[HN Gopher] Cultures where men and women don't speak the same la...
___________________________________________________________________
Cultures where men and women don't speak the same language (2017)
Author : mojuba
Score : 231 points
Date : 2021-12-13 09:47 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.k-international.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.k-international.com)
| mrhektor wrote:
| This reminds me of the book Speaker for the Dead, which is book 2
| in the Ender's game series. The creatures found on the new planet
| had different languages for men and women. I wonder if Orson
| Scott Card took inspiration from some of these cultures in
| building the narrative for the book!
| mwcampbell wrote:
| Came here to say the same thing. I wouldn't be surprised if he
| did take inspiration from those cultures; he was a missionary
| (for the LDS church) in Brazil.
| janandonly wrote:
| I think the ancient Sumerian language also had a dialect for
| women that was apart from the standard (male) dialect...
| retrac wrote:
| While e.g. Nushu (a secret women'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's a continuum, probably, between slightly to
| moderately gendered with most languages.
|
| 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'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.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| There's a great, and almost impossible to translate, scene in
| the movie "Your name", where, after the female protagonist
| character finds herself in the body of the protagonist male
| characters, almost gets in trouble for using the wrong "I".
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iowh6UxahKs
| ncpa-cpl wrote:
| I was going to mention this same example :)
| throwaway472927 wrote:
| I imagine to some extent men and women choose different words
| because they express different ideas? That can still be a for
| societal reasons if you like but at a "level lower" than
| language.
|
| This kind of question reminds me of "if a lion could speak, we
| could not understand him"
| Metacelsus wrote:
| >gendered patterns to verb conjugations
|
| Polish does this too.
| bruce343434 wrote:
| do you have a source/more info on your last paragraph?
| fxtentacle wrote:
| I do :)
|
| "We analyzed 700 million words, phrases, and topic instances
| collected from the Facebook messages of 75,000 volunteers,
| who also took standard personality tests, and found striking
| variations in language with personality, gender, and age."
|
| https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.
| ..
| xioxox wrote:
| Is it just me, or are most of the results in that paper
| rather obvious and not very useful in general, outside of
| social media posts. In Facebook posts, it's not surprising
| that men talk more about computer games and sport, and
| swear more. Women using more emotion words and men more
| object words, is again fairly obvious.
|
| If one took an academic text, a short story, a novel, a
| blog post, or some other more careful piece of writing, it
| is unclear whether this kind of classifier would work as
| well.
| bruce343434 wrote:
| > Women using more emotion words and men more object
| words, is again fairly obvious.
|
| Is it? I think it's rather interesting. Though not really
| as much of a language dialect rather than a perspective
| shift, as if the men and women on average interpret the
| world differently.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| > If one took an academic text, a short story, a novel, a
| blog post, or some other more careful piece of writing,
| it is unclear whether this kind of classifier would work
| as well.
|
| It should be a pretty easy test to do, for those with the
| trained classifier; I wonder why they haven't reported on
| doing it.
| yorwba wrote:
| It seems like the differences in word choice are strongly
| driven by the topics people choose to talk about on
| Facebook. Besides obvious cases like "shopping" vs. "xbox"
| there's also more subtle things like
|
| > we noticed 'my wife' and 'my girlfriend' emerged as
| strongly correlated in the male results, while simply
| 'husband' and 'boyfriend' were most predictive for females.
| Investigating the frequency data revealed that males did in
| fact precede such references to their opposite-sex partner
| with 'my' significantly more often than females. On the
| other hand, females were more likely to precede 'husband'
| or 'boyfriend' with 'her' or 'amazing' and a greater
| variety of words, which is why 'my husband' was not more
| predictive than 'husband' alone. Furthermore, this suggests
| the male preference for the possessive 'my' is at least
| partially due to a lack of talking about others' partners.
|
| To disentangle the effect of topic choice from word choice,
| you'd probably need a controlled study with fixed writing
| prompts.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| 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.
|
| English is at the de-grammarised end of the spectrum. There are
| gendered clues in English, but they'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're
| really a kind of variation on other subgroup slangs - like teen
| slang, other age-related indicators.
|
| Most languages have far more obvious grammatical distinctions.
| The Romance languages have obvious gender in the grammar, but
| it's... just there. It doesn'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.
|
| Fully distinct dialects/languages are incredibly rare and are
| often artificial and/or more likely to be created by a
| subculture than as a direct result of gender differences.
|
| Example: English has Polari, which was entertainer/street slang
| and often used in gay subcultures. It also has Cockney,
| Estuary, Northern, Scottish, Urban, and others - all
| differentiated by culture.
| retrac wrote:
| I used Japanese, like the article did, as an example for this
| reason. Japanese has no grammatical gender like French. But
| Japanese is gendered. There are patterns in Japanese, where
| men and women use pronouns differently, and have slightly
| different patterns to which grammatical forms they use, and
| when. Women tend to use polite forms, in pronoun and noun
| choice as well as verb conjugation, more than men do. Small
| differences in sentence final particles, and so on. In
| practice the standard language becomes nearly gender-neutral
| in formal, polite contexts. Still, there's a real effect in
| Japanese, where men and women do speak and even write
| slightly differently. Male students of Japanese can even
| suffer a problem where they sound effeminate because they
| have modelled themselves on teachers who are mostly women.
|
| I was just observing this general effect is probably true, to
| some degree, big or small, for most languages. It's probably
| a little more pronounced in Japanese than English. In neither
| case is it anywhere distinct enough to call it a separate
| dialect for men and women.
|
| > Most languages have far more obvious grammatical
| distinctions.
|
| Grammatical gender like French or Arabic is pretty unusual,
| really. It's common in the Indo-European and Semitic
| languages, which are prominent by number of speakers, but
| grammatical gender is fairly rare when surveying the world's
| language families as a whole. It's completely absent from
| many of them. The whole Sino-Tibetan language family
| (including modern Chinese), for example. They get along fine
| with a single third person pronoun (in speech) and no
| grammatical gender.
| [deleted]
| ecpottinger wrote:
| This has shown up in the responses to my fan-fic. More than
| once I have been told I used suffixes wrong because I have
| someone of the wrong sex used -chan -kun to the other sex.
| ggrrhh_ta wrote:
| Turkish, an indoeuropean language, has no grammatical
| gender markers.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Turkish is not Indo-European
| ggrrhh_ta wrote:
| Oh, is Altaic, it's grammar and structure is so similar
| in many other regards to indoeuropean languages that I
| did not reliazed it wasn't. Thanks.
| [deleted]
| eatplayrove wrote:
| If you took any Indo-European language and created a new
| language completely contradicting it with respect to any
| aspect of the language, you'd get something pretty close
| to Turkish :-) I am really surprised you think Turkish is
| similar to any Indo-European language. Btw, the Altaic
| language family is also disputed. The most accepted
| theory is that Turkic languages are an isolated language
| family by themselves.
