as it exclusively refers to objects (or living things without gender, bacteria and plants). Apparently, in english even "he/him" can be gender neutral. While don't agree, it apparently occurs in some (historical) formal speech.
I love that in Russian the grammatical genders are not random. There are pretty straight rules for them because unlike many European languages Russian still has grammatical cases and it means that grammatical gender really canges them. You can't change the word that ends with "а" (femenine in 99% cases) any other way than it has to because you won't be able to understand it's role in a sentence. It means that any new word AUTOMATICALLY gets it's gender because it needs to follow the rules of grammatical cases.
7:31 quick correction: in Italian it's "l'uomo" not "il uomo". On a side note, I love how you used San Marino's flag for Italian. Made me giggle so hard.
Native Portuguese speaker here, and I must point out that, at least in Portuguese, many times, words that are only differentiated by gender are actually seperate words with completely different meanings. I can think of some exceptions, like the Italian example you gave of frutto(a) (in Portuguese fruta (feminine) is a coloquial term and fruto (masculine) is a botanical one), or when loan-woards, like "tablet", can be interchangeably any gender. Note the examples: Campo (field/countryside) and Campa (grave/gravestone). Cavalo (horse) and Cavala (general term for multiple species of mackarel). Termo (term) and Terma (hot spring/bath-house). In the dictionary, these words are not "the feminine/masculine of..." they're just words that happen to sound and look similar, and be opposite gender. Even when looking at words that should be the feminine and masculine of each other, like animals. Cavalo (male horse) and égua (female horse) are seperate words; égua is not the feminine of the word horse, it is the feminine of the animal "horse". Please do note that Portuguese is the only gendered language I speak, and I'm not a linguist. Also, (and, again, I'm no linguist) but I'm pretty sure that gramatical gender systems are only up to 3 classes, more than that (like swahili) is classified as a noun class system. Anyway, I still do love the video and agree with most of it, as I'm really tired of people who don't understand how gramatical gender works pretending like they understand the concept. Also, love the fact you used the least expected flags for each language, that really cracked me up, it was funny to hear "Italian" and see the San Marino flag.
Excellent as usual, just a tiny mistake around 7:39: the article before uomo is "lo", so it is l'uomo. And if it is meaning the human specie it should be written l'Uomo.
We have masculine and feminine words in Welsh too. We do not have a "none" classification, but some words are bi-gendered (both male and female). One example is tafarn (pub). In Welsh, the gender is used to determine if and when a particular word will mutate.
My sole complaint about grammatical gender in German is that it is just complicated and inconsistent enough that the amount of effort necessary to learn it outweighs the real but unappreciated (by me) benefit it brings. I can't truly appreciate the full extent of how grammatical gender benefits the German language since I wasn't raised speaking it. Even worse, since I wasn't raised speaking it, I struggle much more with committing grammatical gender information into my memory. There are bad arguments and misconceptions about grammatical gender, and this video does a good job outlining those, but I retain my overall stance that grammatical gender makes a language difficult to learn in any way that makes it "worth it".
Next video: why does Chinese and some east asian languages have measure words? Or classifiers? Once someone asked me why does Chinese has so many measure words. And i couldnt answer him.
every language has measure words, actually. like in english we know that "a paper" is different from "a sheet of paper". it's just that we don't think of "sheet" as a measure word because we instead just think of it as a regular noun what we call "measure words" in other languages are also like this, but we just don't see it anymore because the original words have fallen out of fashion for example in mandarin 条 used to mean "strip/strand", that's why we use it for long stringy things 位 used to mean "role/seat/rank", that's why we use it to count people, (but only in formal situations, where their role is relevant) 只 used to mean "one half of a pair", that's why we use it to count a single shoe. in the past this was actually used to count birds specifically, because birds always come in male/female pairs, but then it got applied to other animals too 个 used to mean "bamboo staff/pole", then it got to mean just "piece", and now we just use it for anything that doesn't have a different liangci if you think about it this way, then it makes sense that there are so many measure words, because there are so many words in general lmao
@@diamdante Except in most languages, you usually don't use measure words. You have two apples, not two X of apple. East Asian languages use measure words obligatorily.
Also, some measure words in Chinese don't make any sense because for example you use 条 for dogs, fishes, roads and trousers and these things have absolutely nothing in common, while very similar things like lion and tiger use different measure words, tiger has 只 but lion has 头，why?
@@vytahyes, it's more uncountable nouns in English like "a piece of furniture / information", "a glass of water" or collectives "a kettle of fish" but not few.
my favorite example of gender changing the meaning of a word is el pimiento (pepper as in the fruit) vs la pimienta (pepper as in the spice). i don't know why i like this example. it's just fun i think.
The bit about the story about "a man and a woman" vs "2 men" made me think that it would be cool if we could just assign grammatical gender arbitrarily when first introducing a subject. This way, you could use any amount of pronouns (as long as there would be enough in the language) to backreference a subject. Something along the lines of "These are my friends Dave-[suffix 1] and John-[suffix 2]. [pronoun 2] is a bit angry at [pronoun 1] right now and won't talk to them."
Algonquian languages, for example Ojibwe, do have this. The Wikipedia article on Ojibwe grammar does a good job describing it, although Ojibwe has a lot of inflection and the article is fairly detailed. In languages with a proximate-obviative distinction, the function of the third person of English and other languages is divided between the "proximate" for the most prominent referent in the discourse at that time and the "obviative" for everything else. So a story about Jane and Mary, or Dave and John, would focus on one of them and the other would be consistently marked as obviative. The focus of the story can change, and which person is proximate can also change and does not need to be consistent during an entire discourse.
that means that the other person would have to keep track of all the genders in the sentence, and it could cause some confusion when you want to change them
or maybe a "former/latter" distinction? Dave brought John his[F] bag. (Dave's bag) Dave brough John his[L] bag. (John's bag) where his[F] and his[L] are two different pronouns, and the former is used when a sentence has only one subject.
Just like "masculine" and "feminine" don't literally mean the objects are considered male or female, so too are "singular" and "plural" when it comes to singular-they, because "they" is still grammatically plural even when it refers to one person. Simple examples are easily resolved, but in more complicated sentences it can be difficult and sometimes jarring to disambiguate whether you're including the previous clause's object can be a bit jarring: "Alex nods once to their accomplice, and they return to the square to wait as she heads down third street to come around the other side."
as a native Hebrew (a language with grammatical gender) speaker, what I like about grammatical gender is that, unlike some of what the critics say, does indeed add meaning. you can make words or sentences carry more information, and since to me the main purpose of languages is to distribute information, I can look at it as distinctly good thing. To give a simple example, if I want to tell you a story about a female friend, and the fact that she is female is relevant to the story, I can just say friend [female form], instead of using more words to say that she is female.
(also native Hebrew speaker here) i’d have to disagree - i think the kind of gendering you are talking about causes more trouble than it’s worth. in the example that you gave, the need to specify gender just adds confusion because then you need to clarify whether you mean “[girl]friend” or “friend who is a girl”. other languages such as German have the same problem. the only other time nouns are really gendered in this way is pets; maybe somewhat useful but not really. and as mentioned in the video this kind of gendered language makes non-binary peoples’ lives that much harder.
My favourite example of the complexities of grammatical gender from Danish is our two words for pigs: En gris (common/uter gender) Et svin (neuter gender) Both are equally valid, yet 'gris' seems more familiar and cute and is the word first learned by children because they see a happy pig in a pen on a farm in a children's book. 'Gris' is uter/common. 'svin' is neuter and is used mostly when referring to pigs used as "production animals" as we would call them: animals used for the sole purpose of being turned into food products. It probably helps that our equivalent of "pork" (aka. the animal as meat) is also 'svin', but that doesn't quite explain why 'gris is used as a very, very mild insult when someone is being messy with their food (typically children), while 'svin' is what you call someone who is morally reprehensible and is probably going to start a fight with you over your usage of that word. We also more likely to think of something closer to the feral equivalent of the pig; the boar, when we say 'svin' (boar is 'vildsvin'; "wild swine"). 'Pig' is almost always imagined as a small pink fellow with no tusks or brushes.
The "wrong" flags for each language just so good! Just one little mistake: in italiano si dice "l'uomo" non "il uomo". It's just a little mistake, the content is perfect, as always!
I don't know Swahili but as a native Spanish speaker who's currently learning Runyoro-Rutooro (another of the Bantu languages spoken in Uganda), I've found the R-R "grammatical genders" (or "noun classes" as bantuists usually call them) much more meaningful than the Romance-like grammatical gender systems (only masc. and fem.). This is because they're many more and instead of assigning "sex" to inanimate objects you get to have a quite logical classification based on non-arbitrary features like: size, humanness, animalness, non-human non-animal livingness, non-livingness, length/deformity, abstractness, action sense, etc. It may not be perfect but damn me if it ain't easier when trying to understand a speech or a story!! An example: Omuyembe gukagwa ha kyana ky'entulege ekikaba nikirya ekikoora kandi nubwo gwafiire. 'A mango fell on a zebra foal which was eating a leaf and then it died'. What died? The mango?, the zebra?, the leaf…? If you read it in R-R, the answer is simple (source: me).
Great video! The part about grammatical gender making it easier to distinguish between people in a story made me thing of ASL. From what I've been learning in my 101 class, the distinguishing is done spatially (at least in some cases)! Like, when you talk about two people, you indicate which is left and which is right. You then shift your shoulders to the left and right to indicate which person you are talking about. learning ASL has been incredibly interesting so far, and much more complex than I had imagined. I would love to see you talk about it some time in a video! :D
I don't really mind grammatical gender and agree it can improve comprehension in certain situations, but it just seems like an overly complicated system if that's the goal.
I'm French non-binary, and trying to speak in full sentences without gendering myself fells like dodging psionic bullets aimed at my mental health. Awesome video still
I'm learning German, so I just switch back and forth, but once I get better, I want to try to get better at avoiding gender. Also, your experience talking about yourself reminds me of the feeling of trying to not misgender a friend while talking about them to someone they aren't out to in English.
Idk about French but apparently in Poland some activists found a dialect which provides gender neutral forms. They had to avoid Polish equivalent of "it" because it refers to objects. It's not widely used in the mainstream because we're not very progressive but it's something Maybe you could find something similar in dialects or historical variants of your language
I'd say you'd have to defend languages that doesn't use it. I mean is just very useful and it makes it easier to follow a conversation using stuff like (el, lo, la, ella) instead of just "the" and "that"
The main problem is that any attempt to categorize things into tidy boxes will inevitably find something that doesn't fit into either, unless of course the boxes are assigned with absolutely no regard for what they're being assigned to.
But it is relatively random, difficult to learn and as we have seen occasionally causes societal issues. On top of that, I recall there being a few debates amongst Croats on how to make the plurals of loanwords - should cent act like student or should Katar become Katara or Katra in a specific case? And it's advantages are meagre at best - you get better clarification in a very small number of cases and those cases mainly exist because the gender system encourages them.
10:25 i'm so glad that you put the definition there so that people in the comments won't ask about it, i've seen that _way_ too many times granted, they're pretty much never asking it genuinely, and really only doing it to JAQ off, but still
let me recommend the Modern Standard Chinese pronoun tā, which fits for masculine, feminine, neuter, human, non-human, animate and inanimate genders. solving the problems once and for all: unite we stand, divide we fall.
