Imagine there was a society in which blue eyed people are referred to with blee/bler pronouns, and green eyed people are referred to with glee/gler pronouns, and one day someone from that society saw a brown eyed person and had no idea whether to categorise them as blee/bler or glee/gler
Yeah it’s so weird when you think about how arbitrary separating pronouns by gender really is. I feel like it would make way more sense to have multiple ungendered ones that work similar to the way we have this and that to talk about two different inanimate objects
I don’t think it’s all that arbitrary. A bit, sure, but not fully. If i’d have to guess, it probably has to do with the cultural, social and biological relevance of sexual preference in bonding and maybe reproduction and all that.
Language tends to evolve to convey culturally relevant information. You know, like tu/vous or status/relationship distinctions in japanese or the amount of words there are for friendship in arabic.
If that was the case it would be a much more common feature. There are about 7000 languages in the world and only about a hundred of them have that feature.
But, cultures speaking languages with that feature tend to be much more likely to subjugate other cultures than other cultures are.
So, while if you take a random culture on this planet, it most likely won’t have the he/she distinction in their language. But if you take a random human on this planet, they most likely do have it.
Yeah, we have all kinds of labels that are not arbitrary, but also also not 100% accurate in all cases. They only tend to be a problem when people try to treat them as absolutes.
There are plenty of examples of languages with two, three, or no grammatical genders (which don’t always correlate with biological genders—e.g., some languages see ”animate” and “inanimate” as genders.)
If it isn’t arbitrary, why is there so much variation?
Edit: I’m not saying that adding information to nouns by splitting them into rough categories isn’t useful, just that the specific dimension on which we make the split (sex vs animacy vs eye color) is arbitrary.
I think it is, just not fully. You’d be hard pressed to find a language with 6 genders, for example.
This and that are also pronouns, just not personal pronouns. Gendered personal pronouns are common across languages but far from universal.
Mandarin has just “tā”, though it’s distinguished in writing as 他/她/它, he/she/it. Chinese speakers often have trouble correctly using he/she in English - “my girlfriend, he is very attractive” is something I heard.
I also often end up choosing “he” or “she” just randomly unless I specifically pay attention to it, because Finnish doesn’t have that Indo-European peculiarity.
Also, I’ve seen so many young Finnish children get mad at their English teachers in school because until learning of the he/she distinction they had never had to bother tracking the gender of their conversation partner. It’s an extra burden that forces them to look at all their everyday life differently and they demand their teacher to remove that feature so that they don’t need to add that to their life.
“English” way way back was a gendered language across the board, like so many other modern languages still are. The reason modern English is a mostly non-gendered language is because when the Anglo-Saxons and the Danes (Vikings) were in constant contact with each other, the grammatical gender and inflections were not uniformly aligned between the two languages. So early English speakers ended up dropping almost all gender and inflection in their language. Gendered pronouns are some of the oldest words in English, and they’re still hanging on. This kind of makes sense, because we are, of course, biological animals, and as such it is very important for us to be aware of what pairings might produce offspring.
There are still a few things that hold on: some pronouns, and a few different inflections, like “children” instead of “child[e]s”. In English, the “singluar they” has been used since at least early Modern English; Shakespeare used it, for example. It’s usually not effective to try and dictate new words by fiat, especially when such words are intended to replace very old core words in the language. I see the “singluar they” being used much more easily and naturally now than it was when I was younger, and I expect that trend to continue. Eventually, gendered pronouns in English will sound “old-timey”.
I thought the dropping of grammatical gender was a consequence of the creolisation of Anglo-Saxon with French to form English, not of Danish with Anglo-Saxon???
The process took many centuries, and Norman French did play a role, but it certainly started with the Danelaw.