Language and Gender: A Whorfian Problem

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[deijo]

Somewhat related. I'm from Spain and lived in Scotland for a year. Me an other Spaniards shared a common experience that we found really interesting. Whenever we were talking with English natives and they were telling us about friends or family and said, for instance, "I have a friend who works there" or "my literature teacher is really cool" we always felt that we were missing out on some crucial information because we couldn't know the gender of the person they were talking about. We are used to always knowing whether a friend is a man, a woman or even non-binary just by the inflected gender (amigo/amiga/amigue) and somehow we really felt that lack of information when speaking in English. We sometimes had to ask "are you talking about a guy or a girl?" because that information changed things for us.
Really interesting topic and good video! Keep up the good work~

[MohamedAli-rdrn]

Thank you so much for sharing this helpful information about language and gender.
I am learning a lot from you.
I really appreciate your time and you:)
What about French? I think that it is the same as Spanish or Italian or even Arabic?

[dollylove]

It is a plush toy without genitalia. If it was real then it could be determined if it were male or female.

[shapeoperator]

I do not see this as a strong example in favor of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, if we take that to mean "Language determines thought".

The situation could absolutely have occurred regardless of whether they had switched to English or not. A third person could, for whatever reason, have asked them (in Turkish) whether the bunny was a boy or a girl. At this point, they would have had to make a determination based on their past experience. It is unclear whether Turkish had any influence here. If anything, starting out in a genderless language provides *less* opportunity for their feeling to be determined or biased by the language alone.

As for English, it forces you to make a choice in the same way that someone just asking you to make that choice (in whatever language) would: it is purely incidental, and has nothing to do with the grammar actually determining or even influencing your thought on the matter.

As a side note, I think serious problem with discussions of Sapir-Whorf is that every language comes attached to a dominant culture and a textual or audiovisual corpus. These simply cannot be separated from the language, if only because cultural dominance eventually translates into the dialect becoming more widespread. We can even see this at an individual level with classical authors like Cicero and Shakespeare having an outsized influence on the development of Latin or English. If you study either language in any detail, you simply cannot avoid encountering expressions or ideas they created, even if you never read their works, because they pervade the language.

So it is basically impossible to know if it is really the grammatical structure of the language influencing your thoughts or the cultural context. We know the latter, the ideas and books of other speakers of the language, influence thoughts. As for grammatical context influencing thoughts, there is some evidence for it but as far as we can measure the extent is quite limited. See for example Deutsch's "Through the Language Glass")

[progcacophony]

So use "it" instead of she and he, hahaha