I'm completely on board with you here, in fact I would actually go even more extreme as to say that the words "masculine" "feminine" and "neuter" are still weird and misleading
I've always wondered why we don't just call them "Noun Class 1, 2, 3, etc." If you wanted to be frivolous you could even call them "left, right, middle" or something like that. I think it's a bit dumb that we're using words that we use to describe irl gender identity 99% of the time, to describe an aspect of grammar that we rarely discuss in our daily lives lmao
I would just name them by their associated pronouns. Thus, for instance in German "der class", "die class" and "das class".
Since the German word for "class" ("Klasse") is itself in the "die class", that might cause a bit of confusion from time to time. But I deem it way less of a confusion then "male", "female", and "neutral" cause.
@@lonestarr1490 ”die Derklasse”, ”die Dieklasse”, ”die Dasklasse”. There. New terms coined. It's even grammatically correct already.
Yeah, we can call It for romance language "color gender" and "fruit gender", since all colours are masculine and all fruits are femenine. In fact It's a cool naming since per example in "Orange", El naranja Will allways be colour and La naranja Will allways be Fruit. Bad thing: there would be a few exceptions
@@unanec in Romanian fruit get random genders (apple is neuter, banana is feminine, grape is masculine)
but I never noticed how all colors are masculine, that's wild
@@lonestarr1490 Not all languages with genders have articles, for example slavic languages don’t.
If anything, German has taught me that a skirt is the most masculine thing ever, it literally being called Der *Rock* and it being masculine noun.
Would be cool to have a skirt named Dwayne Johnson.
german ist ein nazi language sweetie...
German 🤝 Scottish
That’s how I remember the word for skirt XD
Sort of like how in Spanish "dress" (vestido) is masculine for some reason
The section with mismatching flags got me so good.
holy shit it's kala Asi from toki pona
It's technically not mismatched lol
None of those flags are _actually_ mismatched though
At approximately 4:39 for those who mainly listen to the video.
@@px6883 They are, because flags represent countries, not languages.
7:27 "Things aren't gendered, words are."
Yes!! Thank you for spreading this nuance.
Wrong, words describe things. The gender of a word that describes a thing also adds to its description. When things are described as a gender that has a meaning of an interpretation of the thing itself. It is no accident. There are no accidents.
@@DubmanicGetFlazed that's not how the grammar works
@@AmITalkingTooFast Its how words work. Its not arbitrary at all that a bridge is feminine in German and a table is masculine.
This is a culturally significant understanding.
@@DubmanicGetFlazed I have no doubt that there are reasons why the particular words used to describe specific objects have specific genders, but that doesn't mean the objects described by those words are inherently assigned those genders.
@@DubmanicGetFlazed buddy,,, Words have different grammatical gender depending on the language.
I am a native russian speaker. Grammatical gender here is marked on pretty much everything. And that I think is really helpful. Because russian is a language with free word order and having a link to the noun marked on adjectives or verbs helps to understand which words are related to each other in a sentense. Especially in poems where words hop around even more.
Петрушка is male, петрушка is female. :)
In my research, it's been said that languages that have more flexible word order tend to have more declension as well. The declension is what allows us to understand the relationships between the words in a sentence, removing or lessening the need to use more structured word order (which holds the same function). Russian is a very good example of this!
@@yuuri9064 Flexible word order doesn't require more declension. Any case teoretically can be replaced by preposition, if there are enough many prepositions in the language.
Он вошёл в комнату в пальто в клетку. He entered the room wearing a plaid overcoat.
В клетку в пальто в комнату вошёл он. He entered the room in a cage in a coat.
В пальто в клетку в комнату вошёл он. He entered the room in a checkered coat.
@@yuuri9064 And also. Russian is a good example, but not very good. Because accuzative and nominative sometimes are identical. For example, the sentence "Мышь держит ключ" may be understood both as "Mouse holds key" and "Key holds mouse" (or "Mouse is holding key" and "Key is holding mouse").
hindi's the same, word orders get pretty crazy in songs and poems, but it's still obvious what's going on, in part due to the gender system
As someone who speaks Japanese, grammatical gender is such a wild concept. Japanese doesn't even use definite or indefinite articles, so the idea of varying those depending on an arbitrarily assigned gender makes an already difficult to understand concept even harder.
However, Japanese, Chinese, and I think a few other east Asian languages have a similar concept to grammatical gender when it comes to numbers. Essentially, if you say a number of objects, the specific word for the number changes depending on what specifically you're counting, so to refer to 2 people you'd say 二人 (futari) but if it were 2 cats the the number changes to 二匹 (nihiki). There are about a dozen different types of grammatical counters that each depend on particular properties of the object, such as numbers for long objects, small objects, flat objects, machines, animals, ect. On their own, the different numbers don't actually communicate any additional information besides the type of object they're counting, but similar to the examples given in the video they can slightly change the meaning or connotations of the word they're attached to, or add further clarification incase a person misheard. it's just as complex, arbitrary, and difficult to learn as grammatical gender, so I find them quite comparable, but I think they don't get nearly as much attention in English-speaking circles, because far less people have experience learning Asian languages to even know that such a concept exists.
Another really interesting point about is that despite having very few explicitly gendered terms, there is one pretty significant part of Japanese that is gendered that I very rarely see gendered in other languages. the personal pronoun (I/me) has several different variants depending on the gender of the speaker, and/or their status relative to the person they're speaking to, for example 私 is feminine or neutral formal, あたし is very feminine and casual, 僕 is masculine and submissive, 俺 is masculine and assertive, ect. Following on from what you said about trans people in the video, it does present very similar ways for Japanese speakers to express their gender identity without explicitly telling people that they identify as male or female. For example, I have an AFAB friend who describes their gender as unspecified, and uses the masculine assertive 俺 while in casual chats with our friend group.
兎一羽．．．
Glad you mentioned this! It came to mind for me, too. In particular, as I understand the Vietnamese usage--I'm not a native, so I stand to be corrected--usually classifiers in Vietnamese work the way you described for Japanese, although in Vietnamese it seems they can also sometime be used a bit like definite articles as well.
👀
@@天野やな丸 ちょっと待って、兎の助数詞は匹じゃない？？？羽がないんだけど！！紛らわしすぎ
what makes the Chinese measure words even worse is that there are often several different words used even when you're describing two things that are pretty similar
for instance, while cat, horse, and cow are all animals
the measure words used are counterintuitively different, 一隻貓(a cat), 一匹馬(a horse), 一頭牛(a cow)
and sometimes they just seem so random, take 一把椅子(a chair) for example, 把 has nothing to do with chair but its just there. 一條好漢(a good/bold man) is also super weird since 條 literally means "strip"
although English does have this kind of things such as a "piece" of cake
they're definitely way easier than those in chinese
I wanted to point out that männlich and weiblich actually do mean masculine and feminine, while they can also mean male and female in other instances. Personally, I prefer using those words in a linguistic setting instead of maskulin and feminin because their etymology is Germanic rather than Latinate. I also prefer using sächlich for neuter for the same reasons. In any case, I just wanted to point out that using weiblich and männlich is equivalent to saying masculine and feminine and does not have to mean male or female.
I've actually never heard someone say "neutral" only "sächlich" or "Neutrum" in more academic/formal speech or writing. And technically speaking those words just mean "manlike/manly", "womanlike/womanly" and "thinglike" not male, female and neuter
Same here in Croatian. We don't have distinct native words for "being biologically male", "having male qualities" and "being associated with men". After all, "masculinum" and "femininum" just mean male and female in Latin anyway.
@@2712animefreak To be fair, as a native English speaker I found his semantic argument about saying "masculine" and "feminine" rather than "male" and "female" to be fairly pointless. These terms are already so similar that I don't think trying to force a distinction here really does much to help with the issue.
If we really want to disassociate these different article and pronoun types from societal gender associations, then the better solution is to just call them "type 1, 2, 3, etc." or something else that has no connection to gender at all.
@@SchmulKrieger Care to explain why not?
@@mayiintervene2131 I have heard people call it "neutral" but it's sadly not correct. The correct term is either "sächlich", as you said, or "neutrisch". But "neutrisch" sounds quite odd so I get why people use "neutral" instead.
I think grammatical Gender is very good: you immediately spot the non-native even if their pronunciation is impeccable.
This is so mean. lol
@@kklein Vhy do you sink we here on ze continent did it? So ve could alvays spot ze Englishman trying to 'ide in ze shadows... Muahahahaha!
Yeah, grammatical gender really makes it more difficult to learn languages who have them, which means fewer people will learn those languages.
@@phosphoros60 Reminds me of that one joke.
"Mayday, Mayday, we are sinking!"
"Wot are you sinking about?"
reminds me of how one american teacher i had used to call the tv "el tele" which will never stop sounding funny to me
Italian speaker here. I understand how difficult it must be to even understand the concept of grammatical gender, let alone use it fluently. It's an innate thing we don't even think about. I really understood that when I was living in China and was struggling to remember the tones of words. One day I asked my Chinese friend: "is it easy for you to remember the tone of a word you hear for the first time? Do you ever get confused?" And she said "no". It was at that point that I truly understood that every language has features that native speakers don't even consider while people learning that language struggle with. One day a Chinese student asked me: "isn't it weird that Turkey is both a bird and a country?" And I replied: "isn't it weird that you call it literally fire chicken?" He was baffled by my answer cause he had never thought about it before. My advice for people who want to learn a gendered language is to not overthink it. I've recently realized that in Italian "il tavolo" and "la tavola" (masculine and feminine for "the table") have different meanings. The first il the object itself, the second refers to the table ready for a meal. I've always used them being subconsciously aware of the difference but consciously realized it in my late twenties. The problem with non native speakers is that they must make a conscious effort every time they use a word. I guess it's just like learning an instrument: give yourself time, with a lot of practice the gender of nouns will become automatic
If italians can distinguish words "venti" and "vénti", then it is not strange that chineese can distinguish tones.
@@ЮраН-ь2к "Venti" and "venti" sound exactly the same to me, but it may depend on region. Different Italian regions have slightly different pronunciations. I pronounce those two words identically. In fact, jokes exist relying on "venti" and "venti" being identical.
Daaaang you re right, i also thought about il tavolo/la tavola when he brought the example of il frutto, but i thought la tavola was just tuscan for il tavolo. Well, your explanation makes sense, we only use la tavola related to food
Coming from a Cantonese-speaking family, we were never taught tones. In Chinese school, they still did not teach us tones. We were just suppose to read aloud the written the text and if we pronounced it wrong, we were suppose to mimic the correct pronunciation spoken by the teacher. However when learning Mandarin in an English-speaking environment, we were taught the four tones in Mandarin.
imo that's because the ways tones are taught is just bad. Westerners learners think tones are categories sylables fall into rather than a "real" sounds like p, k, z.
It's as if an English learner had no concept of voiced consonants and saw /z/ and /s/ as two categories of the same sound.
Glad our favorite hyper-polyglot-giga-chad is getting the recognition he deserves
"average polyglot"
*shows a HYPER-polyglot alpha male gigachad*
this is an insult
Language Simp is a god among men.
