Hot take: gendered language doesn’t serve any meaningful purpose and we should just get rid of it. There is no need for inanimate non-gendered objects to have a linguistic gender.
Or, you know, you could just get over it and realize that gender in language is not the same thing as gender in people. There’s one African language, for example, that has 16 different genders.
Also, you are mistaken that linguistic gender doesn’t serve a purpose. It does and there’s a pretty extensive body of linguistic literature on the subject.
Fun fact; as with most of the other Germanic languages, English originally had three genders; masculine, feminine and neuter. They got stripped out of the language for reasons having to do with English history that are too technical to go into right now.
And German still has those genders, and as you rightly said, they have nothing to do with gender identity.
The only issue here is gendered pronouns and other forms of address that rely on the gender of the person being discussed. Nobody cares whether a table is masculine or feminine, but they do care whether your parent’s sibling is a male or female because in many languages, there’s no word to eliminate that information. That’s the issue here, and the solution isn’t to rewrite the entire concept of gender in languages, but instead to introduce and popularize genderless pronouns and titles. I know I hate saying “how many uncles and aunts do you have,” especially since I know that doesn’t necessarily cover all of the person’s parents’ siblings. Give me words like “cousin” so I don’t need to separate people by gender in casual conversation unless it’s actually relevant.
Can you link a layman’s explanation of the value of grammatical gender regarding inanimate objects? After years of learning and being frustrated by French, I had come to the conclusion that grammatical gender was stupid and served no purpose, but I’d love to have a better understanding of its value.
Again, this isn’t coming from a position of “prove me wrong, buttfart”. This is coming from “I’d like to learn more and have a better understanding of something I’m probably just not getting.”
