[Shameless comm advertisement: make sure to check !linguistics, this sort of question fits nicely there!]
There are two main points: agreement and derivation.
Agreement: grammatical gender gives you an easy way to keep track of which word refers to which. Consider for example the following sentence:
The clock fell over the glass table, and it broke.
What does “it” refer to? It’s ambiguous, it could be either “the clock” or “the glass table” (both things are breakable). In Portuguese however the sentence is completely unambiguous due to the gender system, as the translations show:
O relógio caiu sobre a mesa de vidro, e ele quebrou. // “ele” he/it = the clock
O relógio caiu sobre a mesa de vidro, e ela quebrou. // “ela” she/it = the table
It’s only one word of difference; however “ele” he/itmust refer to “relógio” clock due to the gender agreement. Same deal with “ela” she/it and “mesa” table.
Latin also shows something similar, due to the syntactically free word order. Like this:
puer bellam puellam amat. (boy.M.NOM pretty.F.ACC girl.F.ACC loves) = the boy loves the beautiful girl
puer bellus puellam amat. (boy.M.NOM pretty.M.NOM girl.F.ACC loves) = the handsome boy loves the girl
Note how the adjective between “puer” boy and “puella” girl could theoretically refer to any of those nouns; Latin is not picky with adjective placement, as long as it’s near the noun it’s fine. However, because “puer” is a masculine word and “puella” is feminine, we know that the adjective refers to one if masculine, another if feminine. (Note: the case marks reinforce this, but they aren’t fully reliable.)
The second aspect that I mentioned is derivation: gender gives you a quick way to create more words, without needing new roots for that. Italian examples:
“bambino” boy vs. “bambina” girl
"gatto" cat, tomcat vs. “gatta” female cat
"banana" banana (fruit) vs. “banano” banana plant
"mela" apple (fruit) vs. “melo” apple tree
Focus on the last two lines - note how the gender system is reused to things that (from human PoV) have no sex or social gender, like trees and their fruits. This kind of extension of the derivation system is fairly common across gendered languages.
Addressing some comments here: English does not have a grammatical gender system. It has a few words that refer to social gender and sex, but both concepts (grammatical gender and social gender) are completely distinct.
That’s specially evident when triggering agreement in a gendered language, as English doesn’t do anything similar. Portuguese examples, again:
[Sentence] O Ivan é uma pessoa muito alta.
[Gloss, showing word gender] The.M Ivan.M is a.F person.F very tall.F
[Translation] Ivan is a very tall person.
Check the adjective, “alta” tall. Even if “Ivan” refers to a man, you need to use the feminine adjective here, because it needs to agree with “pessoa” person - a feminine word. This kind of stuff happens all the time in gendered languages, but you don’t see it e.g. in English.
You say a lot of things, but do you have evidence of them? Or is it just related to them doing what's actually required to avoid giving the people DDoSing them another means of taking them down, fake DMCAs based on communities hosted in other instances that promote breaking the law?
And before anyone gets any idea, if they tried doing the same because they are mad, expect for it to backfire. Spectacularly. As in you might want to think twice before moving directly into the servers hosting those communities. And that's not a threat, that's because anyone with a brain can read, specially those in the legal world who have jobs because there is literally a separate aspect of legal proceedings involved in collecting evidence called discovery where lots of people with brains are able to read and understand the same conversations you and me are able to understand for instances that might indicate aiding, abetting, and collusion, being able to discern them from the false accusations thereof as well.
Well, considering they just decided to ban my account and delete all of my content on their server without even a warning for simply criticizing their terms of conduct, I guess you were right and I was an idiot for defending them.
I was already considering switching over to kbin fully just because they're set up to interact with both Lemmy instances and Mastodon. Unfortunately the Mastodon side still feels a bit janky, but I'm hoping that'll change as time goes on.
Definitely not going to stay with an instance that pre-emptively bends over for corporate interests. That's one of the biggest reasons why I'm shifting away from Reddit in the first place.
You don’t. See the first (introduction) video from the Alt-Right Playbook. Basically, there is a real risk that even if you “win” the argument, the red-pill derp just gets angry and takes it out on a convenient female target. The energy is better spent finding ways to counter red-pill ideology that don’t involve engaging directly with these people.
Women are not some single homogenous group. Every woman is a unique person, just like men are.
Actually I think you’ll find that all women everywhere can be extrapolated from 5 shit takes on Twitter, one of which was a joke and one of which was a far-right LARPer /s
There are books about how to manipulate women. I read one of those and felt sick. No normal man can write stuff like that, publish it, and feel good about himself. Jesus.
Normal men don't read it either. We're potentially raising more broken young men than we've seen in the last hundred years. And when the aftershocks arrive, people will act surprised like they always do.
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