@@justinc.5591 ... and women
@@mandelbrodt that is extremely atractive to all men............ and women on the planet
they*
I'm a closeted trans person speaking a language with grammatical genders my biggest struggle is talking about myself. I often have to choose between misgendering myself, making weird sentences to avoid gendered words or not saying what I wanna say at all.
you are not a closeted trans person you are a freak akin to Buffalo Bill from _The Silence of the Lambs_
Lol
I feel that as I’m taking a language class with a gendered language, and we often do first person sentences. So I have to decide if I want to use my birth gender, the other one that feels better than that, or the controversial gender neural one that fits the best but may not be accepted.
@@gender_demon gender human
@@uglyluffy7815 indeed
For the meaning part I would like to add that it's easier to understand what someone is talking about without them actually saying the exact word. For example my dad often forgets words and he'll just say "pass me him" (translating literally here) and knowing he means an item of the male gender I can immediately rule out a lot of items that are feminine gender. It can also speed up communication. My mom could say 'where is that..' (that here is in female gender form in my lang) and I could much easier and faster infer what she wants before she even says the word
I agree. Frases like "give me that" or "where is it" are very common in laguages with grammatical gender.
My mom has some brain problems and she very often can't come up with the exact word when talking but it still quite easy to understand what she's trying to say.
@@mariusdragoe2888 fellow Romanian?
@@porphyry17 Yes
A funky quirk of the language I grew up with is that it's not uncommon for feminine nouns to get referred to as 'he' when the noun itself isn't present
They do this in some dialects of English!
In South-West England/"the West Country", tools and other objects are masculine, so people will say "Pass he over here" if they want you to pass the salt.
I think it's because they used to speak Cornish in that region, which had masculine & feminine genders but no neuter.
1:54 (since we're already talking about fruit)
Little fun fact about Italian fruit names: many fruits are feminine and the respective trees from which they grow are basically the same word but in the masculine form. For example:
la mela (the apple) - il melo (the apple tree)
la pesca (the peach) - il pesco (the peach tree)
la pera (the pear) - il pero (the pear tree)
And the list goes on; arancia/arancio, mandorla/mandorlo, ciliegia/ciliegio, banana/banano, albicocca/albicocco, castagna/castagno...
Boia, non me ne ero mai accorto 😍😍😍😍😍😍
@@97Corvi what davvero??
@@boghund si dai non ci avevo mai fatto caso almeno XD
Anche se ci sono delle eccezioni, tipo fico/fico, melograno/melograno
The same in spanish, except in some cases and when the fruit is masculine
pera and pero
manzana and manzano
naranja and naranjo
olmo and sámara
viña and uva (although viña is thot to come from vino)
mora and mora (the tree and the fruit are the same word)
I’ve been learning for 3 years and never noticed wtf
Based flag choices
The hyperpolyglot gigachad is here
The Brandenburg flag got me laughing😂
@@proto566 They look similar but it's actually the flag of the Autonomous Province of South Tyrol, not Brandenburg :) (source: I'm a South Tyrolean)
@@marsl8603w southtyrol
Grammatical gender also has the added bonus that (at least for words that have roots long in the past) you can sort of extract some historical information about the people who spoke that language and the society they lived in. For example, the fact that "earth" or "land" in many Indo-European languages is feminine is very likely rooted in ancient beliefs around earth being a maternal deity kind of figure.
Another useful linguistic property is that sometimes grammatical gender indirectly informs about the existence of a certain (former) grammatical characteristic that might not survive in the form of the language as it is studied. For example, besides the number 1, the only other number with a grammatical gender distinction in Latin is 2. The latter is a residue of the dual grammatical number that existed in an ancestor of Latin, as it was passed down from PIE.
Alternatively, some words have a certain grammatical gender because they imply another word right beside them. When the Romans or the Greeks marked every region around them as feminine (Gallia, Germania, Hispania, Italia, Africa, Asia etc), the implication is that they are referring to "land" which is feminine. So even when individual words survive, grammatical gender allows someone to deduce a probable way of thinking those peoples had when naming things.
It is interesting how grammatical gender or lack of there of can affect translations.
As example, there is Japanese novel series called "Kara no kyoukai", which has been translated in Polish officially (don't ask why specifically to that langauge given it barely has been released outside of Japan, but that's my first langauge so I'm not complaining).
In those novels, the protagonist is a girl that after certain event stats to refer to herself in a way as a man would be. In Japanese it is done by using masculine "ore" as her "I" of choice. Japanese "I" pronouns have some gendered connotations, but are not strictly linked (you can have, especially in songs or ficiton, girls using more masculine "I" and it wouldn't mean they consider themselves to be men for example). In Polish there is just single "I" without gender connotations, so this aspect of her is done by speaking of her with masculine grammatical gender (conjugating verbs to be in masculine form). Difference between the two is that in Polish it sounds as if she considered herself to be a man. It is not out of place given her backstory, but it could cause more confusion about her gender identity. During the translation, this aspect of her wasn't lost, but instead became stronger (not perfect solution, but at least translating it was possible).
I didn't watch movies based of novels (novels themselves are not translated to Egnlish officially), so I cannot directly compare how it was done in English, but... I can image keeping this aspect of the protagonist would be basically impossible, since it is present only when she is speaking about herself.
It was certainly a problem in the English translation. The official adaptations went for SHIKI and Shiki denoting the male and female part respectively and it gets really weird if you consider Shiki's third personality, which is just void, written as " " (that's where the 空, kara in kara no kyoukai comes from). The characters name is then written normally, but set inside Japanese parenthesis, i.e. 「Shiki Ryougi」.
KnK is a pretty good example why grammatical gender can help massively with the understanding of the inner workings of a character in a concise manner. The current approach works, but can be missed if the subtitle timing is fast, or the reader spaces out for a few lines and then have to backtrack a few seconds in the video or pages in the novels.
oooh that's interesting
@@Ruhrpottpatriot
"The official adaptations went for SHIKI and Shiki denoting the male and female part"
In Polish version, name of Shiki's masculine personality is written in italics rather than ALL CAPS, which is looking way more natural in text written in latin alphabet.
Third personality is refered to as just two Japanese brackets with an empty space inside.
Also, I am not refering to this problem (as it stems from problem of converting ideogramic scripture to more phonetic one), I am refering to the fact that Shiki after losing masculine personality starts speaking in masculine way to compensate for the lack of it.
That hurt me deeply… Russian KnK translations are a big meme here, since the translators couldn’t choose the right words just for everything! It’s so hard to translate word plays and metaphors from one language to another, especially if one of the languages is Japanese…
even though Portuguese has genders I can't think of any way to transmit this same idea of changing the speech to a more masculine or feminine way only through words, sad
Dunno about other Slavic languages (it's probably the same), but in Polish not only nouns and adjectives change with gender, but so do verbs.
While you can say "he/she/it drank tea", you literally cannot say "I drank tea" in a gender neutral way - you have to specify your gender as masculine or feminine.
People have come up with some workarounds, but they all sound very artificial, especially when "x", a letter nonexistent in Polish, is used in a verb suffix.
I thought it's 'ja piję' in present tense, regardless of male/female.
But it's different in past tense.
@@BakerVS you are right. Only in past tense, because modern past tense in Slavic languages came from participles and participles are gendered.
Of course you're right, I've changed the example to past tense
Polish has neuter, that was used before non-binary people became the mainstream (you can find these forms in JPII speeches). My grandparents used local dialect which also often used neuter forms like 'przyszłoś, byłoś, czytałom'. From what I have seen most non-binary people also use these forms. I would say it is more artificial problem infected by newspapers than a real day to day issue.
@@adapienkowska2605 Every Slavic language has neuter.
But, for instance, Russian has a stigma about neuter gender. It's used for mocking transwomen and transmen and using it is considered rude. So, it's out of options for cultural reasons. The only way is using plural forms, because unlike some other Slavic languages, plural forms in Russian are not gendered. But it just feels awkward.
Some languages go far in the "no classes" thing. Finnish (my native lang.) didn't for long differ animate and inanimate things. We just used "it" for everyone, and it's still done in colocial speech
Hungarian i know is mostly similar, although the personal third-person pronoun (ő, he/she/sg. they) is only really used for people, and objects get referred to as the equivalent of this/that (ez/az)
Grammatical gender is just really well-known because it's an Indo-European feature. The absence of it is just as popular, if not more, outside IE languages.
I think you may have made a small grammatical mistake. "didn't for long" implies that what you are describing didn't go on for a long time. You might want to say "didn't for a long time" which means that the amount of time when you didn't differ between animate and inanimate things was a long time.
In Korean, it is generally rude to use 3rd or 2nd person pronouns, as you should call people by their occupation or position or by name (depending on your relative status).
the same thing goes for Turkic languages. we use “O” for everyone (he/she/it). and there's no gender identity in the grammar
I see what you did there with the flags! Especially that American flag for Spanish really threw me off for a second there, just to realize that I am myself a native Spanish speaker in Florida lol ...And, of course, the U.S. being one of the countries with the most Spanish speakers in the world.
That Ukraine flag for Russian, though... Daring.
While K-klein does use obscure flags to represent languages as a jab against the trend, using flags for countries associated with their majority language to represent a minority language does show the cognitive dissonance.
But I bet even with a trend like that, putting the israeli flag to represent the arabic language is too much out of their comfort zone...
I'm surprised more people didn't comment on this.
I had a good laugh.
wtf why
I assumed the flags indicated where those studies had been made. So the study of Spanish-speaking people was probably done in the US and the study of Russian-speaking people was probably done in Ukraine.
@@SmultronsyltNatha so ukrainians would be incredibly biased
05:48 - 05:55
Thanks!! This is something I keep telling people all the time whenever they want to change the language (Spanish speaker) to get rid of its "sexist nature". The problem is not the language, it's the people and just (horribly) changing words in a language won't magically make people less sexist.
Confirmo
I fully agree with you that changing the language will not directly make sexist people less sexist but importantly when people talk about the "sexist nature" of a language they typically mean the language was formed by sexist people thus reflecting their biases. I am going to invent an extreme example to try to show my point: if maley in the english language meant "dominant" and femaley meant "subservient", I believe this would quite clearly influence english speakers using these words, especially children learning the language, to more often associate women as subservient and men as dominant by the simple similarity of the words. And if the language doesn't change, these ideas will be transported onto anyone learning the language.
It's kinda like having the world explained to you by centuries of sexists.
So our understanding of social gender influencing our understanding of words only alters our understanding of the word, while the way our language functions influencing our understanding of gender is imo significantly more problematic. This influence of gender on our understanding of words could also alter our actions, i.e. germans investing more ressources into making sure bridges are stable then italians because of the gender of the word, but it is far less clear whether this alteration is negative compared to when we pidgeonhole roles onto social gender.
Definitely, to add on to that, languages are alive and bound to the people who speak it. If people in my country suddenly started speaking Turkish in an entirely different way, because they want to, who is anyone to silence them? I feel like people should be more patient with these topics, instead of going crazy like some comments i’ve seen here
Men and women are different, there's absolutely no problem with some properties being seen as male or female.
changing words and getting rid of grammatical gender won't make BOOBA less attractive
It also has different depths in different languages. I'm German and in a deep conversation with a French lady. We're writing in French. When saying eg "I'm happy" we write the happy part different according to our genders.
