Did you know that Chinese didn’t have a word for “She” until about 100 years ago? In fact, Chinese operated without a female 3rd person pronoun for thousands of years, and it wasn’t a problem – until interaction with the west. Watch this video to learn the fascinating (albeit winding) history of Chinese gendered pronouns.
It’s obvious that gendered pronouns are not a necessary linguistic feature when you look at how many languages don’t have them, either in writing or in spoken speech. Humans can understand each other perfectly fine without specifying gender. Including that distinction is a choice.
Chinese people did not choose to not include that distinction, and people speaking languages with that distinction did not choose to include it either.
Grammatical gender is a structure that appears and disappears through spontaneous processes that happen over the span of several generations. We can support inclusive language and gender equality without making unscientific claims.
I say this as someone who appreciates the content you regularly post. Let’s keep to the facts, comrade.
I agree with you that it’s a gradual process, but i think to say that it just appears spontaneously mystifies this process too much. Languages are spoken and shaped by people. They don’t exist in a magical void. Ergo, if a feature becomes adopted, it does so through social interaction and because of a series of choices by individuals. Once a new linguistic convention gains a critical mass of support, it catches on as the new norm. Nevertheless, every norm originates somewhere. That’s all i was trying to say. Not that everyone who adheres to these norms is making a conscious choice.
You are misunderstanding. We can talk about adopting linguistic conventions in terms of orthography and vocabulary for example, but let’s look at a practical example of completely unintentional change in grammar and phonology.
In Latin, there were 3 genders: masculine, feminine and neutral, marked at the ending of words. In the descendants of Latin, the same spontaneous changes that create different accents of the same language happened to make the neutral ending sound identical to the masculine one, and so they were merged.
There is no series of choices, no magical void.
We’re discussing gendered pronouns, not grammatical gender. Mandarin didn’t have gendered pronouns until the 20th century.
And adding gendered pronouns was a more or less conscious choice.
I’ve got a number of indigenous friends, and Shawnee doesn’t have gendered pronouns either! Didn’t even add them, too.
That’s interesting. I know very little about indigenous North American languages. Near where i grew up the main languages without gendered pronouns are Turkish and Hungarian.
Apparently it is more common for languages to not have gendered pronouns than you would think if you only looked at European languages.
This analysis seems to suggest that only 30% of languages worldwide have them?