this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2025
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I love linguistics but it has some weird stuff in it.
Chinese doesn't have gendered pronouns in the spoken language. "He", "she", and "it" are all pronounced, “tā”. Possession and number are done by adding 的 (de) or 们 (men) after the pronoun, irrespective of gender. Originally, there was only one character for "tā", 他. In the early 20th century there were several westernization movements in China. One of them included adding gendered pronouns, in order to be able to more accurately translate English texts. Thus, 她 (she) and 它 (it) were adopted. (they used to mean other things and were repurposed). One immediate problem that people noticed was the choice of components. 他 includes the 亻component, which means "person". 她 replaces it with the 女 component, which means "female". So some linguists pointed out that this implies that women aren't people. The current situation is that people tend to use, 她, when there is a single subject who is known to be female. When it's unknown or there are multiple subjects they default to, 他 or 他们.
German is heavily gendered. You can still linguistically gender someone correctly but, in addition to pronouns, you also need to match adjectives. You also need to get comfortable with the gender of nouns often not making any logical sense. eg:
Moon - Der Mond - masculine
Girl - Das Mädel/Mädchen - neuter
Sun - Die Sonne - feminine
There's the added confusion that the third person feminine singular, is spelled and pronounced the same as the second person plural. The second person doesn't differentiate in gender but it's often impolite to use the singular so it's common to refer to males as "Sie". Not to say that any of that is hard. Native German speakers constantly need to match the gender of adjectives to nouns so they're very used to it.
Russian seems to be more complicated. I recently read that Masha Gessen uses, "they". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masha_Gessen It seems that Russian uses gendered past-tense verbs. They originally used masculine verbs out of, "hoping that I would wake up a boy. A real boy" but switched to feminine verbs as a teen and stuck with that. If anyone speaks Russian well I'd love to hear more about how gender is used and perceived in Russian. Particularly from the linguistic, rather than the cultural, perspective. It looks like Russian does have gendered pronouns https://www.russianlessons.net/grammar/pronouns.php but the Wikipedia article doesn't say which they use.
edit: clarifications and grammar
The big thing that people get wrong and which makes me so very tired is that IT'S NOT SOCIETAL GENDER, it's just a case of terrible terminology that we're stuck with. A chair isn't feminine or whatever, it's just that words related to femininity happen to be in the same class as other words.
I really wish we could all agree to call it basically anything else, like "genre" which shares the same root but doesn't create the connotation to societal gender.
Thank you for your thorough response. You make some good points. I think we're talking about slightly different topics though.
There's always some explanation to why certain words or grammar forms evolved. Sometimes those reasons are commonly known, sometimes the "commonly known" reasons are wrong, sometimes linguists argue about the origin, sometimes they have no idea.
For everyday speakers, the "logic" of immediate usage, is more important than the etymology.
German speakers are generally aware of the "rule" that diminutives are neuter. If you look at this list words, some of them have non-diminutive forms;
Die Katze
Der Hund
Die Ohrlappe
Two of them don't really.
"Platz" is grammatically, the non-diminutive form of "Plätzchen" but it doesn't mean "(normal sized) cookie" (aside: Not to make fun of our Northern friends but "Keks" gets around that confusion) "Magd" is the non-diminutive form of "Mädel" but girls aren't (generally) "little maids." I can't remember the last time I heard anyone say, "magd" to refer to a living person.
Also notice that when we strip off the diminutives, the remaining words are no more "logical". Cats and earlobes aren't inherently feminine and dogs aren't inherently male.
My usage of "logic" in the context of German grammar, is that grammatical gender is often at odds with both self identified gender and biological gender. German speakers are generally comfortable saying "Der" about subjects, that nobody would think of as male. German speakers are likewise comfortable saying "Sie" about subjects that nobody would think of as female and, "Das" to subjects that are very obviously not neuter.
The reason for contrasting several languages was that I suspect there are different cognitive loads involved in correctly gendering people, depending on language. Many people notice that native Chinese speakers routinely "randomize" he/she/it. They don't just misgender trans-people, they often just forget which one means which. German speakers are pretty used to playing around with endings to imply additional meaning. "Dutzen" is often done without the word "du". Speakers easily put together the correct endings for the singular and listeners instantly recognize the implication.
As a final example, I'd offer the sentence, "___ ist ein fesch__ ___." I posit that if I insert "Die" vs "Der" into the sentence, most German speakers would instantly correctly fill in the rest of the blanks with, "-es Madl" or "-er Bua". If you try to say the wrong one it just sounds weird.