We wouldn't do this when writing in German, though both are gendered languages.
Same in Polish - the gender of the person/thing we're talking about impacts the verbs, the numerals and some other partd of the sentence. As I'm native, it's not difficult for me, but I appreciate the languages that don't do that as they're simpler. But then it allows me to write/say a sentence that in English would be 4 words (I will be cooking) in only 2 words (będę gotowała) and that's neat as well.
Da liest du echt ein bisschen zu viel in die Sache hinein...
I don't understand. What would you write in German? Wouldn't you write it in the masculine and her in the feminine?
Same with Arabic
Yeah, gender in German is easier than in many other languages when it comes to that. The gender of the speaker doesn´t affect the grammar.
In Czech, I spoke is "mluvil" if you´re a man and "mluvila"if you´re a woman.
In Japanese, "it can´t be hepled" is "shou ga nai ne" if you´re a man and "shou ga nai wa ne" if you´re a woman (at least according to my gf)
There´s tons of differences like that in many languages.
Being a native Portuguese speaker, it's hard for me NOT to have the concept of grammatical gender 😅
Well, English is a good example.
@@8is yes, but it's the same for me.
I occasionally, by mistake while trying to say something fast, will say he or she for inanimate objects or animals.
@@andrebrait Interesting. As a Swedish speaker, that doesn't happen to me. I guess that is because Swedish has two grammatical genders that aren't associated with the masculine or feminine gender. Swedish have "den" and "det", which are only understood as "it" and not "he/she".
@8is still, when speaking English, I will sometimes refer to a table as a "she" or a tree as a "he" without noticing. It's weird.
I called so many trees multiple times as "she", ahhhh portuguese.
I see what you mean when you talk about how gendered words don't necessarily exist for some sexist or patriarchic reason, but as a native french speaker, I was told that in a sentence where there is one adjective connected to multiple nouns (such as: trois gars et une fille sont beaux) the "masculine" wins. Later on, I learnt that this was not the case until the 17th century, and the invention of the Académie Française. Before this, adjectives would take their gender from the nearest noun. The change from "do whatever you want with it" to "masculine wins" was a conscious one, and a situation where rules should change.
I feel like applying strict guidelines to language often leads to many problems. Perhaps we should let them evolve a little more.
Now the system is the norm, so we shouldn't commit the same mistake and force new changes
I mean don't you give an argument for forcing some change in a positive direction? If that sexist reform in the past now has become uncontroversial I'd expect a reversal of the change (or some other measures aiming at more gender neutral rules) to be accepted within some decades. Which would leave future generations with a fairer language.
@@tuluppampam Hear hear! To me "inclusive language" is a false good idea of the kind of the Republican calendar or the 10 hours day...
@@tuluppampam Well I think if the norm is flawed and, as a french speaker, not very intuitive, I think it should change
@@tuluppampam It sounds like OP is suggesting that we shouldn't force anything at all, and let languages evolve on their own
As someone learning Latin, Italian and French...I have never had any strong negative feelings about grammatical gender. In fact I am quite fond of grammatical gender. Besides, how boring would language be if they all worked like English?
Yeah people think Latin is hard with all the cases and declensions, but if we didn't get the clues from relative pronouns introducing clauses ten lines into the giant run on sentence, we would be dead.
Yeah, I like it, especially Slavic grammatical gender-that’s my favorite kind!
wdym? There are few languages that do not have grammatical gender
yeah. tbh learning italian, latin and now starting french too...gender was pretty low on my list of grievances with a language. I mess it up from time to time, obv. But I would still happily take three more genders if I could get rid of the conjunctive instead.
Not having grammatical genders ≠ Working like English. Just ask most Asian languages.
Native Spanish speaker here. For all my life I thought of grammatical gender as a given, neither good or bad. After seeing your video I've learnt to genuinely like it and appreciate its intricacies.
Hello Klein. Nice video, but I'd like to contribute to the ending.
I suppose English is your native language; mine is Italian.
Italian has masculine and feminine, and there's an ongoing debate about inclusive language here in Italy.
Two main school of thought: those who claim masculine is the basic form for every noun (unmarked, technically speaking), and those who think that should change. The innovation proposed by these people is the implementation of the asterisk or the schwa as "neo-suffixes" (does this term even exist? dunno, it's cool, though...).
So for example the most widespread greeting in Italian "Ciao a tutti" (masculine, currently considered unmarked) should become "Ciao a tutt*" or "Ciao a tuttə".
Some years ago, people who were in favour of inclusive language greeted "Ciao a tutti e tutte", masculine + feminine, but that was leaving out non-binary people, so currently this form is no more considered "new", just a bit long, and it's used just at the beginning of a discourse. For exapmple, our president currently greets us "Cari concittadini, care concittadine" (dear citizens) masculine + feminine, then during the speech he uses the unmarked masculine "un saluto a tutti", (greetings to all of you).
Neo-suffixes in Italian are very controversial outside the web, especially the schwa. Linguists says they are being forced into the system, since first and foremost it would be invasive in the agreement chain ("lə miə amicə è molto simpaticə"). They signed also a petition against the schwa. They encourage people to continue using the unmarked masculine (since they say this form doesn't literally mean "masculine"), or just avoid it by using synonims or other solutions.
People in favour of inclusive language don't agree, and they are still using their own solutions, at least in the written texts, which are more controllable.
The debate remains open, imho.
What do you (and your followers) think? 🙂
i don’t know much italian, i stopped studying it a while back, but i find this super interesting. german is in a similar situation, where many people hate the fact that people have been trying to add and asterisk to “one who [verbs]” nouns. “maler” is masculine, “malerin” is feminine, and then “maler*innen” is gender neutral (these words all mean painter). for italian, it must be very difficult. with articles like la, il, lo, le, gli, i, what else is left to make gender neutral? just off the top of my head, what would you think about using “-u”? like lu for the, and adding -u as a gender neutral suffix?
edit: i accidentally used an umlaut in the word malerin!
As an other native speaker, the main issue with ə Is that is quite hard to use as a sound at the end of a world.
Reading It Is really Easy, but the compention part Is quite hard.
At the end the real solution in my opinion Is to separat the concept of grammatical gender with sexual gender.
Like instead of "femminile" and "maschile" we could call them "classe 1" e "classe 2"
At the end the link between the 2 is quite vage.
We have no reason to implay with "il gatto" that Cats have male attributes and viceversa 😅
Yeah, Spanish is in the exact same position, except that the suffix is "e" (for example the word for citizen would be ciudadano (masc) ciudadana (fem) ciudadane (neutral)) and a new gender neutral third pronoun "elle" (and "elles" for plural).
Personally, I'm in favor of it, I like the practicality and inclusivity this new feature adds and I don't think it would complicate grammar. We can debate as much as we want but, if it's to become "official," it'd had to be naturally, by having people actually using it. I recon its adoption would be slow, first on niche groups and then spreading across the youth first. I encourage this new form of inclusive language and I hope more and more people accept it specially as non-binary people gain more and more recognition and representation on media.
I disagree with snob academics that argue it's being forced. Nobody is forcing anybody to speak a certain way, it's just being argued that there's a legitimate necessity for this feature, if anything it's these academics the ones that try to prescribe from the get go that such a feature is not necessary.
coming from French, and having a similar situation, I’d have to side with the linguists. Everyone uses the masculine as an unmarked default, even those who would call that sexist or transphobic (at least in daily speech, when not actively trying to make a statement). Really, it makes more sense to just start calling the ‘masculine’ ‘neuter’ instead, since it marks anything that isn’t strictly feminine as opposed to marking the strictly masculine. Also, since the word ‘ièl’ is a failure that noone ever uses and most people don’t even know exists, this would allow for the pronoun ‘lui’ and it’s clitic counterpart ‘il(s)’ to become acceptable for everyone (and in practice it is, using the masculine for a woman is considered more of a stylistic choice than a mistake). I think viewing things this way could make everyone happy: the language isn’t forcibly changed And everyone can be referred to appropriately without conflict. But i’m not optimistic that those in favor of change would ever see it this way unfortunately
@@princessdiana1229 I'd say it is "Malerin", maybe a regional thing...
Then again, like the main comment mentions, there is the problem of including non-binary people. "Maler*innen" to me is just male and female. While "Maler" would be the generic masculine, wich would contain every person. So instead of using the historically correct, but male form, that contains every person, we now use a made up form wich - to me - feels even more excluding. But this is just my personal view...
Even the old English word for girl, mægden, is neuter, because it consists of mægþ meaning girl (which is feminine) and the diminutive suffix -en, which makes it neuter.
To add to the confusion, the old english word for woman (wifmann) was masculine.
Engl. maiden ~ Ger. Maid (not used any more today, just as lexicalised Mädchen)
If English still had gender, I bet you "Maiden" would be a neuter noun.
this is very interesting because the old german (not literally “Old German” but an older form of the language, the name of which is escaping me right now) word for woman is “Magd” and then they added the diminutive suffix “-chen” and the word became “Mädchen” to mean girl! Magd was feminine (the word still technically exists it’s just rarely used) but Mädchen is neuter
@@SchmulKrieger yes i know about that
The arguement against grammatical gender usually boils down to "it's arbitrary and brings unnecessary complication", but that's like 90% of language features! Declensions and conjugations, irregular formes, formalities and phatic phrases, heaps of synonims, weird spelling, most colloquialisms, exclusions from rules - so much is unnecessarily complicated and could be replaced by something more efficient, but isn't that what makes languages interesting? Isn't that the beauty of language?
Without such arbitrary, nonsensical complications human speech would be like sets of commands or lists of product requirements. Sure, it would be more efficient, but that's just not what language is about.
I mean, all those examples, besides like phrases and stuffs(which could carry meaning), are a deadweight on mental resources while speaking/writing a language. I'm not saying we should enforce a "correct" was to do these things but, recognizing that they aren't useful can be done separately.
There's also the question of usefulness, difficulty and time investment.
I really don't care if it took me 10% longer as an infant to learn a language because of the feature N, if a few decades later I'm using that feature just fine.
Tough luck to the new learners.
The biggest downside of gramatical genders is that you need to edit/retype more of the declinations, if you changed a word and the form no longer matches.
Just as a person who dosen't have gramatical pronouns in their first language find them hard to learn. As a non native English speaker I can tell you than English as it's fair share of oddities. First of all the spelling, I've been learing English for over 6 years now and I still get it wrong, coming from Italian where evry letter has a single universal sound (with the exeption of a few very well makred cases, like "C" becoming "K" when you find "CH" ) It's truly a nightmare. Add to that the fact than we never use the letters "J K W X Y" and "H" without "C or G" unless they come from an imported word. In elementary school we are forced to learn pages upon pages of verbal declinations than varies based on the pronouns used, the time of possibility "Congiuntivo" it's so hard than many peopole never master it (the funny thing is than it's actualy easyer to catch someone else makeing that misktake, than corecting yourself). So the way English replaces all of those with the super simple frasal verbs, it actualy makes it harder for us.
language would be so much better without the " arbitrary, nonsensical complications" and other such bullshit
YES ABSOLUTELY
Yes, the gender thing does make learning other languages difficult. In English you see or hear a word and that's it.
OK, you will need to know which random way it's spelt, or pronounced, or where the stress is, or if it's countable or non-countable, how the plural works, if it's two words, one word or hyphenated, ... But other than that it's simple.
