<story><title>Cultures where men and women don’t speak the same language (2017)</title><url>https://www.k-international.com/blog/men-and-women-dont-speak-the-same-language/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>okal</author><text>An interesting Romance counter-example is &amp;quot;Obrigado&amp;quot; vs &amp;quot;Obrigada&amp;quot; (&amp;quot;thank you&amp;quot;, in Portuguese). I&amp;#x27;m not even remotely fluent, but if I recall correctly, the gender is dependent on the speaker, not the person being addressed.</text></item><item><author>the_af</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;Most languages have far more obvious grammatical distinctions. The Romance languages have obvious gender in the grammar, but it&amp;#x27;s... just there. It doesn&amp;#x27;t do much except to indicate that the subject or object is male or female. Beyond that, there are some rather random associations of gender to specific nouns.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;I can&amp;#x27;t speak for all Romance languages but my native Spanish: it&amp;#x27;s true that we have gendered nouns (most if not all of them, I think) but it has nothing to do with the speaker, so it&amp;#x27;s not a language for men or women. For example, a chair (&amp;quot;silla&amp;quot;) is always female, regardless of whether it&amp;#x27;s me saying it (a male) or my mother. It&amp;#x27;s a bit like how ships in English are a &amp;quot;she&amp;quot; regardless of who&amp;#x27;s speaking, only more enforced and for all nouns.</text></item><item><author>TheOtherHobbes</author><text>This seems to be conflating grammatical gender - which includes differences in pronouns, adjectives, sometimes verbs, and pronunciation, but is still based on relatively minor variations in a common vocabulary - with full dialects, which can have very distinct vocabularies and may include words with unique meanings.&lt;p&gt;English is at the de-grammarised end of the spectrum. There are gendered clues in English, but they&amp;#x27;re (mostly) not baked into the grammar. The differences are more about specific idioms and expressions that one gender is more likely to use, and they&amp;#x27;re really a kind of variation on other subgroup slangs - like teen slang, other age-related indicators.&lt;p&gt;Most languages have far more obvious grammatical distinctions. The Romance languages have obvious gender in the grammar, but it&amp;#x27;s... just there. It doesn&amp;#x27;t do much except to indicate that the subject or object is male or female. Beyond that, there are some rather random associations of gender to specific nouns.&lt;p&gt;Fully distinct dialects&amp;#x2F;languages are incredibly rare and are often artificial and&amp;#x2F;or more likely to be created by a subculture than as a direct result of gender differences.&lt;p&gt;Example: English has Polari, which was entertainer&amp;#x2F;street slang and often used in gay subcultures. It also has Cockney, Estuary, Northern, Scottish, Urban, and others - all differentiated by culture.</text></item><item><author>retrac</author><text>While e.g. Nüshu (a secret women&amp;#x27;s only writing system) is a rather extreme example, Japanese with its various first-person pronouns and gendered patterns to verb conjugations is not that odd.  Many languages are like that.  Possibly all languages, to some degree.  It&amp;#x27;s a continuum, probably, between slightly to moderately gendered with most languages.&lt;p&gt;English is definitely on that continuum, by the way.  Any significant text (just a few paragraphs) has enough clues to predict a speaker or writer&amp;#x27;s gender with considerable confidence.  This shows up most dramatically with statistical models (including deep learning) but trends with particular grammatical constructs and word choices were noted long ago.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>n4r9</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve heard of this example before, and this is speculative but I wonder if it&amp;#x27;s because the speaker is counter-intuitively also the object of the phrase.&lt;p&gt;The root &amp;quot;obrigad&amp;quot; sounds a lot like the English word &amp;quot;obligate&amp;quot;. If this is more than just a coincidence, then a more direct translation is &amp;quot;I am obliged&amp;quot; rather than &amp;quot;thank you&amp;quot;. Said this way it makes a lot of sense why the verb is determined by the speaker.</text></comment>
<story><title>Cultures where men and women don’t speak the same language (2017)</title><url>https://www.k-international.com/blog/men-and-women-dont-speak-the-same-language/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>okal</author><text>An interesting Romance counter-example is &amp;quot;Obrigado&amp;quot; vs &amp;quot;Obrigada&amp;quot; (&amp;quot;thank you&amp;quot;, in Portuguese). I&amp;#x27;m not even remotely fluent, but if I recall correctly, the gender is dependent on the speaker, not the person being addressed.</text></item><item><author>the_af</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;Most languages have far more obvious grammatical distinctions. The Romance languages have obvious gender in the grammar, but it&amp;#x27;s... just there. It doesn&amp;#x27;t do much except to indicate that the subject or object is male or female. Beyond that, there are some rather random associations of gender to specific nouns.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;I can&amp;#x27;t speak for all Romance languages but my native Spanish: it&amp;#x27;s true that we have gendered nouns (most if not all of them, I think) but it has nothing to do with the speaker, so it&amp;#x27;s not a language for men or women. For example, a chair (&amp;quot;silla&amp;quot;) is always female, regardless of whether it&amp;#x27;s me saying it (a male) or my mother. It&amp;#x27;s a bit like how ships in English are a &amp;quot;she&amp;quot; regardless of who&amp;#x27;s speaking, only more enforced and for all nouns.</text></item><item><author>TheOtherHobbes</author><text>This seems to be conflating grammatical gender - which includes differences in pronouns, adjectives, sometimes verbs, and pronunciation, but is still based on relatively minor variations in a common vocabulary - with full dialects, which can have very distinct vocabularies and may include words with unique meanings.&lt;p&gt;English is at the de-grammarised end of the spectrum. There are gendered clues in English, but they&amp;#x27;re (mostly) not baked into the grammar. The differences are more about specific idioms and expressions that one gender is more likely to use, and they&amp;#x27;re really a kind of variation on other subgroup slangs - like teen slang, other age-related indicators.&lt;p&gt;Most languages have far more obvious grammatical distinctions. The Romance languages have obvious gender in the grammar, but it&amp;#x27;s... just there. It doesn&amp;#x27;t do much except to indicate that the subject or object is male or female. Beyond that, there are some rather random associations of gender to specific nouns.&lt;p&gt;Fully distinct dialects&amp;#x2F;languages are incredibly rare and are often artificial and&amp;#x2F;or more likely to be created by a subculture than as a direct result of gender differences.&lt;p&gt;Example: English has Polari, which was entertainer&amp;#x2F;street slang and often used in gay subcultures. It also has Cockney, Estuary, Northern, Scottish, Urban, and others - all differentiated by culture.</text></item><item><author>retrac</author><text>While e.g. Nüshu (a secret women&amp;#x27;s only writing system) is a rather extreme example, Japanese with its various first-person pronouns and gendered patterns to verb conjugations is not that odd.  Many languages are like that.  Possibly all languages, to some degree.  It&amp;#x27;s a continuum, probably, between slightly to moderately gendered with most languages.&lt;p&gt;English is definitely on that continuum, by the way.  Any significant text (just a few paragraphs) has enough clues to predict a speaker or writer&amp;#x27;s gender with considerable confidence.  This shows up most dramatically with statistical models (including deep learning) but trends with particular grammatical constructs and word choices were noted long ago.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>codethief</author><text>Well, practically all adjectives in Spanish&amp;#x2F;Portuguese&amp;#x2F;French&amp;#x2F;Italian change depending on the grammatical gender of the noun they refer to. And, of course, if the noun in question is &amp;quot;I&amp;quot; (as in your case), then they reveal the (physical) gender of the speaker because usually&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    grammatical gender of a person == physical gender of that person
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
But compared to the differences in, e.g., Japanese that some people here are discussing, this seems rather minor.</text></comment>