I'm a linguist by profession and all I can say is that if a person is not a native speaker of a language that assigns genderi to inanimate objects, they can't really criticize the language nor the people who speak it as being sexist or gender biased. It's mere grammatical gender! Native speakers of these languages and those of us lucky enough to be fluent in such a language don't even think about it. Languages develop and evolve over many centuries and none of it is really planned!
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I'm a linguist by profession and all I can say is that if a person is not a native speaker of a language that assigns genderi to inanimate objects, they can't really criticize the language nor the people who speak it as being sexist or gender biased. It's mere grammatical gender! Native speakers of these languages and those of us lucky enough to be fluent in such a language don't even think about it. Languages develop and evolve over many centuries and none of it is really planned!
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My grandfather’s older brother was a linguist. I never met him. Fascinating field. I wonder how English lost the grammatical genders of things?
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