this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2023
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I've been told that to start a fight in Francophones, just demand to know whether grapefruit ( pamplemousse, iirc ), is male or female...
: P
The book "The Alphabet Versus The Goddess" by Leonard Shlain, makes the point that women's-rights simply don't progress as quickly, in countries which have gendered languages...
So, Anglo cultures pushed women's-rights, whereas Latin cultures .. won't, don't, drag their heels, etc...
That book is now a couple ?decades? old?
It's still true.
Conditioning an entire population's System-1 ( Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking Fast & Slow", the System-1 is the default-instinct & the trained-now-automatic-expertise system, it also is the system that is both addiction & prejudice ) into gendering everything, automatically, may well prevent equal-validity from ever having place...
Mind you, I now want to see which Nordic/Scandi languages are gendered, & which Middle-East languages are gendered, to see if that holds in those parts of the world, not just in the Americas...
... digging ...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_in_Danish_and_Swedish
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender
( that isn't a quick read... may come back to it some day... )
Bingo!
"The grammatical gender of nouns is one of two: a noun may be masculine or it may be feminine, and there is no neutral option. Moreover, masculinity is the default grammatical gender in Arabic and a word does not have to have anything special in order to reflect this. Femininity, on the other hand, is not default and a noun would have to have something special to reflect this gender in Arabic."
from
https://www.learnarabiconline.com/gender/
So, there is ZERO hope of equal-validity in Arabic culture, because the language programs Arabic people's System-1 into 2 exclusive validity-categories, with male being inherently more-valid, by established language-habit.
What about Hebrew?
https://www.timesofisrael.com/in-an-increasingly-nonbinary-world-is-gendered-hebrew-willing-to-adapt/
No wonder women can't get equal-validity in Jewish culture...
( I read a Jewess's writing ~ Nobody EVERY celebrated the birth of a Jewish girl: only boys are celebrated ~ .. which explains the damage in the stereotypical "Jewish mother", a woman whose validity has been contempted by all in her culture, until the damage is her most defining feature... )
So, it looks like equal-rights/equal-validity for women is .. baseless, in some/many cultures...
Interesting, but depressing.
: \
That sounds like some Strong Sapir-Whorf thinking. And the Strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is pretty roundly rejected by most linguists.
That's mostly bullshit imo.
Grammar itself doesn't necessarily hold back progress with gender identities and equality.
Languages evolve.
French can have gender neutral pronouns, which can make sense for referring to people of various gender identities.
Meanwhile, a gender neutral "table" is a bit moot. While a table is a feminine noun, such an object has no identity, its "gender" has nothing with social constructs, with gender roles or identities, not with women in general. A noun isn't feminine or masculine because of its characteristics, but because of its phonetics and in some cases, plain old habit.
Synonyms can have different grammatical genders.
I'm quite certain that women are better off living in France or in French Canada than most places in the anglo US, not that it's a high bar on the subject of women rights.