Genderless words

[Jonathan Buhacoff]

Proposal:

A language should not have gendered words. The words that refer to or describe the genders would not themselves be gendered.

Intent:

Reduce time needed to learn a language. Eliminates uncertainty about the gender of a new word. Eliminates the need to assign a gender to every noun. Eliminates the need to gender adjectives and adverbs to match the gender of a noun.

Discussion:

Some languages are gendered, meaning that all words or nearly all words are assigned a masculine or feminine gender and are written and pronounced differently because of that. Some languages are non-gendered, or genderless, meaning that all words are independent of gender.

Using gendered words means everyone has to learn the word and also what gender it is.

Gendering words has a cost for learning but doesn’t add any value. Is there a benefit to treating a table as masculine or feminine? Not a particular table, but all tables? A table is masculine in Hebrew but feminine in Spanish. It’s arbitrary.

To be clear, this proposal is not intended to remove all gender from a language. We need words to describe anything that exists or that we can think of. So we need words to name and describe genders. This proposal is about avoiding the practice of gendering everything around us, especially inanimate objects, and about avoiding the practice of gendering every verb and adjective to match the actual or arbitrarily-decided gender of a noun, as is done in gendered languages.

In English, we might write “the table is white”. None of these words are gendered. In Spanish, the same sentence is written “la mesa es blanca”. Three of four words in the Spanish translation are gendered. “La” is a gendered equivalent of “the” for feminine words. “Mesa” is the word for table and in Spanish it’s a feminine word. “Es” is the equivalent of “is” and is non-gendered. “Blanca” is the word for “white” when describing a feminine noun, such as “mesa”. In Spanish, “blanco” is the word for “white” when describing a masculine noun. This is what we propose to avoid with “a language should not have gendered words.”

Reference:

List of languages by type of grammatical genders (Wikipedia)

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