| ggrrhh_ta wrote:
| I am sure I had learned (long in the past) that they were
| in different families; but my little exposure to Turkish
| led me to believe (having forgotten what I had learned)
| that they were related; why? because the conjugations and
| tense modalities evoked to me an analogy to those of
| romance languages, and the declination cases and flexible
| word order evoked to me those of Easter European
| languages; while at the same time dismissing the greatest
| difference: it's agglutinative character.
| vincentmarle wrote:
| That's correct, grammar wise Turkish is closer to
| Japanese and Korean than to Indo-European languages, but
| there's an incredible amount of French loanwords (partly
| because of Ataturk's obsession with French).
| mda wrote:
| French loanwords started came to language in first half
| of 19th century, during the attempts of reforms by
| Sultans and with the influence of people who had French
| education. I would argue most french loanwords were
| adapted earlier than 1920's where Ataturk had an
| influence on Turkish language. Roughly ~4% of Turkish
| words are French loanwords.
| mda wrote:
| Turkish has little structural or grammatical resemblance
| to Indo-European languages from the perspective of its
| main features (extreme agglutination and vowel harmony).
|
| (Edit: reduced absoluteness, because lack of grammatical
| gender feature can be found in some Indo-European
| languages)
| geraneum wrote:
| In Persian (an Indo-European language), not only is there
| no grammatical gender, but also there are no gender
| pronouns [1]. You can write text that is technically
| gender-neutral.
|
| [1] http://sites.la.utexas.edu/persian_online_resources/pro
| nouns...
| brnt wrote:
| Sounds like cannot possibly write a nonneutral text!
| geraneum wrote:
| It's still possible to explicitly mention the gender. For
| example say "that woman" or "the man". The reader also
| might get some clues from the context, for example,
| saying "my dad said..." will reveal some clues about the
| gender of the subject. It's optional.
| [deleted]
| emteycz wrote:
| I don't see how is grammatical gender relevant to this.
| Czech has it, and both males and females speak it the same.
| Different suffixes are used to refer to yourself but nobody
| would think of that as "men/women language" as it's exactly
| what the others use when speaking about men/women.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Interesting fact is that very early Indo-European likely
| didn't have grammatical gender. The (extinct) Anatolian
| languages (Hittite, Luwian) split off before Indo-European
| really gelled, and they didn't have gender but instead a
| system of animate/inanimate.
| guerrilla wrote:
| I don't think you understood what you're responding to as it
| was not talking about grammatical gender, which is why it
| mentioned the use of statistical methods. The claim was that
| men and women do write in different dialects although they
| are less pronounced than in other languages.
| [deleted]
| the_af wrote:
| > _Most languages have far more obvious grammatical
| distinctions. The Romance languages have obvious gender in
| the grammar, but it 's... just there. It doesn'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._
|
| I can't speak for all Romance languages but my native
| Spanish: it'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's not a language for men or women. For
| example, a chair ("silla") is always female, regardless of
| whether it's me saying it (a male) or my mother. It's a bit
| like how ships in English are a "she" regardless of who's
| speaking, only more enforced and for all nouns.
| okal wrote:
| An interesting Romance counter-example is "Obrigado" vs
| "Obrigada" ("thank you", in Portuguese). I'm not even
| remotely fluent, but if I recall correctly, the gender is
| dependent on the speaker, not the person being addressed.
| ggrrhh_ta wrote:
| The most obvious English case would be
| "beautiful/handsome".
|
| I am handsome.
|
| I am beautiful.
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| Those words are differentiated on the object, not the
| gender of the speaker.
| ggrrhh_ta wrote:
| I was trying to give an example similar to
| obrigado/obrigada in English.
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| OK, but neither are examples of language being different
| based on the speaker, they are both based on gender of
| the object, whether is is contextually yourself, or
| another.
| kingcharles wrote:
| Handsome being a male adjective is a recent development
| though. Read some 19th century novels and the women are
| routinely described as handsome.
|
| I told my girlfriend she was handsome the other day and
| she objected strenuously.
|
| https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/355908/why-
| is-ha...
| forinti wrote:
| There are other little things in Portuguese:
|
| I did it myself: Eu fiz eu mesmo/Eu fiz eu mesma.
|
| And most adjectives. Actually, "obrigado" is "obliged" so
| the phrase "much obliged" is equivalent to the Portuguese
| "muito obrigado".
| codethief wrote:
| Well, practically all adjectives in
| Spanish/Portuguese/French/Italian change depending on the
| grammatical gender of the noun they refer to. And, of
| course, if the noun in question is "I" (as in your case),
| then they reveal the (physical) gender of the speaker
| because usually grammatical gender of a
| person == physical gender of that person
|
| But compared to the differences in, e.g., Japanese that
| some people here are discussing, this seems rather minor.
| n4r9 wrote:
| I've heard of this example before, and this is
| speculative but I wonder if it's because the speaker is
| counter-intuitively also the object of the phrase.
|
| The root "obrigad" sounds a lot like the English word
| "obligate". If this is more than just a coincidence, then
| a more direct translation is "I am obliged" rather than
| "thank you". Said this way it makes a lot of sense why
| the verb is determined by the speaker.
| telmo wrote:
| Yes, this is exactly the reason. (I am a native speaker)
| the-smug-one wrote:
| Can it be extended with a reference to the (self-)object?
| Like "me llamo" being "I call myself" in Spanish for "my
| name is".
| the_af wrote:
| In Spanish, "me llamo" carries no gender information.
| the_af wrote:
| Oh, yes, but those aren't nouns. I didn't mean Spanish
| isn't gendered -- it obviously is -- but that gendered
| nouns aren't indicative of the gender of the speaker, so
| that particular observation was unrelated to the topic
| under discussion. Your example is indeed an example of
| gendered language depending on the speaker, and has
| similar examples in Spanish (e.g. "contento" / "contenta"
| for "happy").
| qsort wrote:
| > Any significant text (just a few paragraphs) has enough clues
| to predict a speaker or writer's gender with considerable
| confidence.
|
| Do you have any examples of this?
|
| Not saying I don't believe you, but unless the text contains
| something very obvious (e.g. "my wife"), I often can't tell if
| the writer is a man or a woman.
|
| It's much easier to tell in Italian, French or Spanish, for
| example, all languages where the gender of the speaker is baked
| into most sentences.
| jameshart wrote:
| While you can certainly use statements like that to adjust
| your priors, be careful not to make absolute assumptions - in
| the US approximately 1% of people who have a wife are women.
