The french word for vagina is “vagin”. IT IS MASCULIN.

We have been taken for fools! The charlattans in French linguistic departments are mocking us.

  • Paragone@lemmy.worldEnglish
    317·
    6 days ago

    https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the-alphabet-versus-the-goddess-the-conflict-between-word-and-image

    is a book which points-out that language-cultures gendering EVERYTHING … don’t do women’s-equal-validity.

    English, which doesn’t gender nouns, is where women’s rights has traction.

    Languages program our ability to know meaning, & there are, same as in programming, consequences of every single language-design decision.

    I’ve been told that to start a fight among French people, all you have to do is demand to know whether grapefruit ( pamplemousse ) is male or female.

    ( that’s for Quebec, it may not be true of France, or Lebanese, or African French )

    The inability to get women’s-equal-validity to get anywhere in Latin America, fundamentally, comes down to the language disallowing equal-validity: everything’s gendered, & THAT IS THAT, & you are powerless to change established-categories…

    A group of women is apparently a female-noun, but if you add ONE male, then suddenly the gender of the noun changes, to male.

    Women’s-rights don’t have real traction in that kind of language-culture: it’ll never work or happen.

    _ /\ _

    • Lvxferre [he/him]@mander.xyz
      21·
      5 days ago

      Usually I don’t waste my time with bigoted (yes) bullshit. But your comment is so fucking bad that I feel the need to.

      And by “bad” I mean that it’s 1. extremely incorrect, 2. stinking assumptions and similar filth, and 3. being used to babble inane cultural supremacy.

      English, which doesn’t gender nouns, is where women’s rights has traction.

      This map shows social gender inequality, something clearly correlated to women’s rights. I want you to notice a few things:

      • Canada scoring better than USA, even if ~30% of the population of Canada is Francophone. French uses grammatical genders.
      • USA scoring roughly the same as Chile and Uruguay; in both, the majority of the population is Hispanophone. Spanish also uses grammatical genders.
      • The UK scoring lower than lots of continental countries in W. Europe. Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, German, Italian, and plenty other languages of the region use grammatical gender.
      • Turkey scoring considerably low. Note the Turkish language does not use grammatical genders.
      • Sub-Saharan Africa scoring extremely low, even if a lot of people in the region speak Bantu languages. Bantu languages typically have noun classes, but not grammatical gender.

      Now, are you noticing any pattern that would back your idiotic claim up? No, you aren’t. (But I bet you can associate it just fine with purchasing power or similar economic data.)

      This alone would be already enough to debunk your bullshit. But I’ll go further.

      Languages program our ability to know meaning, & there are, same as in programming, consequences of every single language-design decision.

      Human cognition is not programming, human languages are not programming “languages”, and the hypothesis that language dictates your worldview and/or cognition (“strong” Sapir-Whorf) has been debunked a long time ago. Fuck, language isn’t even necessary for thought; it only streamlines it. Saying “languages program our ability to know meaning” is as silly as saying “streets program our ability to walk”.

      Your comparison is misleading, incorrect, and outdated.

      I’ve been told

      “I’ve been told”? You’re taking conclusions from… hearsay???

      that to start a fight among French people, all you have to do is demand to know whether grapefruit ( pamplemousse ) is male or female.

      Wrong. You’re confusing biological sex (male, female, plus more) with grammatical gender.

      Biological sex concerns the body of some living beings, including humans. It does not apply to fruits, like that citrus. And it does not apply to words. What applies to words is grammatical gender: a type of noun classes system where words referring to men and women usually end in different classes.

      This distinction is blatantly obvious for anyone who speaks a gendered language. Including French speakers; note the same French speakers will happily use the grammatically feminine word “personne” (person) to refer to males who present themselves socially as men, this shows they are aware (unlike you) that sex is not the same as grammatical gender.

      In the meantime, German speakers use the grammatically gender word “Mädchen” (girl) to refer to females who present themselves socially as women. Same deal: the grammatical gender applies to the word, not to the person the word refers to.

      Also. If I had to take a guess, the “fight” in question is on the same level as the “fights” they have over “pain au chocolat” vs. “chocolatine”. Or like English speakers have over “colour” vs. “color”. It isn’t a real fight, it’s simply poking fun at variation within the language.

      The inability to get women’s-equal-validity to get anywhere in Latin America, fundamentally, comes down to the language disallowing equal-validity: everything’s gendered, & THAT IS THAT, & you are powerless to change established-categories…

      Let us pretend for a moment I didn’t debunk this shit right off the bat, and that you would have found some actual correlation. You didn’t, but let’s pretend you did: you’d still be assuming correlation from causation, that’s bloody dumb.

      Side note, as someone who’s actually from Latin America, and see those lands in his everyday instead of “i’Ve BeEn ToLd”: sexism here is not caused by Spanish and Portuguese having grammatical gender; it’s caused by a bunch of social institutions inherited and replicated over and over. Such as, you know… patriarchy. That exists also in societies speaking non-gendered languages, as the English-speaking ones.

      A group of women is apparently a female-noun [SIC], but if you add ONE male, then suddenly the gender of the noun changes, to male.

      Or you can use a feminine word to refer to the whole group: “las personas” / “as pessoas”. That doesn’t change jack shit because, as I said, sexism is caused by social institutions, not language.

