nshepperd comments on Offense versus harm minimization - Less Wrong

60 Post author: Yvain 16 April 2011 01:06AM

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Comment author: komponisto 17 April 2011 02:48:47PM 7 points [-]

Sometimes I wonder why it's called "grammatical gender" at all, when it so often has no connection to actual gender whatsoever. In your example, there's no gender information transferred at all! It may as well be called "grammatical colour" or "grammatical arbitrary class".

As it turns out, that's exactly the original meaning of the word "gender" -- of which the French translation is genre.

Comment author: nshepperd 18 April 2011 02:53:52PM 0 points [-]

Well, that's interesting, although it still doesn't explain - or rather, justify - the use of the words masculine and feminine for a distinction that has nothing to do with sex. You'd just end up with people getting confused by the words and thinking words like feminine-was have genders or something (whatever it even means for a string of phonemes to have a gender).

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