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| I would say that an assumption with 99% accuracy is a
| pretty good one.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| Just to clarify to help avoid some awkward moments...
|
| In the U.S., the normalization of gay marriage has involved
| a lot of cultural strife over the past few decades.
|
| One may still encounter cliques in the U.S. that refuse to
| accept grammatical constructs such as "her wife" for
| various reasons.
| namelessoracle wrote:
| If your machine learning model had a indicator that could
| point to something with 99 percent accuracy, you would tell
| it to ignore that?
| retrac wrote:
| Some anecdotes I remember regarding American English: men
| pose fewer questions, are more likely to use double negative
| forms, and use the passive voice less. Many word choices are
| somewhat gendered as well. One reply gives the obvious
| example of "lovely" being much more commonly used by women,
| but many words are like that. Even a simple choice like which
| empty qualifier you use -- "drastically", "dramatically",
| "enormously", "badly", "awfully" -- can apparently tip the
| scales one way or the other. (I don't know which is
| supposedly which for those!) These are small differences
| individually, but summed up they apparently become
| considerable.
| silvester23 wrote:
| I don't speak any Spanish or Italian, but I had French in
| school (it's been a while) and I presently cannot recall how
| the gender of the speaker is more obvious than in, say,
| English.
|
| I'm curious, could you give me an example please?
| dgellow wrote:
| "Mon amie est enseignante. Durant l'ete elle s'est engagee
| a se lever plus tot pour la nouvelle annee scolaire."
|
| - "amie" is feminin of "ami"
|
| - "enseignante" is feminin of "enseignant"
|
| - "elle s'est engagee" is feminin of "il s'est engage"
|
| Edit: note that the concept of "gender" in indo-european
| languages is only vaguely related to the concept of
| "gender" as in human sexual expression. For example "la
| nouvelle annee scolaire" ("the new school year"), "annee"
| is considered feminin, so "nouvelle" has to be adapted to
| the feminin, instead of the masculin/neutral "nouveau". But
| that of course doesn't make any sense if you only consider
| "gender in languages" to be about male/female.
| the_af wrote:
| > _- "amie" is feminin of "ami"_
|
| But this relates to the gender of the friend, not of the
| speaker.
| dgellow wrote:
| The principle is similar for the speaker. Anything the
| speaker would say about themselves would have to be
| gendered accordingly.
| the_af wrote:
| I don't speak French, but I'm a native Spanish speaker
| and I have two observations:
|
| First, it's true that Romance languages use gender in
| this manner. I was just pointing out that the specific
| example chosen didn't show this. The example has nothing
| to do with the gender of the speaker, but with the gender
| of the object under discussion; it's similar to you
| saying "she" or "her" when referring to a woman; it
| enables me to make no assumptions about your own gender.
|
| Second:
|
| > _Anything the speaker would say about themselves would
| have to be gendered accordingly._
|
| In Spanish there are careful ways to avoid making
| assertions about yourself in a gendered manner. They are
| a bit more roundabout, but can be done. My point is not
| that this is the most natural way of speaking, just
| pointing out that it's _technically_ not true that you
| must always make gendered assertions about yourself.
|
| Example:
|
| Instead of saying "I'm very tired", "estoy muy cansado"
| (gendered male language) I can say "tiredness overcomes
| me", "el cansancio me invade", hiding my gender. Yes,
| it's a bit artificial but not so uncommon I have never
| read it. So in Spanish you can make assertions about
| yourself without betraying your gender. Don't know about
| French or other Romance languages, but it wouldn't
| surprise me to know you can employ similar tricks. It's
| probably _harder_ in Spanish than in English to hold a
| conversation longer than a couple of sentences while
| hiding your gender; it will start sounding very
| unnatural, I grant you this.
| dgellow wrote:
| I guess you could do it to certain extents, but it's
| likely to be considered incorrect French, or just really
| weird. Now if you're writing a song or a poem, it's more
| common to see that kind of construct, as a way to play
| with rhythm and sounds, so it's not entirely impossible.
| kaladin-jasnah wrote:
| Yeah, a better example would be something describing
| their speaker. For example: "je suis americain" vs. "je
| suis americaine," (I'm American) the latter being the
| feminine form of "American."
|
| I am not a French speaker by any means so feel free to
| correct my words.
| Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
| Many adjectives in Spanish have gender, so for example:
|
| I'm tired (male) -> estoy cansado
|
| I'm tired (female) -> estoy cansada
|
| In French it works the same way, although I'm not confident
| enough in French to give you an example without making
| horrible spelling mistakes. But the idea is the same.
| Rels wrote:
| For French:
|
| I'm tired (male) -> Je suis fatigue
|
| I'm tired (female) -> Je suis fatiguee
| forinti wrote:
| The French passe compose is funny if translated word for
| word into Portuguese:
|
| Je suis tombe -> Eu sou caido (or Eu sou tombado) Je suis
| tombee -> Eu sou caida (or Eu sou tombada)
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| _Je suis tombe_ is _passe compose_. _Je suis fatigue_ is
| _present de l 'indicatif_. _Fatigue_ can both be an
| adjectif and a _participe passe_. The verb _fatiguer_
| uses the _avoir_ auxiliary verb when using _passe
| compose_ however: _ils m 'ont fatigue_ / _la poutre a
| fatigue sous le poids_.
| simiones wrote:
| The passe compose of "je suis fatigue(e)" [I am tired]
| would actually be "j'ai ete fatigue(e)" [I was tired].
| Translated word for word to Portuguese, this would be "Eu
| tive sido/estado cansado(cansada)".
| Fradow wrote:
| First very simple example that comes to mind, the sentence
| "I'm happy": in English, the speaker's gender is not
| obvious.
|
| In French, you will say "Je suis content" if you are male,
| and "Je suis contente" if you are female.
|
| The trailing "e" change the pronunciation: in the male
| variant, the trailing "t" is silent, while it's not in the
| female variant because of that "e".
| SilasX wrote:
| English kind of has traces of this in eg "I'm an
| actress/waitress/stewardess" (vs actor/waiter/steward)
| although gendered role-terms like those are less common
| and tend to get phased out in favor of gender-neutral
| ones ("server" replacing waiter/tress and "flight
| attendant" replacing steward/ess). And I wouldn't
| consider it incorrect or out of place for a woman to say
| "I'm an actor".
| mrighele wrote:
| In Italian some tenses are gendered. They are more or less
| the equivalent of english perfect tenses, like "Io sono
| andato"/"Io sono andata" (I have been to) "Io saro
| andato"/"Io saro andata" (I will have been to)
| 3np wrote:
| Here's an essay exploring that
|
| https://www.diva-
| portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1023448/FULLTEXT...
| [deleted]
| mojuba wrote:
| Even as a non-native English speaker I can tell you off the
| top of my head: "lovely" in the American culture is
| predominantly used by women (though in the British culture
| exceptions can be made more often). But I'm sure there are a
| lot of more subtle differences too.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| British culture is very much not homogeneous in this
| regard. The use of words like _lovely_ probably tells a
| British speaker more about the geographical origin of the
| speaker than their sex.