The thing with gender only being grammatical and not semantic really got me. In Sanskrit, one way to say friend is मित्रम् (mitram) which is neuter gendered regardless of what gender the friend is. Also, one way to say wife is दाराः (dārāh) which is always plural regardless of how many wives you've got☠️ (Sanskrit has 3 categories of grammatical numbers: singular, dual, and plural). The list goes on.
As much as I should have thought this out earlier, divorcing the term "gender" from biology allows you to see some languages as having "grammatical gender". The best examples are Polynesian (Austronesian) languages such as Hawaiian and Maori, where gender only appears when talking about "alienable" (a) vs. "inalienable" (o). (Note that this can overlap with languages that have "traditional" categories of grammatical gender, but it's common enough to be of highlight.)
But why not just call these classes something else?
@@algotkristoffersson15 Grammatical Gender literally comes first than, for a want of a better word, "Sex" Gender. The former came from Roman times and the latter meaning only on the last few centuries. It'll be hard to change it with that much corpus, when we can't even change horrible false friends like "Perfect" and "Perfectives"
That said, some people *do* use different term for non-"traditional" gender groupings, "Noun classes". It's rather controversial though, as it implies "Noun classes" and "(Grammatical) Gender" are different systems, when they're just a different grouping of the same system.
I love it when the thesis contained in the title of a video makes me recoil, but then when I click on it anyway and watch the video, the analysis/argument is actually really good. Great video!
thank you so much!!
4:20 I sure hope bridges aren't fragile
Your channel is the best. I really don't have anything else to say. You're one of the few channels I feel my heart skip for a second when I see they uploaded.
In galician (a language of a region in Spain) gender is often used to signify size or shape, for example, "un bolso/unha bolsa" or "un porto/unha porta"
Is porto a big door in galician? Is it not also a harbour like in portuguese?
In Venetian we have quite a few couples where the feminine is a larger version of the noun: muro/mura = wall(of a house)/wall(around a property), baile/baila = spade/shovel, fior/fiora = flower/squash flower(as a food), and others. Also albero/albera = tree/poplar.
un cesto/unha cesta
@@libertariantiger No, it is a port. Also, in German, we can see that ports, gates, and doors are all related, and they are just the same thing, but with different genders, as all 3 refer to "openings that allow you to cross areas that can be closed", as ports can make you cross different countries overseas, gates can make you walk back on your yard, and doors can be used to walk into a different room. Ports, gates, and doors can be closed. Here's a way for you to recognize the genders of ports, gates, and doors in German by using the "transgender MtF trick".
der Port: cisgender male ♂🌊🪵
der/das Ort
das Tor: non-binary ⚧🏡⬅
das/die Toor
die/das Tör
die Tür: transgender female ♀🚪
4:40 i see you hate flags being used to represent languages
Second-language German speaker here. Grammatical gender took a bit of getting used to, and even native speakers sometimes make mistakes with it. I was amused when my German boss once accidentally referred to a library as “das Bibliothek”
This sounds completely apochryphal. For words that are completely unfamiliar or rare that MAY happen but no adult native would ever say "das Bibliothek".
@@spellandshield People say things wrongly, it happens.
Yeah, words in germanic languages don't really have a sound associated with gender, making them a guessing game for non-natives.
@@spellandshield is possible, invspanish you hear people say "la agua" all the time. Though it should be "el agua"
@@spellandshield Not a native German speaker here (native Spanish speaker tho) it does happen sometimes but it's really really rare. The kind of thing you say and you get made fun of in the group chat for the ages.
That's definitely the case in Bulgarian. Nouns aren't a certain gender, because we see them as being male or female. It all depends on what syllable a word ends with. A good example would be "Момиче", which means girl, but is in fact in neuter. Another example could be "Армия", since the army has been historically been linked to masculinity. The word itself is in femine, because it ends in an "ия" syllable.
Wonderful video-I really enjoy the editing style and the way you conveyed information! And the points you made all have my full approval as a nonbinary speaker of a ridiculously gendered language, lol
Excellent video :)
I´m a German teacher and learner/speaker of French, Czech and Russian (both have 3 genders, 4 if you count the two types of masculine) but not a linguist, so here are my thoughts when it comes to learning languages with grammatical gender:
It might sound weird but I recommend not focusing on gender too much. Listening and vocabulary are a much bigger issue. Like, waaaay bigger (gender is not that relevant for communication) and the thing is, that a learner´s accuracy with gender (and grammar in general) very strongly correlates with their listening skills and vocabulary size.
I have talked to 1,000 German learners and everyone is bad at genders in the beginning, no matter how much they try to memorize articles. People with (overall) fluent German are somewhere between good and (almost) perfect, no matter how they got there (even those who never bothered memorizing articles!!!)
It makes sense though. At some point, you´ve heard "der Tisch" so many times, that "das Tisch" simply "feels wrong". At some point, you´ll have heard so many words ending in "-tion" that are feminine, that "das Inspiration" feels wrong as well. The exceptions are usually common words, which means you hear them a lot, which makes it easier to learn what sounds right.
Just like native speakers! I mean toddlers don't get thaught all the genders of German words, they just listen and repeat until they get a feel for it
@@ichliebebaeumeweilbaum Yeah, I agree, adults can learn like children.
The tricky question is to what extent conscious learning can help.
this was really informative and i genuinely love what you’ve created here. ngl i was doubtful going into the video, but your explanation of the misconception between grammatical and real life-applicable gender completely cleared up all my questions! im very excited for the next part!
In norwegian, the word "ball" means different things based on the gender
"en ball"/"ballen" - Masculine is the usual round object
"ei balle"/"balla" - Feminine is slang for a testicle
"et ball"/"ballet" - Neuter is the one with dancing
In German "der Ball" refers to both the round object and the dancing party. In this case, context is vital in order to understand which one is being talked about.
Yeah, German does this a bunch too, though not with the word for "ball" (that one's always masculine) :)
der Schild, pl. die Schilde = shield
das Schild, pl. die Schilder = sign
der Kiefer, pl. die Kiefer = jaw
die Kiefer, pl. die Kiefern = pine
das Steuer, pl. die Steuer = rudder, helm
die Steuer, pl. die Steuern = tax
I don't think German has a word that comes in all three genders though, that's pretty neat!
That "feminine ball [sic]" is actually testicular _really_ drives home the point of gender classes not being semantic 0.0
@@HeadsFullOfEyeballs the best one I can think of is "der Band" - volume, "das Band" - ribbon, "die Band" - band (just homograph, pronounced like in English but with final devoicing).
Ironic that testicles are feminine
About non-binary people and grammatical gender: it does make it harder. I have a cousin who recently came out as non-binary. Where in English I can say "my cousin [insert name] is non-binary", in French (my native language) I have to do the awkward "mon-ma cousin-ine". It's not impossible, but I can see how it creates even more friction with people who don't really understand the concept of being non-binary, like older generations. Where English speakers would juste need to adapt to the "they" pronoun and possibly a new name for the person, in gendered languages it's a whole new way of talking that you have to adopt. Even for my cousin themselves it gets tricky, because instead of saying for example "when I was little" they have to go "quand j'étais petit/petite" or "petit...e", which makes speech awkward and cluttered, and attracts attention to their gender identity pretty much anytime they speak about themselves. In writing it's somewhat easier, but in oral speech it's a pain in the ass.
Lmfao, mentally-ill individual identify as a fictional gender cause they are not comfortable with their assigned gender, so they decided to whine about grammatical gender. Anyway, when was the last time you groomed children?
To people who are mad about the word “they” being grammatically plural, think about the word “you”.
I like grammatical gender. It makes writing and speaking in German really precise and helps pack alot of meaning in single sentences. I often struggle with doing the same in other languages (mostly English, but also Dutch and Japanese) and obviously this has not only to do with grammatical gender and my proficiency in my mother tongue is definitely higher than other languages.
4:35 I love this flag selection
When I first clicked on this video, I thought it would be some monolingual American talking about how gender is confusing, and got a video that actually was ok. My native language is Hebrew which has a gender system very similar to Spanish or French with the added bonus that verbs get conjugated by gender also. The parts you said about it being easier to tell who is doing something in a sentence is definitely true. Also to touch on the part at the end, gender neutral pronouns are definitely a challenge when every pronoun except for “I” and “we” gets conjugated by gender including “you”, so most people just say “I identify as non binary but you can use male or female pronouns on me” or “I identify as non binary but use male/female pronouns on me”, which is a the simplest solution in my opinion.
I find it funny how the only people I ever hear complain about grammatical gender are Anglophones. Often times they read way too deeply into it and therefore have a skewed idea of how little it actually means.
I have noticed this too. Although my language (Urdu/Hindi) has grammatical gender, our pronouns are neuter.
We have one word which means he, she, it and they (Vo). Crazy right?
And yes, some people think way too much about grammatical gender to the point of forcing change in a language through artificial means just so that it can be “inclusive”
@@lightscameras4166 this exactly! ive started to feel ashamed when using grammatical gender even though its literally just speaking properly & communicating best what i mean. it doesnt need to mean more than that
Literally means that most words start with one of 3 syllables, instead of randomly with combinations of 26, you just DROP the gender part in some use cases.
Americans could use the simplicity, instead of having the vocabulary of 1% of the words in English language and struggle to pass higher education because they couldn't remember how to speak English. Do you know why spelling bees let you ask for language of origin? Because EVERY language of origin is its own grammatical gender.
I'd say less Anglophones, and more people whose native language lacks it. Which in Europe, is basically just English.
And that last sentence is probably the main reason people find it frustrating. It makes a lot of languages disproportionately more difficult to learn compared to how little it seemingly does.
Estonians also struggle with gender when learning Russian. Estonian and Finnish languages, like rest of the Uralic languages, do not have gender
Ahhh just discovered this channel yesterday and have been binge watching, I wish there were more videos! Been searching for a good linguistics UA-cam channel ever since I saw Tom Scott’s little series - this is perfect!
thank you so much :)
any discussion about grammatical gender always reminds me of a conversation i had about a breakup between two non-binary people, wherein it became very difficult to keep track of whether “they” referred to one of them in particular or the both of them.
This happens with we (me and you) and we (me and someone else) all the time too.
Besides, the best way to not confuse who you're talking about would neoprounouns for everyone. Shortened names let's say for convenience. /jk it would solve the problem though technically.
I'm French, and it's just natural for us to have grammatical genders for words, it's only since I started surfing the English side of the internet that I've noticed a bunch of Americans complaining how it doesn't make sense and we shouldn't be using them. Who the hell do you think you are telling us how we should speak.
And like you said, I've never in my life heard a French person describe a word as male/female or a boy/girl, we say masculine and feminine, this is a misconception from the Americans.
