Complexity is a benefit when it comes to language, as it allows greater or more robust transfer of information. There’s a good comment downthread about how gender makes a language more robust: you know which object a pronoun refers to.
I’ll point out that English is not free of gendered nouns, either: Ships, cities, and most nations are feminine, for example.
Super interesting perspective. As a person with a complicated relationship with gender it’s always seemed purely like a nuisance to me: that it would just further complicate the conversations about gender that are already so semantically tedious and fatiguing in English.
I appreciate you broadening my perspective to include more than one way of looking at the subject
Those are just esoteric or poetic uses. It’s perfectly fine to just say “it” in all those cases, but there is still a distinction for people. It’s worth considering the possibilities of that disappearing as well. In any case, we don’t conjugate differently for genders
Complexity is a benefit when it comes to language, as it allows greater or more robust transfer of information. There’s a good comment downthread about how gender makes a language more robust: you know which object a pronoun refers to.
I’ll point out that English is not free of gendered nouns, either: Ships, cities, and most nations are feminine, for example.
Ships maybe but the other two are only feminine to old people. Even the stodgiest newspaper isn’t saying things like “The US sends her ambassador”.
Super interesting perspective. As a person with a complicated relationship with gender it’s always seemed purely like a nuisance to me: that it would just further complicate the conversations about gender that are already so semantically tedious and fatiguing in English.
I appreciate you broadening my perspective to include more than one way of looking at the subject
It’s just a strange name for a more or less arbitrary way to group words together. It has close to nothing to do with gender as identity.
Those are just esoteric or poetic uses. It’s perfectly fine to just say “it” in all those cases, but there is still a distinction for people. It’s worth considering the possibilities of that disappearing as well. In any case, we don’t conjugate differently for genders