Straight feels for this pic . <| sep |> A given language might not have a word for gender , but given a sufficiently complex sentence , you can explain what gender is in any language . Just like one language might have single words that explain whole mathematical concepts that in english require several pages of explanations . Much like mathematics , language builds upon millenia of previous ideas . It just so happens that in mathematics we don ' t carry these previous ideas as an unstated bias , but rather as a rigorous set of logically consistent ideas . And what we consider logically consistent is just another unstated bias that we carry along with language . In fact , for many years in math we didn ' t have a formal concept of what was derived and what was true a priori .