| tech2 wrote:
| There is a site I'd used a while back for exactly this when I
| was trying to ensure that my writing (and speech) in some
| fiction was gendered in a particular manner -
| https://www.hackerfactor.com/GenderGuesser.php#Analyze
|
| Playing "guess why" is the fun part :) I'm sure there are
| other tools available now and I'd love to hear of them if
| people are aware of them!
| [deleted]
| dudeinjapan wrote:
| > Japanese with its various first-person pronouns and gendered
| patterns to verb conjugations is not that odd
|
| Japanese does have gendered first-person pronouns, though the
| textbook standard one "watashi" is neutral. In Japanese,
| pronouns in general (including fp) are used less than English;
| they are only used when there is ambiguity, names are often
| preferred to pronouns, and in casual speech it is even OK to
| refer to yourself by your name (like Jimmy from Seinfeld.)
|
| In the textbook, Japanese doesn't really have gendered patterns
| to verb conjugations. Verbs are rather conjugated based on
| level of formality, for example "itte-ru", "itte-imasu", "itte-
| orimasu" all mean "I am going" in ascending degree of
| politeness. There are also impolite/brash-sounding forms "iku-
| zo", "ikou-ze", "ike", etc. which tend to be said more by men
| (or teenage boys) but women can use them too, it's just not
| "lady-like".
|
| That said--it is fair to observe that in film for example
| samurai and geishas speak essentially two different sounding
| languages, more so than a knight versus a princess. Men are
| expected to be rugged and use "rugged" words; women are
| expected to be beautiful and use "beautiful" words. There are
| definitely words, speech, and tonal patterns which are more
| masculine and feminine, but in anime for example these
| differences are exaggerated far beyond real-world
| conversational norms.
| kemayo wrote:
| I always thought the pronouns were fascinating, just because
| of the level of intentionality implied in picking one. It's
| like if in English I deliberately chose to say "I, a tough
| guy, did X" (which I gather is the approximate equivalent of
| saying "ore wa X"...).
| numpad0 wrote:
| An explanation that I find very fitting to Japanese is it's a
| "topic prominent" language with topic-comment structure
| rather than being subject prominent like English is. The
| concept of topic explains frequent absence of explicit
| subjects better, I think.
| eesmith wrote:
| Is Turing's Imitation Game - in its original formulation to
| identify which of players A and B is the woman and the man - so
| easily solved? I don't think so.
|
| It's clear that many factors contribute to one's choice of
| language.
|
| In the mid-1950s people studied the differences between the
| English spoken by the upper class ("U") and middle-class
| ("non-U") in the UK - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U_and_non-
| U_English .
|
| In the US, a Black American may grow up with speaking African-
| American Vernacular English
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-
| American_Vernacular_En...), and code switch to speak a more
| general American dialect.
|
| My freshman year roommate spoke more "Southern" when on the
| phone to family than when talking to others in the dorm.
|
| The language of a scientific monograph is quite different than
| the language of an HN comment, and being able to write in that
| style suggests an academic training.
|
| So I'm not surprised that gender can also be a factor in word
| choice. Indeed, a friend of mine who reads romance novels
| claims a common difference between male and female authors is
| how they describe clothing.
|
| If you want to describe all of those as different languages ...
| I've long given up trying to understand the differences between
| 'dialect' and 'language' (much less 'sociolect', 'ethnolect',
| 'stylistic register', etc) so go right ahead.
|
| But I'm hesitant to believe that "Any significant text"
| predicts a specific author's gender "with considerable
| confidence."
|
| I know of several cases where people tried and failed to guess
| an author's gender. Robert Silverberg, for example, found
| "something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree's writing";
| James Tiptree, Jr. was the male pseudonym of a female author.
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Tiptree_Jr.)
|
| Searching Google Scholar, I find articles like
| https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2109/2109.13890.pdf saying:
|
| > However, other gaps need to be addressed as well, including
| that no method of classifying age or gender--both of which are
| aspects of author profiling--that also considers the genre or
| nature of the analyzed text has been widely endorsed. Beyond
| that, to the best of our knowledge, no research has involved
| surveying or comparing the different approaches used in author
| profiling. In fact, current knowledge about the task is largely
| based on small-scale experiments conducted to find a reliable
| classification method with a near-zero error rate. In order to
| use forensic authorship profiling as admissible evidence in
| courts, the proposed methods must have about 100% accuracy. The
| average accuracy of good proposed methods are ranging from
| 70-85% [5]-[9]. However, the proposed methods still suffer from
| low accuracy.
|
| That suggests that the "with considerable confidence" you refer
| to is on a population level, and not a per-person level. Rather
| like how, with considerable confidence, I can say that in
| general men are taller than women, even though many women are
| taller than many men.
| FabHK wrote:
| > Is Turing's Imitation Game - in its original formulation to
| identify which of players A and B is the woman and the man -
| so easily solved? I don't think so.
|
| The imitation game is adversarial (both players try to
| convince the interrogator that they are the woman, or the
| human). GP was talking about non-adversarial settings.
| eesmith wrote:
| The original claim was " _Any_ significant text (just a few
| paragraphs) ".
|
| "Warm Worlds and Otherwise" is a significant text.
|
| I'll grant this qualifier for purposes of discussion. In
| that case:
|
| - if someone writes using adversarial methods, can that
| person's gender still be detected? How much text is
| required?
|
| - Here are male authors who wrote romances using a female
| pseudonym - https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/104973.Male
| _Authors_Who_... . Can we presume they used other
| adversarial methods? I do.
|
| - How many people are trained to write using an adversarial
| style?
|
| (Quoting the top Google hit for "write like a man" at
| https://www.timsquirrell.com/blog/2017/3/29/write-like-a-
| man... : """Teachers often make up for this by telling
| their female students, either explicitly or implicitly, to
| "write like a man". This means that they should write
| confidently, "objectively", not hedging their arguments,
| coming down boldly on one side of an issue, etc.""")
|
| - Are all gender mis-identifications due to the authors
| using deliberate adversarial techniques?
| Pinegulf wrote:
| This idea seems like a bad idea. At least from the natural-
| selection view: All of presented ones are obscure and on the
| verge of dying out.
| rvense wrote:
| Language death has nothing to do with fitness, and these
| languages are not being "selected against" by the presence (or
| absence) of some linguistic characteristic. Languages die out
| because the groups that speak them assimilate into other
| groups, taking on their language and culture.
| grozzle wrote:
| Indeed. English is as dominant in the world as it is today
| probably because England and the USA have (or had) plenty of
| shallow coal, iron, and (relevant after the "special
| relationship") oil deposits, not because of any particular
| linguistic efficiency.
| bmmayer1 wrote:
| Iraq has even more oil deposits. Why doesn't the world
| speak Arabic?