Same in Arabic! It’s مذكر/مؤنث
And not رجل/امرأة
@@wolferup it not the same if you say tense wrong ok and? what bad could happen? but when you say tone wrong you gonna mess up the meaning
Americans that also probably don't even know the language (on average they know 0.8 languages, not even 1)
"Who the hell do you think you are telling us how we should speak" what's a bitch gotta do to be allowed to have an opinion? 😭
But for real though, you do realise that misconception comes from the fact that the words masculine and feminine are inherently linked to the concepts of masculinity and femininity, right? The fault of this in the first place lies with the association of word genders with social gender. Not to mention that a word's grammatical gender does have a demonstrable link to the cultural associations with the real-world-people gender as pointed out in the video. A system of (semi)rigorous noun classification is perfectly fine, not something I have a problem with at all. But we can and I believe should remove the association between grammatical and social gender
I'm someone who doesn't fit neatly into one of two boxes. I don't give a fuck if your language uses noun classes, but *tying them to human gender* is definitely a huge mistake.
My native language has genders, and I like it. It's like the words have their own little personalities. Though I'd be hard pressed to come up with a practical/useful reason for having them.
Just a correction, at 7:39 the article for uomo it's not "il" but "lo" which becomes in the contracted form "l'uomo"
When I was studying Spanish, the gramatical gender cause some disconnect in me, like the word persona is feminine, so we can a phrase like "persona masculina". Eventually, I just thought of gramatical gender as a language mechanics that happens to overlap with real world gender most of the time.
Well said!
In Polish the grammatical genders are, *męskosobowy, niemęskosobwy i nijaki* (osobowy is an adjective meaning relating to a person, so: *man-person-ly, non-man-person-ly, and neuter* )
However, according to Wikipedia, the non-man-person-ly gender is simply called _żeński_ , ( I was taught the person-ly thingy) meaning feminine. This makes kind of sense since it's used to talk about women. There are also technically 2 more genders (masculine vital non-person-ly (e.g. animals) and masucline non-vital (e.g. Objects), they exist because articles and some words can fluctuate whether you are talking about an object or animal, but only if it is masculine
What's also interesting, in Polish any word ending in "a" is feminine/non-man-person-ly (there are probably some exceptions with words from a long time ago but I haven't seen any)
any word ending in "o" is neuter (for example, _Dziecko_ meaning child)
any word ending in anything else is masculine.
In my opinion grammatical gender in Polish makes a lot more sense, than say French or Spanish (thankfully as a native French speaker I never had that issue).
Animals are masculine, except if you their feminine sex counterpart (ten Lew, ta Lwica -- that Lion, that lioness ).
It's _consistent_ a -- feminine, o -- neuter, anything else -- masculine
*I used the translation: man-person-ly, actually_męski_ reffers to manly traits, not man as a sex
thank you for sharing kind sir
Well, if you're looking for exceptions in Polish, then don't worry, we have you covered.
Marek to mój (m) kolega (m).
Mark is my (m) colleague/friend (m).
„Prawdziwy (m) mężczyzna (m)” to głupie (n) pojęcie (n).
“The real (m) man (m)” is a stupid (n) concept (n).
We also have some imported ones as in “poeta” (m)/ poet, but the same thing happens in Italian (il poeta), so I blame Greek xd
That's not what they are - it's way more complicated in Polish. In singular we have 3 genders: nijaki (neuter), żeński (feminine) and męski (masculine) with masculine having a different main declinations depending on being animate (humans, animals) or inanimate (objects) so you can argue it's really up to 4 genders. We also have 2 genders in plural and those are męskoosobowy (masculine personal - just for male humans) and niemęskoosobowy (non-masculine personal - everyone and everything else). Note that męskoosobowy doesn't equal masculine or even masculine animate as animals land in non-masculine personal in plural. And non-masculine personal in plural includes all that was feminine, neuter and masculine except for that referring to male people (or groups including male people).
Also the endings are a big simplification. Yes, 'a' is generally feminine (big exception is the word for man - mężczyzna that is male despite ending with 'a') and 'o' (and 'e' and 'ę' and 'um') is a neuter ending but not everything else is masculine. There are a whole classes of nouns ending with a soft consonants - 'ś', 'ć', 'dź, 'ń' - that can be either masculine or feminine and you just have to memorise them - eg f-m pairs - gęś - łoś, kość - gość, gołoledź-niedźwiedź, dłoń - koń. Nothing is simple in Polish grammar.
@@Ellestra Okay thank you for correcting me hah, I was just sharing knowledge I learned a while ago. I still stand by what I said that grammatical genders in polish are more logical than in other languages. I admit I made a mistake with the word endings, but im sure there is some explanation to all of them (like mężczyzna being masculine since it means "man"). Solely the fact that there are some rules with exceptions already makes it easier than say french.
What I have heard is the hardest in polish for non-natives, is the grammatical cases: when does the word end in -ów and when do we remove a letter and when....
anyways thank you again for correcting me
There are five grammatical genders in Polish: masculine personal, masculine animate, masculine inanimate, feminine and neuter (in plural it collapses into masculine personal and everything else). And it is this way, because personal/animate/inanimate differences collapsed in feminine and neuter (I think that proto-Slavic had all 9 grammatical genders). World "niemęskoosobowy" is used to described all the collapsed genders in plural (so it is sometimes said that in plural you have two genders: męskoosobowy i niemęskoosobowy), but I never heard of using this term in singular.
In italian la frutta and il frutto also border on that latin-neuter-changing-gender-when-plural thing you went over in another video. Semantically, "la frutta" is a collective noun, like flock, while "frutto" is a regular singular.
Again in italian, coming directly from latin, and other romance languages too, the name of a fruit is usually female, while its parent tree is the same word but male. There are a few exceptions, including of course most fruits the romans didn't know of, and figs for just the most hilarious reason (involving them looking a bit like vulvas)
More on figs:
In latin, ficus (m) is the tree and fica (f) is the fruit, as per pattern. Fica though ended up becoming a euphemism for the vulva, thus becoming itself a somewhat bad word. Some romance languages just went on with it as it was in latin but some changed it up a bit as a way of censorship: italian started using fico (m) for both the tree and fruit, sardinian uses figu (m) for the tree and figu (f) for the fruit, creating an unusual -u ending for a female, calabrian does the opposite with ficu (m) for the tree and fica (m) for the fruit.
If you all have other examples I'd love to hear them tbh
@@scaevolaludens679
You're wrong on the gender of Latin trees (or rather trees in Latin).
Trees are *always* female in Latin even if the word endings 'suggest' otherwise, such as "quercus" (oak) or "ficus" (fig tree), where you see the gender when adding an adjective that has to be changed accordibg to the noun's gender: quercus rubra or ficus carica.
I'm currently learning Danish, and it's so wild to me that while Danish has a common gender/neuter gender setup, Norwegian (in most dialects) still has three. This baffles me, because it makes it seem like Norwegian would actually provide me with less immediately useful information about a word than Danish. What I mean by this is that common and neuter gender are (usually) correspondent to animate and inanimate. So, if I see an unfamiliar word with -et, I can (typically) assume that it describes an inanimate object, which can give me a lot of context clues as to what the word means. But, since Norwegian has a masculine/feminine/neuter setup, I don't think I'd get the same sort of information. (This isn't a value judgement on either language; I'm just pointing out this difference.)
Danish speaker here. Your analysis would be true if it wasn't for the fact the common gender is a collapse of the previous feminine and masculine genders. If you hear a Norwegian word which is either masculine or feminine it has about* the same probability of accurately describing an animate property that a Danish word in the common/utrum. The reason I say *about is that there are a few gender disparities between the two, but we agree on the gender of most nouns.
I should also mention that, in mainstream Danish, there is a trend originating from Southwestern Jutland, (where this is the traditional gender system), where we use the neuter gender for mass nouns and the common gender for count nouns. This might cause confusion sometimes because a lot of mass nouns are utrum, but I would almost always use the neuter gender about them in casual conversation.
@@rasmusn.e.m1064 Thanks for your input. That's genuinely informative.
@@SpaceMonkey15 I don't really speak Norwegian, but I did learn a bit of the bokmål standard. During that time I was taught that with words like 'kvinne' I could really choose whether I want to say 'en kvinne' or 'ei kvinne'. So if that's correct then you can still do the same in Norwegian - 'et' for inanimate, 'ei', 'en' for animate. You actually would get more information since you'd also know if the word is feminine
Also, if you come to vestlandet and cant even bother to learn to speak like us you can fuck off back where you came from or to the eastern wankers who have presided to speak danish except gayly
Since spanish mainly differences gender with the "a"/"o" endings, there were many people years ago that wanted to include a new ending, "e", as a neutral gender.
Of course, people got angry, and even the authority of spanish, La Real Academia de la Lengua Española, said that such changes were innecessary.
For words that change if the receiver is masculine/feminine (abogado/abogada) the masculine plural is neutral. So if I say "abogados" Im referring to:
- A group of male lawyers
- A group of lawyers
Whereas if I say "abogadas" I can only refer to:
- A group of female lawyers
This made it seem like including a new case would be innecessary, since there's already male plural. However, there is no neuter case for singular words. "Abogado" always means male lawyer, "Abogada" always means female lawyer. So there is a place where a new neuter case would be useful: "Abogade".
Other than that, I don't think that adding a new case (or allowing it in other places of the language) would be necessary. As you said in the video, "Persona" doesn't really have a gender, so "Persone/Persones" makes no sense, and we already have other ways to refer to someone in a neutral way.
But then of course came the USA and decided that we should use the X as in latinX as a neuter case even though I can only thing of a word that uses "x" and it's difficult to pronounce and it undermines the case proposed by actual latinos and ahhhhh 😡😡😡🤬🤬🤬 (general sentiment towards "latinx")
i second the general sentiment towards latinx
Oh don't worry, the X thing is just as foolish in English. Check this out: the already gender-neutral word "folks" is regularly re-spelled as "folx" to make it gender-neutral... again? doubly neutral? Sigh... once again my country doesn't stop to think for as many as four seconds
At least in Spanish you can have an elegant way to create gender neutral terms with the -e ending. In French, "inclusive writing" is a complete mess that can't even be pronounced orally and which gives huge clusters written down.
Yes english native speakers have no respect towards hispanics. I feel like they have made a cult out of the “latino” identity and heritage. It is so weird.
the usage of -x in Spanish originated in Latin America, not the USA. I like -e, but let's deal with the facts here!!
In Polish masculine gender can be divided into 3 groups: personal, animate and inanimate; inanimate masculine words decline differently. In the plural, there are 2 genders: virile (masculine-personal) and nonvirile, all words that aren't masculine-personal fall into the latter.
from an aesthetic perspective, i love grammatical gender. it’s very interesting to me! but if there was a language that i had to learn, i’d prefer no grammatical gender
Indeed!
Turkish is the language for you! No gender whatsoever 😊
@@shelookstome8727 I'm pretty good at learning the pronunciation/fonology of a language, being able to pronounce words accurately enough in around 8 languages while knowing only 2½. But when I tried learning turkish fonology out of curiosity I noped out of it almost instantly out of pure dread. This is a trap, Mike, be careful.
The problem trying to artificially "fix" grammatical gender in languages that have it, is that it usually hinders comprehension and creates bizzare structures to the native speaker. Take for example Spanish, where the method of getting rid of gender is by substituting -o/-a suffixes by -e. The odd thing is that the suffix -e is feminine in catalan/valencian, so it can lead to confusion for speakers of both languages.
I think the only this can work is if the language naturally evolves into a language with no grammatical gender, as it has happened many times before.
