Meh, I'm speaking sloppily but I think the principle applies The idea of grammatical gender is vestigial in English but it's where we get our sense that names that end in "-a" or "-en" or "-ie" are feminine and names that end in "-o" or "-er" or "-an" are masculine
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I mean that's why we play these weird etymologically dubious games with trying to generate new names by altering the spelling of old ones "Ashley" hung in there a long time as a boys' name with "Ashlee" and "Ashleigh" and so forth being the girls' variants
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People insisting on "Tony" vs "Toni" and "Danny" vs "Dani" and so on
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Replying to @arthur_affect @BootlegGirl
Kind of yes, kind of no. It’s interesting how firmly tied grammatical and human gender have become in European language cultures, when it’s something of an accident of history based on the importance of latin.
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Replying to @bazzalisk @arthur_affect
Hence Japanese names not mapping to this schema at all
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Replying to @BootlegGirl @bazzalisk
Japan does not have grammatical gender in this sense, it's one of the features that's mostly (but not completely) associated with descent from proto-Indo-European
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Which is very different from saying Japan doesn't have the *social* concept of gender, which it absolutely obviously does But that's why stuff isn't a one-to-one mapping to get languages
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Like Japanese doesn't have the equivalent of "he vs she", all pronouns are gender neutral (except recent ones invented specifically to translate "he/she" from Western texts) The "gendered first-person pronouns" people like to talk about are technically registers of politeness
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So it's a second-order thing, "watashi" is a "feminine" word for "I" because it's *polite*, and women are expected to be polite to a greater degree than men A man calling himself "watashi" isn't acting girly so much as he is acting formal and deferential
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Replying to @arthur_affect @BootlegGirl
A man calling himself “atashi” on the other hand is likely to be seen as acting effeminate.
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Yeah I think I've talked about this before, "secondary gender markers", or maybe tertiary ones Like in English we don't have anything as codified even as the watashi/boku/ore thing but a man will get funny looks for "talking like a girl" in certain ways
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That Reductress article, "Man strikes blow for gender equality by ending every sentence with 'If that makes sense?'"
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Replying to @arthur_affect @BootlegGirl
Hmmm, yeah, I guess men are a lot more likely to say “If you know what I mean?” Or something like that.
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