Gender Pronouns
I recently started studying French and I found it off that with direct objects, the gender of the pronoun is determined by the object rather than the person whose it is. Thus you would basically say his book if you are talking about a woman’s book because book is masculine or you would say her table if you are talking about a man’s table because table is feminine.
I found this really weird because it seems that the gender of the object that doesn’t actually have a gender is more important than the gender of the person who does in fact have an actual gender.
But then I started thinking about pronouns in general. Why is the only disguising factor in determining a pronoun gender based (well aside from singular vs plural)? It’s like most language is set up to make sure that people are separated and identified by gender. And that may seem normal, but I think that’s just because that’s how it’s always been for us. Some people identify more closely with their race or religion or even subculture, but no thought was ever taken into account in terms of that being the identifying classification in our pronouns. Hell, pronouns could have initially been set up to distinguish eye colour or hair colour, but the idea of that (or anything other than gender)seems ridiculous to us.
I’m not going to sit here and say that anyone who likes that we are pronoun identified as male vs. female is wrong or bad, but if I was making my own language, I’d have singular and plural and that’s it. I don’t want to impose classifications (be it gender, race, religion, eye colour, etc.) on people by virtue of the language itself. That’s their own call to make.
I found this really weird because it seems that the gender of the object that doesn’t actually have a gender is more important than the gender of the person who does in fact have an actual gender.
But then I started thinking about pronouns in general. Why is the only disguising factor in determining a pronoun gender based (well aside from singular vs plural)? It’s like most language is set up to make sure that people are separated and identified by gender. And that may seem normal, but I think that’s just because that’s how it’s always been for us. Some people identify more closely with their race or religion or even subculture, but no thought was ever taken into account in terms of that being the identifying classification in our pronouns. Hell, pronouns could have initially been set up to distinguish eye colour or hair colour, but the idea of that (or anything other than gender)seems ridiculous to us.
I’m not going to sit here and say that anyone who likes that we are pronoun identified as male vs. female is wrong or bad, but if I was making my own language, I’d have singular and plural and that’s it. I don’t want to impose classifications (be it gender, race, religion, eye colour, etc.) on people by virtue of the language itself. That’s their own call to make.