Absolutely. In English ‘they’ works because people already used it when they didn’t know someone’s gender, so applying it to certain people who don’t want to be categorized by gender wasn’t much of a change. But in romance languages our grammars often demand strictly one gender or the other, and trying to force another gender in would simply break the rules that people know and use. Language evolution has to be natural to its speakers, it can’t be forced no matter how much we want it to.
That isn’t true for French. Many more people are using the gender neutral pronoun “iel” to refer to others or themselves. Even the young people are doing it, and my two cousins who happen to teach French are also teaching more inclusive ways of writing and speaking French after their students asked for it.
You say we shouldn’t impose such ways of speaking to these “naturally gendered languages”. Yet the argument falls flat when you take a look at how modern French has been shaped by sexist grammarians who erased feminine forms of professions and titles, and even erased the proximity agreement rules (the last noun of a noun group should give the agreement) and imposed the “masculine form over the feminine form” rule, where if one masculine and one feminine forms are together, no matter where in a sentence, the masculine form takes over the agreement. Their reasoning was essentially “boys rule, girls suck”.
All in all, I think it’s neat marginalizes groups are reappropriating their language and finding creative ways around the arbitrarily named masculine and feminine grammatical genders. It can’t work if you impose it though, only if other people get exposed and curious about it. And so far it’s working
@@mf5779 Not saying we shouldn't impose, but that languages will naturally adopt these changes if they allow for unambiguous communication and there is a critical mass of speakers willing to include them. For what you are saying it seems this is the case for French.
@@mf5779 Are you French? If so, maybe we have simply different experiences but if not then i suggest you go to the country and talk to people, rather than just seeing what a few people do online. As for your point on the grammarians, that’s true about the standard language but people don’t really pay attention to it in speech (only ever in writing does it impose itself). Sure, some people will be assholes and always try to correct your speech but most will understand and use words as they please and true changes only happen gradually over the course of decades. Maybe one day the grammar will adapt itself to a new gender class, although truth be told it’s more likely in the case of french that the feminine simply falls out of use and we are left without gender entirely. The point is we can’t force that to happen, we can prescribe all we want but at the end of the day the language will evolve by itself slowly over time. French is in fact perfect evidence of that, given how different the standard language and spoken language are (in grammar as much as in pronunciation, that is).
The -e Spanish/Catalan misunderstanding reminds me the case of the use of schwa in Italian for create gender neutral words, that lead to the problem that the words started to sound like the broken version of Neapolitan, that makes large use of that vowel by default. (Other than the fact that most Italian are not used to that vowel)
Are "male," "female," and "neutral" terms that one hears in foreign language classes in the UK? Because I've never heard that in the USA--it's always "masculine," "feminine," and "neuter."
YES. ALL THE TIME. Maybe this is something the Americans have got up on us 😩. That bit was also aimed at Germans.
As a counterpoint, I (also UK) have only ever heard talk of masculine, feminine or neuter from language teachers (French, German at comprehensive school in the 90s, Spanish evening classes in the 2000s), to the extent that hearing "male" and "female" in the video sounded a bit weird to me. I guess (as with a lot of things) the answer must be "It depends"!
@@kklein Well...
Männlich (er/sie/es ist männlich) = the characteristics of a male =
masculine (he/she/it is masculine
=/=
Mann = man
Weiblich (er/sie/es ist weiblich) = the characteristics of a female =
feminine (he/she/it is feminine)
=/=
Frau = female
neutral is neutral
It´s really meaningless to use "Maskulin" oder "Feminin" instead of "Männlich" or "Weiblich" if we still know that they are really the same. In class the terms männlich/weiblich and maskulin/feminin can and are changed interchangeable.
No matter what you call it:
Male/masculine: He/Him ♂
Female/feminine: She/Her ♀
Neutral/Neuter: They/Them ⚧
@@AlbertTheGamer-gk7sn Sorry, but neuter is "it," not they/them. They/them is plural, and in the plural, all English nouns fall into a single class called the "common" gender because it's common to all nouns.
I'm a native speaker of two gendered languages (Catalan and Spanish), and while I agree that gramatical gender in other languages may be confusing for me, since they are different, I have to ask "So what?". Languages exist for native speakers of those languages and no one else. Wanting to learn a foreign language is a decision you actively take, and you agree to participate to some extent in that culture. Spanish doesn't owe you being easy. Native Spanish speakers are comfortable with a set of patterns (I prefer this word over rules), and you don't have a say in them. You may have an opinion on those patterns, and that's OK. But languages shouldn't change because they're confusing to you. That's such a narcissistic mindset, IMO.
PD: Yes, I understand that people are and have been sometimes forced to learn a language. But the problem here isn't language itself, it's cultural imposition.
You convinced me. Noun classes can be like Hamming codes for spoken language.
Thank you so much for acknowledging gender language issues trans & non-binary folks face! I was so happy when I heard you talking about this topic!
I'm enjoying your videos!
I'm very happy with the end of the video. As a non-binary person who lives in a country where all day-to-day communication is done in two very gendered languages in which I have no comfortable way of describing myself or talking about myself, during the entirety of the video the one thought that was sitting on my head was "what about non-binary people?"
So it was really nice to see you acknowledge that at the end of the video
What relevance does that have? You’re still male or female at the end of the day, regardless of what you want to call yourself.
I appreciate the bit in the end, because it reminded me of a youtuber I follow who once complained that English is "the most gendered language ever", and as a speaker of Hebrew, that sounded hilarious.
Couldn't the difference in how German and Spanish speakers see bridges be (at least partly) explained by the different geography, climate, materials and architectural styles found in Germany and Spain?
Another often-cited example from this study and similar is 'key', which is masculine in German and feminine in Spanish, and was described in matching gendered terms as with the bridge example. However, I would find it interesting to ask native speakers of languages without grammatical gender the same questions - then any bias would surely have to be cultural.
Perhaps one should have asked them to describe the same boring non-descriptive bridge
Native German speaker here. I suspect one aspect that contributes how much the gender can color a word is how much of a blank slate that word is.
To take examples from the video, with human (der Mensch, m) and person (die Person, f) I feel no effect of the grammar articles at all, probably cause humans in my mind already have clearly defined gender properties.
Compare this to knife/fork/spoon (das Messer, n/die Gabel, f/der Löffel, m). Now, this is totally my subjective impression, but with 'fork' I totally feel the influence, this is a female object thru and thru. But for some reason, I feel a knife is male and a spoon is neutral, even though their grammatical genders are the other way around. I would never use the wrong articles for those, but somehow a knife has such a strong male (phallic? violent?) aura that the grammar takes no effect.
Another interesting aspect that can contribute is that, when adding personalities to inanimate objects they tend to follow their grammatical gender. In most German children's books the sun is a woman and the moon a man, while in French it's the other way around. The lamp in The Brave Little Toaster is a woman in German and I was surprised to learn it isn't in the original, of course a lamp would be a woman.
Maybe some of the study participants read books about talking bridges as kids and were thinking of those characters, rather than a specific bridge they knew.
I am German and nonbinary, and I have no idea how to refer to myself in German, haha. The environment I'd been in hasn't exactly been conducive to gender exploration, so I've never heard of those pronoun options. I don't think I like any of them, though. Formal addressing in German is very difficult as well since you don't have an obvious symmetrical option as in "Mx" instead of "Mr" or "Mrs" in English, or "señore" instead of "señor" or "señora" in Spanish. I really like the Spanish '-e' affix in general and use it whenever I talk about myself.
Since then luckily I've moved to the UK, the most trans-friendly country in the solar system, and I can refer to myself as they/them unhinderedly.
Thank you for making this video! It's lovely to have someone look at the trans people aspect of grammatical gender.
The Serbian "pain" is cap,I have never heard someone say "ta bol"
I didn't click on this video expecting trans ppl being discussed and how gendered grammar affects them, but it's lovely to see it acknowledged because of how much a system like this impacts a lot of people in day to day life
k klein is nonbinary
Let's all just agree that 99% of the griping and confusion about gramatical gender comes from the decision to refer to it as gramatical gender.
Gender as a concept has meaning that is in no way reflected in how grammatical gender works, it was just a lazy title because people noticed the classifications happened to also contain nouns for men or nouns for women.
What confused me for a long while in French was when in a story about animals, when we refer to them as the animal species, they have fixed gender, like "le chat est arrivé" (the cat has arrived), no matter if it's a male or female cat. But when we refer to this cat character by their name, or simply as a person (il / elle), now we use their actual gender.
that array of flags at 4:36 physically hurt me
Also an article (determiner) can turn to a pronoun to just refer to something directly and the other person will understand to what you are refering to by the gender ( in a conversation in which you have mention masculine and feminine concepts in one sentence). As you explain in 9:11
I didn’t think you’d bring up nonbinary people! We’re often not mentioned in these discussions. Being enby in Russia is hard enough with the Very Not Good politics + bigotry, but the language makes it almost completely impossible lol
I'd say, not 'impossible', but 'unusual' for the most of Russian speakers
personally, I don't think using 'they' when talking about one person (f.e. "я сделали") breaks the rules, it just feels... unnatural for the first time? but after a time your brain is like, "haha, I'm totally ok with this"
*sending support from a Russian queer folk :)*
@@minttea527 it's doesn't feel unusual
It's just that when you refer to yourself as plural in the past it meant that you are a land owner
Because or that using plural words to yourself feels like you have a giant ego
@@aster2790 I didn't know about that, thanks for sharing/gen
It was unusual for me, bc I never heard about singular they and was kinda shocked people can use pronouns except for 'he' and 'she'
@@minttea527 well yeah...
It is like that
In russian "they" is never used as singular, neutral pronoun
Russian neutral pronoun is "it", but using it also feels weird cuz it's used only for objects or when insulting someone
@@aster2790 It's pretty similar in English. While "they" is both singular and plural, at least until recently the singular use wasn't as popular. "It" is also used to dehumanise people in English, as it exclusively refers to objects (or living things without gender, bacteria and plants).
Apparently, in english even "he/him" can be gender neutral. While don't agree, it apparently occurs in some (historical) formal speech.
I love that in Russian the grammatical genders are not random. There are pretty straight rules for them because unlike many European languages Russian still has grammatical cases and it means that grammatical gender really canges them. You can't change the word that ends with "а" (femenine in 99% cases) any other way than it has to because you won't be able to understand it's role in a sentence.
It means that any new word AUTOMATICALLY gets it's gender because it needs to follow the rules of grammatical cases.
7:31 quick correction: in Italian it's "l'uomo" not "il uomo".
On a side note, I love how you used San Marino's flag for Italian. Made me giggle so hard.
Native Portuguese speaker here, and I must point out that, at least in Portuguese, many times, words that are only differentiated by gender are actually seperate words with completely different meanings. I can think of some exceptions, like the Italian example you gave of frutto(a) (in Portuguese fruta (feminine) is a coloquial term and fruto (masculine) is a botanical one), or when loan-woards, like "tablet", can be interchangeably any gender. Note the examples:
Campo (field/countryside) and Campa (grave/gravestone). Cavalo (horse) and Cavala (general term for multiple species of mackarel). Termo (term) and Terma (hot spring/bath-house). In the dictionary, these words are not "the feminine/masculine of..." they're just words that happen to sound and look similar, and be opposite gender.
Even when looking at words that should be the feminine and masculine of each other, like animals. Cavalo (male horse) and égua (female horse) are seperate words; égua is not the feminine of the word horse, it is the feminine of the animal "horse".
