Due to the increased acceptance of non-conforming identities, it’s become more prevalent to either ask for pronouns, tell them to a person you meet, or have them somewhere visible in things like gameshows.
That’s quite as silly to me as this whole “what gender is this washing machine” nonsense is to English-speaking people.
Here in Finland, we don’t have gendered language. Even with third person pronouns, we usually default to “it” instead of “him/her/they”. Except for pets. They always get the proper pronoun “hän”. It’s just respectful.
So yeah, just like the English wonder why they have to learn different words for something needlessly gendered in France, I too, as a Finn, wonder why I have to learn different words for something needlessly gendered in English.
First, I’d like to identify Finnish as a Finno-Ugric language, more than a uralic one, because “uralic” is very broad, just like, say, “Indo-European languages”. There’s several distinction within both groups.
But yeah, there are quite a lot of grammatical cases, I can see that yeah. I wouldn’t bother learning Finnish if I wasn’t born with it, lol.
My point is rather that English calling French out on something linguistic. English is three languages in a trenchcoat masquerading as one.
But also, getting the conjugation wrong won’t really be offensive to anyone, whereas confusing he/she just because your brain is unused to having to specify such things and your mouth is unused to the “sh” sound in she, and ending up misgendering someone, could be. Even accidentally.
“She sells seashells on the seashore” is a very challenging tongue twister for Finns.
Also, note how I can write a sentence like “hän menee kirjastoon”, meaning “[3rd person nongendered singular] goes to the library”, but if you run that through a translator to English, the translator will have to make up a gender. And not surprisingly, the default is the masculine one. (Down with the patriarchy and all that.)
Although this also means you’ll lose information when translating to Finnish. Ups and downs.
This is one of those things that, if translated directly, would be really, really bad.
Now I’ve spoken English for more than a quarter century, so my mouths used to it already, but I remember when learning the language, it was rather hard for the brain to keep switching between “he” and “she”, as it was not a distinction my brain had to make before using English.
I mean obviously I could differentiate women and men, but having to use different pronouns for both?
Due to the increased acceptance of non-conforming identities, it’s become more prevalent to either ask for pronouns, tell them to a person you meet, or have them somewhere visible in things like gameshows.
That’s quite as silly to me as this whole “what gender is this washing machine” nonsense is to English-speaking people.
Here in Finland, we don’t have gendered language. Even with third person pronouns, we usually default to “it” instead of “him/her/they”. Except for pets. They always get the proper pronoun “hän”. It’s just respectful.
So yeah, just like the English wonder why they have to learn different words for something needlessly gendered in France, I too, as a Finn, wonder why I have to learn different words for something needlessly gendered in English.
You speak an uralic language, brother. Gender orno gender, having to learn a billion rules for conjugation is the problem there
First, I’d like to identify Finnish as a Finno-Ugric language, more than a uralic one, because “uralic” is very broad, just like, say, “Indo-European languages”. There’s several distinction within both groups.
But yeah, there are quite a lot of grammatical cases, I can see that yeah. I wouldn’t bother learning Finnish if I wasn’t born with it, lol.
My point is rather that English calling French out on something linguistic. English is three languages in a trenchcoat masquerading as one.
But also, getting the conjugation wrong won’t really be offensive to anyone, whereas confusing he/she just because your brain is unused to having to specify such things and your mouth is unused to the “sh” sound in she, and ending up misgendering someone, could be. Even accidentally.
“She sells seashells on the seashore” is a very challenging tongue twister for Finns.
Also, note how I can write a sentence like “hän menee kirjastoon”, meaning “[3rd person nongendered singular] goes to the library”, but if you run that through a translator to English, the translator will have to make up a gender. And not surprisingly, the default is the masculine one. (Down with the patriarchy and all that.)
Although this also means you’ll lose information when translating to Finnish. Ups and downs.
Right or wrong, calling a person “it” in English is incredibly disrespectful
Which is why I never do, obviously.
This is one of those things that, if translated directly, would be really, really bad.
Now I’ve spoken English for more than a quarter century, so my mouths used to it already, but I remember when learning the language, it was rather hard for the brain to keep switching between “he” and “she”, as it was not a distinction my brain had to make before using English.
I mean obviously I could differentiate women and men, but having to use different pronouns for both?
Quite needless.