| grozzle wrote:
| Too late to the party with just that resource. Engines
| that most efficiently use oil came about only after the
| era of history when engines that need coal were dominant.
|
| Fun bit of alt-history pondering - China was the most
| powerful single nation on Earth at the time of the dawn
| of the industrial revolution - it's quite plausible that
| they missed out on that lead just because of a couple of
| shallow whitewater sections of the Yangtze river that
| made bringing their coal by barge to the coastal cities
| impractical.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| No, they missed out on it because of bureaucratic
| stupidity.
|
| There was a Chinese industrial revolution in, IIRC, the
| 1100s and/or 1200s. They were producing something on the
| order of 100,000 tons of iron a year, with the whole
| industrial revolution "using the outputs to improve the
| efficiency" cycle starting to happen.
|
| And then the bureaucrats shut it down, because "the wrong
| kind of people" were getting rich from it.
|
| They could have owned the world. They could have been the
| ones with the technological and manufacturing dominance.
| And instead they threw it away to keep their society
| stratified in the way they thought it should be. The
| Chinese "century of humiliation" was caused by that
| decision back in the 1200s.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Especially seeing as hugely dominant languages like Mandarin
| and English are so difficult to write, and one would assume
| that ease of literacy would contribute to fitness.
| renewiltord wrote:
| That's memetic selection, right? Like, the assimilation is
| going one way.
| rvense wrote:
| But it's selection based on non-linguistic criteria, like
| who's better at violence and economics. So it affects
| language, but it is not based in language, and thus GP's
| insinuation that this linguistic feature is a "bad idea
| from a natural selection point of view" and this is somehow
| related to those languages' so-called obscurity does not
| make sense.
| renewiltord wrote:
| That makes sense. There is low evidence that having this
| characteristic affects the assimilation. Okay, colour me
| convinced.
| rvense wrote:
| For it to make sense, language replacement (which is an
| observable phenomenon) would have to happen by
| communities learning a bunch of different languages and
| picking the one that they liked best. That's just not how
| it goes. You learn a new language to speak with new
| people that you're interested in, regardless of how weird
| and hard to learn their language is.
| mojuba wrote:
| Languages used to be so much more fluid before the invention of
| printing. Now printing and primary schools have slowed the
| process down considerably, as well as destroyed a lot of
| smaller dialects that never made it to printed literature. Same
| for gender dialects, I presume.
|
| You could argue though that printing and schools are part of
| the human evolution.
| grozzle wrote:
| True. Irish in its heyday had four rather different dialects,
| but today only the artificial compromise "fifth province"
| amalgam is taught in schools.
|
| Same with Japanese. There are _some_ proudly, stubbornly
| distinct phrases in Kansai-ben and other regions, but the
| choice of the Meiji-era government to only teach Standard
| Tokyo Japanese in schools has had the desired homogenising
| effect.
|
| Even as recently as the 1940s, there are well-documented
| cases of teens from the south of England, sent to the north
| of England, to work in mines for the war effort, who simply
| could not understand the variety of English being spoken
| around them. Radio and TV smoothed out all those differences.
| timkam wrote:
| Judging the quality of something primarily based on its
| prevalence is a questionable idea as well (no offense). The
| better argument could be that some of these languages are the
| result of violent conquest, the subjugation of (indigenous)
| women and children, and possibly also of the scarcity of
| meaningful communication between genders.
| virtualritz wrote:
| I have an Australian friend whose wife is Japanese. He learned
| speaking Japanese from her.
|
| When they lived in Japan for a while he was frequently the
| subject of jokes about how "he speaks like a woman" among male
| Japanese native speakers.
|
| See https://bondlingo.tv/blog/male-and-female-japanese-how-
| males...
| redis_mlc wrote:
| Women say, "ohayo gozaimasu", and men can just say in a bass
| voice, "osu." :)
| rgrieselhuber wrote:
| This is very common in Japan, it is honestly very cringe-
| inducing to see Western males coming off this way, it seems
| needy and submissive more than anything.
| QuadmasterXLII wrote:
| English actually has different languages for 12 year olds and
| adults. Vocabulary like "cringe" is fine for kids, but makes
| you come off as judgmental and unpleasant when used in a more
| formal context.
| egypturnash wrote:
| I wonder if this will continue to be a generational thing,
| I still have a smattering of eighties Valley-speak because
| that was pretty popular in my teen years. Maybe people who
| are in their early teens now will be as likely to call
| something they don't like "cringe" in their fifties as I am
| to call something "bogus".
| bckr wrote:
| It's fine to use the word "cringe", but it might be cringe
| to use the phrase "it's cringe".
| lamontcg wrote:
| I keep hoping that word will eventually eat itself.
| teawrecks wrote:
| The only way that will happen is if adults start using
| it. Next time you meet a 12 year old who says something
| is "cringe", tell them they are "cringe" for using the
| word "cringe".
| rgrieselhuber wrote:
| Find a better word for that feeling you get when you hear
| fingernails on chalkboards and we can use that instead on
| this formal Hacker News setting.
| Muromec wrote:
| >it seems needy and submissive more than anything.
|
| Never before did the idea of being reborn as a woman in Japan
| in a next life sound that bad.
| rgrieselhuber wrote:
| The funny thing is, Japanese women don't really come off
| that way, it's just how they talk and they are quite adept
| at achieving their goals with their "feminine" language.
| One gets the impression that many of the Western men who
| learn Japanese from their wives and girlfriends are
| actually trying to emulate this ability to manipulate their
| world through softer / more social language and achieve
| similar levels of success, but it doesn't really work for
| them and seems sociopathic instead. Hence, the cringe.
| teawrecks wrote:
| Interesting. Would "simping" be a better term than
| sociopathic? Obviously that's not necessarily what's
| going on, but Japanese is already so contextual, I
| imagine it's difficult to separate/rationalize _how_
| someone speaks the way they do from the _why_.
| rgrieselhuber wrote:
| That's not a bad way to describe it.
| protomyth wrote:
| It happens in some of the plains tribal languages. One of my
| female bosses at a grant program learned to speak her native
| language from her uncles. Her female relatives tease her about
| speaking like a man.
| clsec wrote:
| Yes, in Lakota men and women speak differently. My mom used
| to laugh at women (usually non-Lakota) who would speak like
| men.
| protomyth wrote:
| She speaks Dakota. I'm pretty sure that includes Nakota
| speakers as well.
| clsec wrote:
| Yes. The difference between the dialects of Lakota,
| Nakota & Dakota is that the L's in Lakota are replaced by
| N's and D's in their respective dialects.
| protomyth wrote:
| There is a bit of word drift too.
| akyoan wrote:
| I feel this in my own life, as an European grown up mostly
| around my mother, sister, and younger female cousins. My father
| lived abroad for long periods of time.
|
| Women nowadays keep assuming I'm gay due to my mannerisms.