Please do note that Portuguese is the only gendered language I speak, and I'm not a linguist.
Also, (and, again, I'm no linguist) but I'm pretty sure that gramatical gender systems are only up to 3 classes, more than that (like swahili) is classified as a noun class system.
Anyway, I still do love the video and agree with most of it, as I'm really tired of people who don't understand how gramatical gender works pretending like they understand the concept.
Also, love the fact you used the least expected flags for each language, that really cracked me up, it was funny to hear "Italian" and see the San Marino flag.
Excellent as usual, just a tiny mistake around 7:39: the article before uomo is "lo", so it is l'uomo. And if it is meaning the human specie it should be written l'Uomo.
4:35 can we just appreciate that all flags here are wrong but still they aren't arbitrary
We have masculine and feminine words in Welsh too. We do not have a "none" classification, but some words are bi-gendered (both male and female). One example is tafarn (pub). In Welsh, the gender is used to determine if and when a particular word will mutate.
My sole complaint about grammatical gender in German is that it is just complicated and inconsistent enough that the amount of effort necessary to learn it outweighs the real but unappreciated (by me) benefit it brings.
I can't truly appreciate the full extent of how grammatical gender benefits the German language since I wasn't raised speaking it. Even worse, since I wasn't raised speaking it, I struggle much more with committing grammatical gender information into my memory.
There are bad arguments and misconceptions about grammatical gender, and this video does a good job outlining those, but I retain my overall stance that grammatical gender makes a language difficult to learn in any way that makes it "worth it".
Love the choice of flags you've gone with
In Portuguese some words depending on the article "a/o" have completely different meanings.
"O grama", the gram.
"A grama", the grass.
A bolsa
O bolso
ocorre algo parecido neste exemplo que citei
@@allejandrodavid5222 kkkkkk buguei
@@allejandrodavid5222 o pico, a pica kkkkkkkkkkkkkk
Next video: why does Chinese and some east asian languages have measure words? Or classifiers?
Once someone asked me why does Chinese has so many measure words. And i couldnt answer him.
every language has measure words, actually. like in english we know that "a paper" is different from "a sheet of paper". it's just that we don't think of "sheet" as a measure word because we instead just think of it as a regular noun
what we call "measure words" in other languages are also like this, but we just don't see it anymore because the original words have fallen out of fashion
for example in mandarin
条 used to mean "strip/strand", that's why we use it for long stringy things
位 used to mean "role/seat/rank", that's why we use it to count people, (but only in formal situations, where their role is relevant)
只 used to mean "one half of a pair", that's why we use it to count a single shoe. in the past this was actually used to count birds specifically, because birds always come in male/female pairs, but then it got applied to other animals too
个 used to mean "bamboo staff/pole", then it got to mean just "piece", and now we just use it for anything that doesn't have a different liangci
if you think about it this way, then it makes sense that there are so many measure words, because there are so many words in general lmao
@@diamdante yeah, true
@@diamdante Except in most languages, you usually don't use measure words. You have two apples, not two X of apple. East Asian languages use measure words obligatorily.
Also, some measure words in Chinese don't make any sense because for example you use 条 for dogs, fishes, roads and trousers and these things have absolutely nothing in common, while very similar things like lion and tiger use different measure words, tiger has 只 but lion has 头，why?
@@vytahyes, it's more uncountable nouns in English like "a piece of furniture / information", "a glass of water" or collectives "a kettle of fish" but not few.
my favorite example of gender changing the meaning of a word is el pimiento (pepper as in the fruit) vs la pimienta (pepper as in the spice). i don't know why i like this example. it's just fun i think.
The bit about the story about "a man and a woman" vs "2 men" made me think that it would be cool if we could just assign grammatical gender arbitrarily when first introducing a subject. This way, you could use any amount of pronouns (as long as there would be enough in the language) to backreference a subject. Something along the lines of "These are my friends Dave-[suffix 1] and John-[suffix 2]. [pronoun 2] is a bit angry at [pronoun 1] right now and won't talk to them."
@@SchmulKrieger Yeah, I was about to say that declinations usually take that role.
Algonquian languages, for example Ojibwe, do have this. The Wikipedia article on Ojibwe grammar does a good job describing it, although Ojibwe has a lot of inflection and the article is fairly detailed.
In languages with a proximate-obviative distinction, the function of the third person of English and other languages is divided between the "proximate" for the most prominent referent in the discourse at that time and the "obviative" for everything else.
So a story about Jane and Mary, or Dave and John, would focus on one of them and the other would be consistently marked as obviative. The focus of the story can change, and which person is proximate can also change and does not need to be consistent during an entire discourse.
that means that the other person would have to keep track of all the genders in the sentence, and it could cause some confusion when you want to change them
or maybe a "former/latter" distinction?
Dave brought John his[F] bag. (Dave's bag)
Dave brough John his[L] bag. (John's bag)
where his[F] and his[L] are two different pronouns, and the former is used when a sentence has only one subject.
@@mmmmmmok5292 if it would be a system in a language there won't be a problem
Just like "masculine" and "feminine" don't literally mean the objects are considered male or female, so too are "singular" and "plural" when it comes to singular-they, because "they" is still grammatically plural even when it refers to one person. Simple examples are easily resolved, but in more complicated sentences it can be difficult and sometimes jarring to disambiguate whether you're including the previous clause's object can be a bit jarring: "Alex nods once to their accomplice, and they return to the square to wait as she heads down third street to come around the other side."
That is why we should say they is when talking about one person neutraly, because that way it is clear we are doing that.
as a native Hebrew (a language with grammatical gender) speaker, what I like about grammatical gender is that, unlike some of what the critics say, does indeed add meaning. you can make words or sentences carry more information, and since to me the main purpose of languages is to distribute information, I can look at it as distinctly good thing.
To give a simple example, if I want to tell you a story about a female friend, and the fact that she is female is relevant to the story, I can just say friend [female form], instead of using more words to say that she is female.
(also native Hebrew speaker here) i’d have to disagree - i think the kind of gendering you are talking about causes more trouble than it’s worth. in the example that you gave, the need to specify gender just adds confusion because then you need to clarify whether you mean “[girl]friend” or “friend who is a girl”. other languages such as German have the same problem. the only other time nouns are really gendered in this way is pets; maybe somewhat useful but not really. and as mentioned in the video this kind of gendered language makes non-binary peoples’ lives that much harder.
My favourite example of the complexities of grammatical gender from Danish is our two words for pigs:
En gris (common/uter gender)
Et svin (neuter gender)
Both are equally valid, yet 'gris' seems more familiar and cute and is the word first learned by children because they see a happy pig in a pen on a farm in a children's book. 'Gris' is uter/common. 'svin' is neuter and is used mostly when referring to pigs used as "production animals" as we would call them: animals used for the sole purpose of being turned into food products. It probably helps that our equivalent of "pork" (aka. the animal as meat) is also 'svin', but that doesn't quite explain why 'gris is used as a very, very mild insult when someone is being messy with their food (typically children), while 'svin' is what you call someone who is morally reprehensible and is probably going to start a fight with you over your usage of that word. We also more likely to think of something closer to the feral equivalent of the pig; the boar, when we say 'svin' (boar is 'vildsvin'; "wild swine"). 'Pig' is almost always imagined as a small pink fellow with no tusks or brushes.
The "wrong" flags for each language just so good!
Just one little mistake: in italiano si dice "l'uomo" non "il uomo". It's just a little mistake, the content is perfect, as always!
I don't know Swahili but as a native Spanish speaker who's currently learning Runyoro-Rutooro (another of the Bantu languages spoken in Uganda), I've found the R-R "grammatical genders" (or "noun classes" as bantuists usually call them) much more meaningful than the Romance-like grammatical gender systems (only masc. and fem.). This is because they're many more and instead of assigning "sex" to inanimate objects you get to have a quite logical classification based on non-arbitrary features like: size, humanness, animalness, non-human non-animal livingness, non-livingness, length/deformity, abstractness, action sense, etc. It may not be perfect but damn me if it ain't easier when trying to understand a speech or a story!!
An example:
Omuyembe gukagwa ha kyana ky'entulege ekikaba nikirya ekikoora kandi nubwo gwafiire.
'A mango fell on a zebra foal which was eating a leaf and then it died'.
What died? The mango?, the zebra?, the leaf…? If you read it in R-R, the answer is simple (source: me).
Great video! The part about grammatical gender making it easier to distinguish between people in a story made me thing of ASL. From what I've been learning in my 101 class, the distinguishing is done spatially (at least in some cases)! Like, when you talk about two people, you indicate which is left and which is right. You then shift your shoulders to the left and right to indicate which person you are talking about. learning ASL has been incredibly interesting so far, and much more complex than I had imagined. I would love to see you talk about it some time in a video! :D
I don't really mind grammatical gender and agree it can improve comprehension in certain situations, but it just seems like an overly complicated system if that's the goal.
It's that English speakers look too deep into it. It's not that unbelievably complex as some say it is.
@@andarilho_31 I didn't say it was complex
I'm French non-binary, and trying to speak in full sentences without gendering myself fells like dodging psionic bullets aimed at my mental health.
Awesome video still
Maybe just pick one wouldnt that be easier?
@@pxolqopt3597 I did. I litteraly said it on the very comment you're responding to.
My first language just don't like it that much.
I'm learning German, so I just switch back and forth, but once I get better, I want to try to get better at avoiding gender. Also, your experience talking about yourself reminds me of the feeling of trying to not misgender a friend while talking about them to someone they aren't out to in English.
Idk about French but apparently in Poland some activists found a dialect which provides gender neutral forms. They had to avoid Polish equivalent of "it" because it refers to objects. It's not widely used in the mainstream because we're not very progressive but it's something
Maybe you could find something similar in dialects or historical variants of your language
I'd say you'd have to defend languages that doesn't use it. I mean is just very useful and it makes it easier to follow a conversation using stuff like (el, lo, la, ella) instead of just "the" and "that"
The main problem is that any attempt to categorize things into tidy boxes will inevitably find something that doesn't fit into either, unless of course the boxes are assigned with absolutely no regard for what they're being assigned to.
But it is relatively random, difficult to learn and as we have seen occasionally causes societal issues. On top of that, I recall there being a few debates amongst Croats on how to make the plurals of loanwords - should cent act like student or should Katar become Katara or Katra in a specific case? And it's advantages are meagre at best - you get better clarification in a very small number of cases and those cases mainly exist because the gender system encourages them.
As a native speaker of one of the Slavic languages I love it when English natives are super confused 😅
10:25 i'm so glad that you put the definition there so that people in the comments won't ask about it, i've seen that _way_ too many times
granted, they're pretty much never asking it genuinely, and really only doing it to JAQ off, but still
i bestow upon thee the shinigami eyes seal of approval
also pls delete the shitty transphobic comments from people
let me recommend the Modern Standard Chinese pronoun tā, which fits for masculine, feminine, neuter, human, non-human, animate and inanimate genders.
solving the problems once and for all: unite we stand, divide we fall.
what about 它&牠&祂?
@@a0987789768 No problem. Just go back to 伊
@@a0987789768 those all goes to non-human or inanimate genders. I don't know what do you "what about" about.