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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • So, Anglo cultures pushed women’s-rights, whereas Latin cultures … won’t, don’t, drag their heels, etc…

    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.




  • I know you’re asking for such errors in other languages, but I find it interesting that some of the common english errors are more frequent with native english speakers than with learners of english as a second language.

    A good example of that is using “of” instead of “have”.
    Should of… of what?? It makes no sense to me how someone could confuse the two.

    Having learned english as a second language, I learned to read and write it before learning to speak it.
    On the other hand, I’d expect native speakers to have learned spoken english before learning written english.
    I think this difference changes which errors someone is likely to make.
    Native speakers confuse of/have more because they heard it long before writing it.
    People who learned it later are less likely to make that mistake, although they’re more likely for some others.

    TL;DR: Native speakers are more likely to make mistakes that are homonyms. Of/have, your/you’re, etc.

    As for the spirit of your question, I’ll go with french.

    Almost every noun in french is gendered.
    Objects, body parts, concepts, ideas, pretty much anything and everything is gendered.
    It’s also super obvious whenever someone doesn’t use the correct gender for anything.
    It’s also hard to explain to anyone.
    There might be a logic behind it, but I don’t know how to summarize any of it.
    I just know it, but couldn’t tell you why.

    Some of those make no fucking sense either.
    It has mostly nothing to do with women or men or gebder roles and identity, it just is.
    “Jam” is a feminine noun, yet “butter” is masculine.
    “Bread” is masculine, but a “loaf” is feminine.
    The noun for each and every season are masculine nouns, but the word “season” itself is a feminine noun.
    Also, a “vagina” is a masculine noun, because reasons? Weird.
    Various different words for “testicles” vary between masculine and feminine.

    It’s all super obvious to anyone who speaks french, but I never managed to explain it to any speaker of a non-gendered language like english without breaking their minds.