| canadianfella wrote:
| A European not "an".
| eesmith wrote:
| https://notalwaysright.com/a-gender-fluid-household/157967/ .
| Short version: 11 year old living only with women picked up
| practices about how to wear at towel, what to shave, wearing
| mascara, etc. that his mother's boyfriend both supports and
| gently points out they are typically gendered.
| animal_spirits wrote:
| That was a fun read
| danbolt wrote:
| This is the best anime I've ever watched.
| dahfizz wrote:
| This strikes me as very strange...
|
| How did the mom not realize that her kid was shaving his
| legs and wearing mascara? I guess it would be one thing if
| the kid was doing it with intention, but he clearly wasn't.
| How did she never talk to her son about that?
| eesmith wrote:
| Don't forget bias error. The linked-to site gets
| contributions from around the world. There's 45 million
| mothers in the US, so source population of about 100
| million mothers. If 0.1% of families have no other male
| presence that's 100K families. If 0.01% of these mothers
| don't notice [1], that's still 10 families.
|
| And it's the unusual which make it to sites like these.
| ("When dog bites man, it's not news. But when man bites
| dog, now that is news!")
|
| [1] Or it could be the mother didn't know how to bring it
| up, or thought she was being supportive of her son's
| choices.
| anotherman554 wrote:
| I feel like if the boy went to school with male students
| the other boys would make fun of him until he conformed
| to the standard behavior, or until he decided he didn't
| care if people made fun of him.
| eesmith wrote:
| ... yes. Which is probably why the text says "She laughs
| and apologizes after [Stepdad] tells her I am lucky I've
| never showered at school or I'd be a laughing stock" and
| "I'm SO GLAD he was around before I started high school;
| I can't imagine that would have been a pleasant
| experience doing things the way I'd always done them."
|
| Could other 11 year olds spot a boy using mascara, a
| differing from one with thick eyelashes?
|
| Or tell that someone is shaving his legs when there isn't
| yet even peach fuzz on his chin?
|
| I couldn't, but I'm pretty oblivious to such things.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > Could other 11 year olds spot a boy using mascara, a
| differing from one with thick eyelashes?
|
| I think they would just default to making fun of him for
| wearing mascara. (source: i have thick eyelashes)
|
| > Or tell that someone is shaving his legs when there
| isn't yet even peach fuzz on his chin?
|
| definitely not.
|
| > I couldn't, but I'm pretty oblivious to such things.
|
| as am i, but i've learned that many other people are
| oddly skilled at picking up on these things.
| johnisgood wrote:
| Well, there's a growing trend against bullying.
| Personally, bullying toughened me up, and it affected me
| in ways that I am glad for. Of course it could have gone
| wrong, too.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| eh, i think i am largely glad the whole bullying + male
| chauvinism thing is slowly dying out.
|
| i think the next step is recognizing that this is a
| problem that needs to be confronted for both men and
| women. "toxic masculinity" among men is frequently
| nowadays talked about and criticized, but i think women
| are given a bit too much of a pass in holding pretty
| shitty gendered/trad expectations of men.
| [deleted]
| nefitty wrote:
| I couldn't use chapstick in elementary school because of
| the relentless bullying it inevitably triggered. Not just
| toward me, but any male that dared to hydrate his lips.
| That sort of reaction made me super averse toward any
| sort of preening-type of behavior, lest I be perceived as
| feminine.
|
| Even now, I'm more comfortable if I look at least a
| little unkempt, as if I work outside with my hands or
| something. I consciously know it's dumb, but my wife
| expresses preferences for that unkemptness in me as well.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Did any of these kids ever chop wood outside in the
| winter or hunt?
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Gendered in the West maybe. Plenty of men in Pakistan and
| Afghanistan wear kohl, dye their beard with henna, stroll
| hand in hand etc.
| eesmith wrote:
| Sure. But this story is clearly labeled "Australia", and
| Pakistan and Afghanistan have their own gender-based
| customs. So your point is .... that gender practices are
| not universal?
|
| I mean, growing up in the US I heard about how French
| women didn't shave their armpits. As an Italian example,
| Sophia Loren -
| https://fineartamerica.com/featured/sophia-loren-on-a-
| poster... . So it's not like these have been universal
| Western practices even in my lifetime.
| TeeMassive wrote:
| I'm learning Japanese (very slowly and more of a hobby) and
| being a caricature of a "gaijin who speaks like a woman" has
| always been a fear of mine haha.
|
| Fun fact, katakana (more sharp and right angled lines) used to
| be for men and hiragana for women (more round and swift).
| w0mbat wrote:
| The same thing happened to a friend of my dad. A long time ago,
| the friend was a British diplomat living somewhere like
| Singapore and he made friends with the two Japanese sisters in
| the next apartment. They used to have tea and chat and he
| helped them practice their English. Being good with languages
| he soon picked up a lot of Japanese from them. One day he got
| invited to an event at the Japanese Embassy and was excited to
| be able to show off his secret language skills. However, any
| Japanese man he spoke to would react strangely and it looked
| like they were trying hard not to laugh. He eventually got
| someone to explain that he was using "women's words", and the
| effect of a dignified English gentleman in a tuxedo talking
| like that was hilarious to them.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Guy was trying to say "Greetings gentlemen, allow me to
| introduce myself" but all they heard was "Gweetings
| gentwemen, awwow me tuwu intwoduce mysewf".
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| Since education in the classics is nearly non-existent:
|
| https://youtu.be/kx_G2a2hL6U
|
| "Remember what punishments befell us in this world when we
| ourselves did not cherish learning nor transmit it to other
| men."
| numpad0 wrote:
| I guess more like "oh god this is terrible please no" vs
| "for god's sake don't fucking do that"
| AlgorithmicTime wrote:
| My naammme is Biggus Dickus.
| amelius wrote:
| What is curious about this, is that his wife didn't find it
| off-putting that her husband was speaking woman-lingo all this
| time.
| globalise83 wrote:
| Perhaps she is into really-subtle-and-really-long-term
| practical jokes.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| Good point - my wife is hispanic and I've learned Spanish
| mostly from her. She's quick to correct me when I use a
| phrase that she uses all the time that men shouldn't (like
| "que feito", for example).
| ncpa-cpl wrote:
| Spanish varies a lot depending on the country, but I've
| noticed this:
|
| My female Spanish speaking friends use: Holi, Porfi
| (Hi/Please)
|
| While the male ones use Hola and Porfa (Hi/Please)
| [deleted]
| dustintrex wrote:
| This is a running joke among Japanese language learners, but
| less of an actual problem than you'd think. The _really_
| feminine words (atashi, kashira, ending sentences with wa etc)
| are trivially avoided, so you end up with neutral /excessively
| polite/gaijinkusai but not particularly feminine language.
