this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2023
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I don't know why you're being down voted. As a Spanish speaker, it's a definite limitation of the language. Where is the penis on a pen, or the vagina on a pencil? Not everything needs a gender, even if you take a firm stance on the existence of non-binary people.
Most people speaking a certain language don’t view it as gender gender. They view it as grammar. They usually view it as “this word changes the end of the adjective to ‘e’ instead of ‘a’” or whatever rule your language has.
Gender in languages aren’t just, “that object seems female” or “that object seems male” because they are many rules that change the gender of the object even if it looks “manly”. For example, in Punjabi, there’s a rule where if the noun has an “ee” at the end, it will be feminine regardless of its characteristics because the sentence flows better that way in Punjabi.
Languages just have gender because it sounds easier to say/flows nicely, rarely actually because they think a certain object has an actual gender.
-A native speaker of a gender language
It's worth pointing out that linguistic gender came first. When people started talking about how humans have all these complicated different ways that we can present socially depending on context, it adopted the linguistic notion of gender.
Oh, TIL!
yeah the inventors of language shoulda been more inclusive >:(