Re: gendering in other languages

[robert <http://dummy.us.eu.org/robert>]

There are good points here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-neutral_language

 > From: Noelle <http://dummy.us.eu.org/noelleg>
 > Date: Sun, 6 Dec 2020 08:48:44 -0800 (PST)
 >
 > this started in electoral-vote.com. LatinX designation was not 
 > started by Latino/a s  but white activists?:
 > 
 > Q: I was surprised to read that the term Latinx was an invention of 
 > white activists. Do you know which white activists in particular 
 > invented it? M.M., Santa Cruz, CA
 > 
 > A: A few linguists and other folks have tried to figure out exactly 
 > who coined the term, and thus far have only figured out that it 
 > began to show up in academic literature (and in Google searches) in 
 > 2004. The source, beyond that, remains a mystery. However, because 
 > the articles (and other works) in which the term first showed up 
 > were written in English, and by white folks, it's pretty clear that 
 > the convention came from white people. Further supporting that 
 > conclusion is the fact that by de-gendering Spanish, Latinx is 
 > something of an offense against that language and that culture.
 > 
 >      J.K. in Portland, OR (formerly Aix-en-Provence, France and 
 > Scheveningen, Netherlands), writes: The whole kerfuffel about 
 > gendered nouns ("Latinx") completely conflates the sorting of nouns 
 > into what are mis-identified as "genders" and the American attempt 
 > to do away with anything that can smack of gender, dating back to 
 > "the personipulation of the language."
 > 
 >      In Romance languages (I will use French here, as I am fluent in 
 > that language), the sorting of words has some arbitrariness and the 
 > "gender" identification got its labels because sorting of male and 
 > female animals who reproduce via some form of sex are into those 
 > categories. But there is arbitrariness in that sorting everywhere 
 > else. For two examples, any noun ending in -eau is masculine and any 
 > noun ending in -ion is feminine. For a really counterintuitive (for 
 > an English speaker) example, the word for "the person" is "la 
 > personne" no matter whether the person referred to is male, female, 
 > or nonbinary. And if a collectivity of people is referred to by a 
 > pronoun, that pronoun follows the gender category of the word. So if 
 > you want to say in French that those folks on the men's national 
 > football team are cute, you would say, "Cettes personnes, elles sont 
 > mignonnes" and no native French speaker would even dream that you 
 > are not speaking correctly. Also, in Romance languages, the gender 
 > reference of a possessed object follows the object, not the owner, 
 > so if you are referring to my paper and pen, you would say "son 
 > papier and sa plume" no matter what gender I am.
 > 
 >      It can get stranger in Germanic languages, where Mark Twain once 
 > observed that in German "It, the girl, takes her, the bucket, to the 
 > stream to fetch water." The Dutch language has evolved to combine 
 > its "genders" into two categories—common (merging formerly male and 
 > female) and neuter. In the Netherlands, I would sometimes avoid 
 > misguessing by employing the rule that all diminutives are neutral 
 > gender and all plurals are common gender (e.g., "het olifantje" for 
 > "the little/dear elephant" or "de olifanten" for "the elephants").