|
| For what it's worth, few foreigners master Japanese to the
| level where they could convincingly sound like a tough
| male/gangster, but unless you actually are in the Yakuza, this
| ability is not particularly useful. Sonai yuun yattara ippen
| washi no chinpo shabutte miruka?
| earthboundkid wrote:
| I disagree. Yes, it's trivial to avoid saying Atashi and
| ending sentence in wa, but feminine language differences are
| a lot more pervasive than that. There's a ton of subtle
| stuff, and you end up sounding strange if you aren't really
| careful. To just give one example, there are a ton of places
| you can choose to throw in an o- or not, just like in
| English, you can choose to say "the" or not. As in English,
| it's about pattern matching and getting used to the subtle
| frequencies for this stuff. Just like French people sound
| silly when they use "the" in the wrong places, a man sounds
| silly when using o- in the wrong places.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > To just give one example, there are a ton of places you
| can choose to throw in an o- or not, just like in English,
| you can choose to say "the" or not.
|
| Definiteness marking is certainly an area where speakers of
| languages that don't do that get confused. But I'm not
| comfortable saying that there are a ton of places in
| English where you can choose to say "the" or not. In most
| cases, there's only one _correct_ choice.
|
| Going back over the nouns in my previous paragraph:
| (marking area[0] speakers[1] languages[2] I ton[0] places
| English you cases choice[1] [there])
|
| [0] rival article already marked
|
| [1] "the" permissible; presence and absence are both fine
|
| [2] "the" possible; presence may raise eyebrows
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > This is a running joke among Japanese language learners,
| but less of an actual problem than you'd think.
|
| I have gotten some comments about my Chinese being somewhat
| feminine. I don't speak, so this is all based on text
| messaging. And Chinese doesn't have overt gender-of-speaker
| markers, so the issue persists even if you avoid those.
|
| I particularly remember one person commenting that making the
| agreement / I'm-listening noise in two syllables, Ng Ng , was
| "cute" where a man should have just said Ng . Apparently,
| this is the kind of thing that will get you.
|
| For what it's worth, in my face-to-face interactions with
| Chinese men, I got a lot more criticism for the fact that all
| of the acquaintances I ever mentioned were female than for my
| choice of words in the rare case where I spoke in Chinese.
| But again, speaking Chinese is mostly restricted to text
| messages for me.
| spacechild1 wrote:
| I speak "female" Kansai dialect because that's what I hear all
| the time from my wife. When I speak to other Japanese people
| they find it pretty hilarious.
| FabHK wrote:
| Related phenomenon:
|
| Mother-in-law-speech, where the language you use changes when you
| speak to your in-laws. There's an Australian language that has
| clicks, but only when talking to the mother in law.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avoidance_speech
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| In Dance with wolves, all men incorrectly speak the dialect used
| for women.
| kgeist wrote:
| In Slavic languages (i.e half Europe) the choice of past tense
| forms depends on the gender: "I said" is translated differently
| depending on whether "I" is male or female. I wouldn't say it's a
| totally different language, but translators often have to assume
| the gender when translating from a language which doesn't have
| such a feature.
| lloda wrote:
| But those forms depend on the gender of the subject, not on the
| gender of the speaker. It's just grammatical gender.
| Muromec wrote:
| It's not even unique to Slavic languages -- past tense is also
| formed through an adjective (and is subject to all gender
| agreement things) in French, so it may be something from PIE.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dative_construction
| Muromec wrote:
| I'm not sure it's that one. There isn't anything going on
| with the subject, it's still in nominative case, while the
| verb is doing funny things.
| xdennis wrote:
| > In Slavic languages (i.e half Europe)
|
| I'm not sure that's quite right. Europe is typically divided in
| 3: Slavic, Germanic and Romance. By my count the population of
| Slavic countries adds up to 280 million of Europe's 750 million
| people.
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| A pidgin language is described in the article. I've heard about
| pidgin [0] in 2003, in the context of Hawaii, and I found the
| concept really fascinating.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin
| alignItems wrote:
| In NYC, Hasidic men speak in Yiddish while the women speak in
| English.
|
| They both can use the other language of course, but as a second
| language and with different accents.
| arrow7000 wrote:
| Was going to bring up this example.
|
| To add to this: hasidic men will often use Hebrew/Aramaic
| phrases used in the Talmud or its commentaries, whereas women,
| who are not permitted to study these materials, don't.
| ars wrote:
| They are permitted to, they just usually don't bother. They
| would learn it as kids in school, and like kids everywhere
| they aren't volunteering for extra classes.
|
| Some women will choose to do so as adults, but at that point
| it doesn't become part of the vocabulary.
| arrow7000 wrote:
| This is simple false.
|
| In hasidic communities women learn mostly Tanach (the Old
| Testament), Halacha (practical laws) and Mussar (roughly:
| ethics).
|
| They absolutely do not learn the Talmud or its
| commentaries. In hasidic circles learning the Talmud - or
| any kind of in-depth abstract study - is said to lead women
| to "lightheadedness" aka promiscuity.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Leaning the Talmud makes women promiscuous? I'm pretty
| sure that's not what deep theological learning is
| supposed to do...
| golemiprague wrote:
| Talmud is not theological learning, it is mostly the
| discussions leading to the coded law, so a bit like a
| combination of law and logic reasoning. As previous
| comments mentioned, women can study ethics and the bible
| which is more theological in nature.
| names_are_hard wrote:
| If you mean that in your opinion (or according to your
| interpretation of Jewish law) they are permitted to...well,
| that's just, like, your opinion, man.
|
| If you mean that they believe themselves to be permitted
| to, this is definitely not the case. Talmud (ie
| Mishna/Gemara) outside of "agadata" is considered off-
| limits to women by all Haredi communities I'm aware of. In
| the past all Torah study was considered forbidden, but in
| the last few hundred years leniencies were found to enable
| some amount of Jewish religious education for girls. This
| was quite an innovation and was not taken lightly. Today,
| in some communities the original texts are all forbidden,
| but in most the Written Law (Tanach) is permitted why the
| Oral Law (Talmud) is not. Halacha (practical law) is
| usually allowed, as is theology, philosophy and ethics
| (Mussar, Chassidus, Rambam's "Shmoneh Prakim", etc)
|
| Bottom line: women don't use scholarly jargon because they
| are intentionally and expressly excluded from such
| activities.
| names_are_hard wrote:
| Scrolled all the way down until I found this example, you saved
| me a top-level comment.
|
| Similarly, in yeshiva communities in the US men and women
| typically pronounce certain Hebrew vowels differently. I'm not
| sure what the historical context here is, but this always
| fascinated me. In any case, women and men speak in noticeably
| different ways about religious concepts, to the point where
| adopting the opposite gender's pronunciation stands out as
| "weird".
|
| In addition to pronunciation differences, using more Aramaic
| and certain Yiddish phrases is male-coded in this community.
