Ask Lemmy

English has gendered pronouns, for example. There's also some gender divides in nouns: actor/actress, for example. (These are slowly being replaced, however.)

Languages like Farsi and Mandarin and such don't. The only difference in pronouns, in fact, with Farsi is "courteous" vs. "common". And even that isn't happening as much as it used to. And the only time nouns are gendered is if the item they're talking about has an actual physical gender. Like "man" or "woman". There are no gendered declensions of any kind, in fact.

It's more complicated in Chinese. In oral Chinese there's no gendered pronouns. It's pronounced [tā] whether you mean man, woman, or other.^1^ As with Farsi, however, there are no gendered nouns outside of those describing literal physically-gendered things. And unlike Farsi, not only are there no gendered declensions of any kind, there are hardly any declensions of any kind^2^.

^1^ In written Chinese, for complicated reasons, there are three different pronouns in common usage: 他 for masculine (he), 她 for feminine (she), and 它 for everything else (it). This "modernization" was first proposed in the very late 19th century and came into its final form sometime in the 1920s. It was a deliberate attempt to make Chinese easier to translate into western languages (and since at the time the Chinese had somewhat of an inferiority complex it was also couched as making Chinese a "modern" language). (There were a couple of others added, including one for deities and one for animals, but those never caught on and are hardly ever seen in modern Chinese.)

But they're all pronounced the same: [tā].

And now, full circle, Chinese is "modernizing" again. While official laws, forms, scholarly papers, regulations, etc. use that three-way split in pronouns, increasingly in commercial settings (like the world's largest digital souq: Taobao) all pronouns are being replaced with "TA". Yes. Latin letters. Uppercased.

This I find completely hilarious: Chinese developed gendered pronouns (in writing only!) to soothe western tastes ... only to pick up an ungendered pronoun again ... to match western tastes. And before westerners have solved the problem themselves in their own languages!

^2^ Chinese does not decline for number except for a tiny handful of cases you can learn completely in 30 minutes. (And even here it's not quite 'declension' like that word applies in the Indo-European family of languages.) There's no "car" vs. "cars". They're both 汽车. If you want to specify that you mean more than one car, you would modify it by saying "some" or "three" or whatever in front of it: 一些汽车 [yī xiē qì chē], literally "one (small number) car" or "some cars".