Genderless words

[Jonathan Buhacoff]

Proposal:

A language should not have gendered words. Even the words that refer to 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.

Reference:

List of languages by type of grammatical genders (Wikipedia)

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