| coldtea wrote:
| So, in a manner, all of them?
| me_me_mu_mu wrote:
| Why/how people find ways to add unnecessary complexities always
| blows my mind.
| snvzz wrote:
| I prefer to see it as richness of culture.
| pmjones wrote:
| Insert obligatory "isn't that _all_ cultures? " joke here.
| temptemptemp111 wrote:
| All cultures
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| I, male, mostly grew up with my single mom and for some reason
| people found it funny that I referred to my underwear as panties.
| xhevahir wrote:
| There are some societies where men or women have a separate
| language--actually, "register" may be a better term--for
| ceremonies that are specific to that gender, like circumcision
| rituals and so on. Nigel Barley's memoir Ceremony tells about one
| of these, which has a Wikipedia entry here:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/La%27bi_language
| bmmayer1 wrote:
| One example here that's missed but I know from personal
| experience[0]: the Venda language of South Africa has two
| different words for "Hello" -- men say "Nda" which literally
| means "I am a lion," and women say "Aah" which as far as I
| learned doesn't mean anything in particular.
|
| [0]https://brianmayer.com/2012/06/saying-hello-in-limpopo/
| gadders wrote:
| Didn't women in Ancient Greece (specifically Athens) speak a
| different dialect of Greek to the men?
| fionnoh wrote:
| Deaf Irish men and women who went to school in the mid 20th
| century would have learned different sign languages.
|
| "The fact that the Catholic schools are segregated on the basis
| of gender led to the development of a gendered-generational
| variant of Irish Sign Language that is still evident (albeit to a
| lesser degree) today."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Sign_Language
| _nalply wrote:
| It's very typical for Signed Languages to have multiple centers
| usually the schools for Deaf. Swiss German Sign Language for
| example has five centers for Bern, Basel, Zurich, Luzern and
| St. Gallen. People say today that Swiss German Sign Language
| has five dialects and this usually wows people, even the
| Alemannic Swiss who themselves have many variants in their
| Alemannic dialect.
|
| Ireland is special that they gender-segretated the Deaf
| children and the consequence is that women and men have
| different dialects.
| paxcoder wrote:
| The two Dublin schools (not far from each other) adopted
| different approaches to the sign language as it was being
| developed. That's unfortunate
| thoraway66 wrote:
| Oh no, cultural diversity!
|
| Everything should be McDs and Starbucks
| smilespray wrote:
| It's true what they say. Men are from Omicron Persei 9 and women
| are from Omicron Persei 7.
| bradrn wrote:
| They've missed at least one prominent example, namely the South
| American language Karaja [0]. Ribeiro's grammar spends a whole
| chapter talking about the difference between female and male
| speech, which include:
|
| * Men can drop _k_ , often causing vowel fusion and modification
|
| * Men drop _d_ / _n_ in the two words _do_ 'a' and _ado_
| 'something'
|
| * Various irregular vocabulary differences
|
| For instance, female _dIkar@ kadIdakakre_ corresponds to male
| _dIar@ adIdakakre_ 'I will take it off'.
|
| [0] Ribeiro, Eduardo Rivail. 2012. _A grammar of Karaja_.
| (Doctoral dissertation, University of Chicago; x+291pp.)
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| > Native Tongue [published 1984] is a feminist science fiction
| novel by American writer Suzette Haden Elgin, the first book in
| her series of the same name. The trilogy is centered in a future
| dystopian American society where the 19th Amendment was repealed
| in 1991[1] and women have been stripped of civil rights. A group
| of women, part of a worldwide group of linguists who facilitate
| human communication with alien races, create a new language for
| women as an act of resistance. Elgin created that language,
| Laadan, and instructional materials are available.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_Tongue_(Elgin_novel)
| kortex wrote:
| My favorite feature of Laadan is grammatical evidentiality,
| which I believe is based on real features of certain Native
| American languages. This is where you state _how_ you know
| something, did you see it with your own eyes, hear it from a
| close friend, or just through the grapevine. There 's even a
| particle for having dreamed it.
|
| How is this different than English? For one, English relies
| heavily on the copula (is/to be) for statements of fact ("it
| _is_ raining " vs "I _see_ rain "), and secondly it's baked
| into the grammar. Stating something without evidence would
| sound just as wrong as "Me fail English? That's unpossible!"
|
| The one exception might be the "uncertainty suffix" _-ish_.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidentiality
| 3np wrote:
| Im surprised they mention Japanese and not Thai, were the
| difference between gender dialects is more distinct.
| hawk_ wrote:
| Not an exhaustive list there by any means. For example Hindi
| and many other languages from the subcontinent are spoken
| differently based in the speaker's gender, although not as
| pronounced a difference as to call them separate "dialects".
| yorwba wrote:
| Japanese has greater cultural clout. There are probably more
| English speakers who know "konnichiwa" and vaguely recall
| hearing that men and women speak differently in Japanese, than
| English speakers who can recognize "sawatdee krap/ka" as a Thai
| greeting, let alone tell you which ending is used by female
| speakers and which by male ones.
| moffkalast wrote:
| I'm surprised nobody has so far mentioned how blatantly sexist
| the whole thing is, in the age of feminists endlessly arguing
| about the smallest pointless thing.
| 3np wrote:
| Vlogpost on same subject
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5b0zeCfW7hM
| juancn wrote:
| They missed Japanese! It has two completely different structures
| for males and females.
| closeneough wrote:
| Isn't this true for every culture?
| emsy wrote:
| This was probably meant as a joke but it rings true to some
| degree.
| rgoulter wrote:
| Deborah Tannen's "You Just Don't Understand" discusses this
| idea. I found it pretty interesting.
|
| Roughly, its thesis is that men typically interact with
| others in a competitive way, as if interactions are about
| status in a hierarchy; whereas typically women would prefer
| to interact in a cooperative way, where interactions are
| about belonging/intimacy. -- The different perspectives lend
| themselves to framing the same sets of actions in different
| ways.
|
| -- The preface makes an interesting point: to the extent that
| differences in cultural attitudes leads to
| misunderstanding/conflict, it's worth trying to understand
| what those cultural differences are.
| psyc wrote:
| Her: We've been dating for six months and I'm all for taking
| it slow, but you haven't even brought up the idea of moving
| in together? Like just to have the conversation? Like what am
| I to you?
|
| Me: _pulls up Google Translate_
| ben_w wrote:
| If there's a women's-only language in the U.K. I've never heard
| of it, but that doesn't mean there isn't one. I do however
| think the U.K. has different linguistic patterns for
| aristocracy vs. everyone else, both with the echo of Anglo-
| Saxon vs. Norman (cow/beef, sheep/mutton etc.); and also with
| the specific posh accent, formal modes of address that most
| people don't bother with, and random use of Latin, Greek, and
| French.
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