Gender Neutral Spanich, etc.

[The Wizard Joseph]

I'll have you know machismo and honour killings are totally different from when incels go off the deep end.

I sense the potential for a horrible rap battle here ending in mass bloodshed. Just gonna go ahead and not chase it.

[rong]

I'll have you know machismo and honour killings are totally different from when incels go off the deep end.

I sense the potential for a horrible rap battle here ending in mass bloodshed. Just gonna go ahead and not chase it.

I'd pay extra for a seat in the splash zone, tho

[The Wizard Joseph]

I'll have you know machismo and honour killings are totally different from when incels go off the deep end.

I sense the potential for a horrible rap battle here ending in mass bloodshed. Just gonna go ahead and not chase it.

I'd pay extra for a seat in the splash blast zone, tho

FTFY 

[The Johnny]

It seems gender is more entrenched in the language than I realised. 

Do you think the constant reinforcement of gender differences in the language could explain the chauvenistic nature of latin culture?  I don't think there is a direct English translation of machismo, for example.

As much as it reinforces animistic thought patterns, by which i mean, maybe.

[Pergamos]

It seems gender is more entrenched in the language than I realised. 

Do you think the constant reinforcement of gender differences in the language could explain the chauvenistic nature of latin culture?  I don't think there is a direct English translation of machismo, for example.

I wouldn't simply blame the language.  Spanish speaking culture may be a bit more chauvanistic than English speaking, but French speaking culture is not, and French is just as tightly gendered as Spanish is.

[rong]

It seems gender is more entrenched in the language than I realised. 

Do you think the constant reinforcement of gender differences in the language could explain the chauvenistic nature of latin culture?  I don't think there is a direct English translation of machismo, for example.

I wouldn't simply blame the language.  Spanish speaking culture may be a bit more chauvanistic than English speaking, but French speaking culture is not, and French is just as tightly gendered as Spanish is.

That's a good point.

[The Johnny]

It seems gender is more entrenched in the language than I realised. 

Do you think the constant reinforcement of gender differences in the language could explain the chauvenistic nature of latin culture?  I don't think there is a direct English translation of machismo, for example.

I wouldn't simply blame the language.  Spanish speaking culture may be a bit more chauvanistic than English speaking, but French speaking culture is not, and French is just as tightly gendered as Spanish is.

https://i2.wp.com/theglobalamericans.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/female-homicide.png?fit=1600%2C2900&ssl=1

It's 2007-2012 statistics for feminicide so its not current, but its worldwide figures.

#1 El Salvador
#2 Honduras
#4 Guatemala

And correlation is not causation, but well...

[altered]

Latin cultures tend to be more violent as a whole, due to either being fascists (Spain, parts of Latin America) or relatively oppressed people thrown into the meat grinder repeatedly for the benefit of rich white people (parts of Latin America and the Caribbean) or straight up getting constantly smashed into the dirt for being left of Mussolini (the rest of Latin America and the Caribbean). Don’t forget plenty of heavily armed drug cartels with foreign backing.

Then global (read: modern Western-driven) culture is pretty fucking misogynistic as a general rule, so of course in the places people get killed most often, most deaths will be of women.

I feel like that is a more powerful determinant than assuming gendered language creates misogyny.

Consider: all the Romance languages and the Germanic languages are just as gendered and only some of them have the distinction of having a gender neutral grammatical gender, and yet I can’t think of any statistic that says Germany, Switzerland and Austria are any more dangerous for women than Belgium or Ireland. Nor France, nor Portugal, etc.

Then consider that Arabic has a much weaker grammatical gender than any of the Romance languages, but the Middle East is a much tougher place to be a woman than most Latin cultured nations. Also, it really sucks to be a woman in parts of Southeast Asia, such as the Philippines, but Tagalog has no grammatical gender. In fact, it doesn’t even have gendered pronouns. Seriously.

Sorry. Doesn’t pass the sniff test for me.

[Cain]

Agreed. This discussion sounds way too close to linguistic determinism. I get why this is an intellectually attractive argument, but the evidence for it simply is not there and there are far better explanations for machismo, violence against women etc than the language being gendered.

[The Johnny]

So you're telling me that if we all switched to speaking Esperanto the world's problems would not be fixed?

Fuck you!

[rong]

aha - linguistic determinism.  I didn't know it had a name, but that certainly fits the bill. 

although I think it may be a factor in explaining some behaviors, simply trying to find illustrative examples is proving difficult enough to rule out the plausibility altogether.

how many exceptions can a rule have before it is no longer a rule?

[Cain]

There is a "soft" version of linguistic determinism, called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. In short, this argues that linguistic categories can influence, but do not necessarily drive outcomes. And the thing is, we can of course think of counterexamples. The infamous one is that the Inuit have 3 different words for snow, obviously because they deal with snow more than us down south and so need different words to describe the different qualities of snow they encounter. But just because English doesn't have three different "snow" words doesn't mean that people don't modify "snow" with other descriptions, to achieve the same effect as these three words have.

It's a problematic distinction, especially when considering how language evolves.

[rong]

There is a "soft" version of linguistic determinism, called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. In short, this argues that linguistic categories can influence, but do not necessarily drive outcomes. And the thing is, we can of course think of counterexamples. The infamous one is that the Inuit have 3 different words for snow, obviously because they deal with snow more than us down south and so need different words to describe the different qualities of snow they encounter. But just because English doesn't have three different "snow" words doesn't mean that people don't modify "snow" with other descriptions, to achieve the same effect as these three words have.

It's a problematic distinction, especially when considering how language evolves.

there should be a word for this concept:  linguinfluence?  languence?  influage?  langfluistic?  I think I like the first 2 better.

[altered]

The only pretty solid evidence I have found of something like SWH goes the opposite direction: it’s easier to discuss something that words encompass; if you need to discuss a novel idea you name it. Language grows in the directions the speakers find most important. And this seems like an iron clad hypothesis, given the existence of jargon, slang and portmanteaus. The inverse is senseless.