Benquo comments on Babies and Bunnies: A Caution About Evo-Psych - Less Wrong

52 Post author: Alicorn 22 February 2010 01:53AM

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Comment author: Benquo 14 March 2011 04:06:57AM 0 points [-]

And maidens are neutral. Which suggests to me that grammatical gender in German has much less to do with personal gender than it does in English.

Comment author: Oligopsony 14 March 2011 04:50:01AM 1 point [-]

IIRC, Germans, Italians, &c. will describe the same objects differently based on the grammatical gender of the word describing it; i.e., speakers of a language in which "bridge" is masculine will emphasize a bridge's strength and stability vs beauty and grace, and visa versa, &c. So gender in the wider sense interacts with it somewhat.

On a lighter note, Mark Twain had a typically great passage which he claimed to be a literal translation of a German story, the main humor being that various inanimate objects are referred to as hes and shes while the hapless fishwife has to get by on its.

Comment author: Unnamed 14 March 2011 05:50:55AM 3 points [-]

The "bridge" study was by Lera Boroditsky, as discussed here. Her papers are available here - it looks like the most relevant is:

Boroditsky, L., Schmidt, L., & Phillips, W. (2003). Sex, Syntax, and Semantics. In Gentner & Goldin-Meadow (Eds.,) Language in Mind: Advances in the study of Language and Cognition.