Timeline for How do speakers of gendered languages experience English [non-gendered] nouns?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
10 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oct 24 at 21:13 | comment | added | Obie 2.0 | @Joshua - Given time, it may come full circle. | |
| Oct 24 at 20:36 | comment | added | Joshua | @Obie2.0: I remember when we had to care whether the computer was male or female. Now all computers are it. The part that mattered is long obsolete. | |
| Oct 24 at 19:37 | comment | added | psmears | @Joshua: Interestingly Google Translate gives "gata" as the primary translation for "cat"... | |
| Oct 24 at 18:38 | comment | added | Joshua | @psmears: Stupid debate in spanish. Me: es la gato o es la gata? Other: es el gato. Me (not having the right vocabulary): No es. Es gato feminine. | |
| Oct 24 at 14:34 | comment | added | Vladimir F Героям слава | Also, in my gendered language, we will not use the equivalent of "she" just because the word for a "ship" is feminine (which it is) if the name of the ship is actually masculine. So the Ajax or Hood will always be masculine for us (a "he"), even if the word for a ship is feminine. Similarly for ships like Titanic where it may be harder to see why the names are perceived masculine. It is quite different from this English nautical practice. | |
| Oct 24 at 10:00 | comment | added | Obie 2.0 | To be clear, the use of "she" to refer to ships in certain people's English is sexist in a way that it arguably is not in French or other languages with gendered nouns, because it is not a remnant of arbitrary grammatical noun gender (e.g. scip is neuter in Old English), but is fundamentally an unconscious legacy of gender stereotypes vis-à-vis the "possession" of something by presumed heterosexual male sailors. | |
| Oct 24 at 9:55 | comment | added | Obie 2.0 | Most English speakers who are not sailors or military are wont to refer to vehicles as "it," even ships. I sometimes see "she" used to refer to ships in publications that stubbornly imitate a somewhat anachronistic nautical style, such as many Wikipedia pages, and that's about the only place. | |
| Oct 23 at 14:55 | comment | added | psmears | Unlike ships, engines, cars etc., cats do come in gendered varieties! | |
| S Oct 23 at 9:03 | review | First answers | |||
| Oct 23 at 19:18 | |||||
| S Oct 23 at 9:03 | history | answered | LPH | CC BY-SA 4.0 |