      Also relevant to note that this grammatical system (mixed social gender = assigned to the masculine grammatical gender) popped up in the same ancestor of those languages that is also an ancestor for English: Late Proto-Indo-European. And the only reason English got rid of it is because English eroded the endings of the nouns and adjectives.

      Women’s-rights don’t have real traction in that kind of language-culture: it’ll never work or happen.

      Yeah, and gravity doesn’t work on Fridays. /s

      [link to a book] is a book which points-out that language-cultures gendering EVERYTHING … don’t do women’s-equal-validity.

      I left this one to the end because I wanted to actually rebuke the whole bullshit first.

      If you’re clearly ignorant about this topic (and odds are you know you’re ignorant about it), the least you could do is to look for reliable sources of information, before vomiting certainty and re-eating your own vomit, like you are doing. But you couldn’t, right? Otherwise you wouldn’t be taking Leonard Shlain seriously.

      Look at his bibliography:

      • Art & Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time, and Light (1991)
      • The Alphabet Versus the Goddess (1998)
      • Sex, Time and Power: How Women’s Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution (2003)
      • Leonardo’s Brain: Understanding da Vinci’s Creative Genius (2014)

      What was this guy again? Artist and physicist? Nah. Linguist? Nope. Anthropologist or sociologist? Nah. Historicist and psychologist? Nah.

      He was a surgeon who served the suicidal butchers (military) of USA. From the fact that he was publishing “best sellers” about random topics outside his area of expertise, you can pretty much guess nothing he said in those books is worth your time.

      Side note #2: your claim becomes specially hilarious when we think about the archetype of the Goddess, that he used in the name of one of his books. That archetype is from the Celtic religions; followed by peoples who spoke languages with grammatical gender. Yup, Celtic languages have gender. And it works either the same as in Latin (see: Gaulish) or as in Spanish+Portuguese (see: Irish).

      You couldn’t make a bigger fool of yourself.

      • ironeagl@sh.itjust.works
        2·
        5 days ago

        I don’t argue with most of your conclusions here, but language can shape how we think. As one example, for languages that have more regular number words (12 = 1 10 2, for instance) the children can learn how to count to 100 much earlier - and this can factor into math understanding.

        The stereotype of this would be the Asian maths wizard, but this holds true for a number of other languages, including Welsh and Tamil. (source1 DOI: 10.1080/0951508080228551 , Source2 DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00266 )

        • Lvxferre [he/him]@mander.xyz
          1·
          5 days ago

          Paragone’s claim is that languages “program” what we think; like in computer applications, they’ll only behave in the way they were programmed, you won’t see e.g. an image editor being magically able to edit text files, because it wasn’t programmed for that. That’s already in strong Sapir-Whorf territory.

          In the meantime, all your examples point to weak Sapir-Whorf: languages influencing what we think.

          That’s why I compared the situation with walking vs. streets. Sure, you might go further if you walk through a street than if you do some weird parkour across a city, so having streets or not does have some influence how you walk. But you don’t need streets to do something as basic as walking, you know?

          So, like. What you are saying is perfectly reasonable, but it’s different from what Paragone is saying, you know?

          And, when it comes to social vs. grammatical genders, languages with the later always make such a mess of it that it’s hard to conclude anything about its impact over the former. And that’s by necessity; noun classes (grammatical gender is a type of noun class) are only useful if all nouns are dumped in some category, even if that wouldn’t make semantic sense. Like “clock” in the masculine but “table” in the feminine, or words for human groups of mixed social gender using the grammatical masculine, or the word for “person” being using the grammatical feminine.

          If anything, I think it’s more useful to look for the opposite: how society shapes language, not how language shapes society. Because it’s well-known languages are mutable, and social pressures can lead them one or another way. And you do see a lot of pressure in multiple languages (some with grammatical gender) to use more words and expressions that leave social gender ambiguous.

          For example, in Portuguese I’m seeing more and more tests recruiting actors being called “teste de elenco” (cast test) instead of “teste para atores” (lit. test for actors). “Elenco” (cast) is as grammatically masculine as “ator” (actor), but unlike the later it doesn’t imply anything about the social gender of the people being potentially hired.

          Another example (still from PT for my own convenience) is that I’m seeing a lot of strategies popping up to counter the “default masculine for mixed groups”; like this.

          • [More traditional] Alguns acharam o vídeo chato.
          • [Word-by-word translation] Some (M) found the (M) video (M) boring (M).

          “O” (the) and “chato” (boring) are masculine there because “vídeo” (video) is masculine, so it triggers agreement, but that is not a big deal. Focus on the “alguns” (some) instead; it’s a masculine word being used to refer to a group of indeterminate or mixed social gender, so some people

          So a sentence like this nowadays often has that “alguns” replaced. Like this:

          1. Algumas pessoas acharam o vídeo chato. [Some people (F) found the video boring.]
          2. Muita gente achou o vídeo chato. [A lot of people (F) found the video boring.]
          3. O povo achou o vídeo chato. [The folks (M) found the video boring.]
          4. Acharam o vídeo chato. [Ø found the video boring.]

          #1~#3 work like that “elenco” I mentioned above; you’re sticking to the grammatical gender, but nothing assumes the social gender. #4 uses an indeterminate subject, so you don’t need any word there.

          There’s also some more iconic strategies, such as saying “algumes”, “algum@s” or “algumxs” instead of “alguns”, as if Portuguese had a third grammatical gender associated with some human beings. But if I had to take a guess they aren’t as popular as the above, and a lot of them only work for writing, not for speaking.