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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   29505 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 26, 2024

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It's really obvious when you're not a native English speaker. In most languages the word for (biological) “sex” doesn't mean fucking, the same word for sex is used for grammatical gender, and there isn't a word for “gender” (these languages are now importing “gender” as a loanword to refer to the foreign concept of gender identity as distinct from biological sex, which has absolutely no basis in the native language).

Similar with the idea that male and female refer to sex while man and woman are something else (which genderists are walking back now that that battle has been won). In most Germanic languages the words male and female are literally man-like and woman-like with no implicit distinction between sex and gender identity.

It's pretty apparent even in English: the retcon split the adjectives male and female as "sex" from the nouns man and woman as "gender". There isn't really a way to describe a "gendered" person with a specific job -- "woman doctor" doesn't roll off the tongue.

I suppose this is excluding grammatically gendered nouns like actress or aviatrix that are becoming increasingly archaic at this point, although that may be the result of the proto-wokeness of last century.

Funnily enough, "beangarda" is one of the few Irish words still in common usage even among Irish people who profess utter ignorance of the Irish language.

The Irish police force is called "Garda Síochána" (guardians of the peace) and an individual police officer is a "garda". "Bean" (pronounced "ban") means "woman" - hence "beangarda".

In my dialect of English 'actress', 'hostess', 'waitress', etc are in common use, with a masculine generic form, and 'woman doctor' merely sounds old, not awkward. 'Woman cop' is in common use. 'She preacher' would mark you as a bit of a reactionary, but 'she-demon' is a less obscene term for bitch.

I wonder how true this is. In Russian the word for grammatical gender is род while the word for biological sex is пол (I don't know if people these days are using род in other ways). Male/female (самец/самка) are not used for people except in a derogatory sense, instead мужской/женский (lit. manly/womanly) is used for that. I suspect there may be a variety of approaches in different languages.

I wouldn't say мужской/женский translates as "manly/womanly". More like those two words are "male/female (adjectives)" and calling someone самец/самка would be "a male/a female (noun)".

You're right about the parts of speech, but the point I was making is that you wouldn't call someone a самец/самка unless you're looking to insult them.

I've only seen someone use род for gender in the translation of C.S. Lewis' Perelandra (where the divine beings are sexless but gendered), but all modern discourse uses a calque, гендер.

That's interesting because I was going to bring up Lewis as a counterargument to the "gender/sex distinction recently invented to undermine gender norms" POV. Lewis discussed it extensively in both fiction and non-fiction and certainly didn't intend it to undermine gender norms. In multiple places he argued that God is infinitely masculine although not male, and that biological sex was in fact only the expression at the biological level of a more ultimate reality.

Looking forward to Russia breaking open the third axis in gender identity space.

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