[igetspam]

As a native English speaker who took German as a kid, I was always perplexed by gendered nouns. Why are fruit feminine and pencils and pens masculine? Is it because writing instruments were the tools of men or because they're phallic? Why is lawyer feminine? Is it a form or derision? Best I recall (and can find), it's arbitrary and I would assume, like many things in our world, they were chosen based on some gender association that often boils down to misogyny. German has neutral articles as well.

While I wouldn't spend my life chasing this debate, as an outside observer, I can't understand why normalizing on "das" would be a problem for 99% of the things and moving forward from there. Language evolves and if we can evolve it to be more inclusive, why not?

[rich_sasha]

Imagine someone comes along and insists that your native language is discriminative on something totally innocuous. Like, say, “a” vs “the”. Dunno, because you can make some nouns special this way. It lets you say “the man” and “a woman” which shows, allegedly, disrespect to one of the genders. You must integrate them into one “tha”. Never mind you lose a key mechanism for expression: surely, you’re not sexist, are you?

You may find it a bit silly or ridiculous, but perhaps, like other people, you may find the very suggestion offensive: that unless you put an axe to the language you speak, according to someone’s half-baked ideas, you’re a bigoted misogynist.

Languages evolve, we change bits to better fit the zeitgeist and that’s normal. But these “though shalt change your language because I say so and I know better” wars are ridiculous.

[1_player]

Why can't gendered nouns stay as a cultural curiosity?

To me the Moon will always be feminine and the Sun masculine, even if they're not gendered in English. So what? People that are bothered by this duality tacitly imply that one of these gender is inherently worse than the other, and speaks volumes about their assumptions and views of the world.

So what if fruit is female and pencils are male? How is that misogyny? Are fruits "weak"? Do they have "emotions"? No, saying it's rooted in misogyny is cultural and historical revisionism pushing an agenda.

Gender activism tries to make society more moderate and inclusive by taking an extremist position: culture will eventually settle towards a more moderate, but still progressive view of the matter.

I expect society to be more inclusive after these efforts, but I honestly do not want nor hope these extremist views to actually take hold. They're just a means to an end. I accept them in the hope they make a better world, but viewed by themselves they're just posturing bullshit.

[raxxorrax]

Moon and sun are the opposite in German. It is arbitrary in different languages and the discrimination angle is just wrong.

[raxxorrax]

The grammatical genus doesn't have anything to do with sexuality. It is arbitrary otherwise and difficult to learn, true. Lawyer is masculine in German, plurals are always feminine.

> they were chosen based on some gender association that often boils down to misogyny

No. They were explicitly not chosen for this reason. There are some exceptions maybe, but the whole debate is based on false assumptions.

There are languages which don't do this of course. I don't see any problems that affect one country but not the other. No.

[bmn__]

> Why are fruit feminine and pencils and pens masculine? Is it because writing instruments were the tools of men or because they're phallic? […] it's arbitrary and I would assume, like many things in our world, they were chosen based on some gender association that often boils down to misogyny

A suggestive and imaginative theory, but wrong. Reality is always much more boring. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29043881>

[dpifke]

Think of it as a checksum.

As a non-native German speaker, I sometimes struggle with understanding speech (especially with thick accents). Knowing the gender lets me narrow down the possibilities of what a word might be, when I don't hear it all the way.