My native language is gendered but I still don’t always know how I’m supposed to talk about male members of a species with a feminine name or vice versa.
“A person by the name of Mary was…” “Person” is masculine. Mary can hear me and I don’t want to offend her. “Was” has a masculine and a feminine form.
I think the masculine form of “was” would be technically correct, but then do I have to use masculine pronouns? “A person by the name of Mary was there and he…” The real answer is to rephrase what I said to avoid awkward grammar.
I deliberately picked an example where there isn’t (or I don’t know) a feminine version. Most words that I can think of for various categories of people do have two genders, although in many cases the feminine version sounds awkward to me, a little like the “trix” suffix does to English speakers.
(Also, the male default sometimes makes using the feminine version of a word sound like you’re deliberately emphasizing that you’re referring specifically to women as opposed to simply talking about someone who happens to be a woman.)
My native language is gendered but I still don’t always know how I’m supposed to talk about male members of a species with a feminine name or vice versa.
“A person by the name of Mary was…” “Person” is masculine. Mary can hear me and I don’t want to offend her. “Was” has a masculine and a feminine form.
I think the masculine form of “was” would be technically correct, but then do I have to use masculine pronouns? “A person by the name of Mary was there and he…” The real answer is to rephrase what I said to avoid awkward grammar.
i thought gendered languages had two genders for words like “person” so you could make the swap when the gender is known
e.g. un person / une personne
I deliberately picked an example where there isn’t (or I don’t know) a feminine version. Most words that I can think of for various categories of people do have two genders, although in many cases the feminine version sounds awkward to me, a little like the “trix” suffix does to English speakers.
(Also, the male default sometimes makes using the feminine version of a word sound like you’re deliberately emphasizing that you’re referring specifically to women as opposed to simply talking about someone who happens to be a woman.)