Hey guys let's change a language because it's sexist. Man these languages have been around for longer than long and it's more TRADITION than anything else really that they should be kept as such. Of course languages evolve and such but, come on, no one's going to decide to remove all gender-related pronouns and nouns and stuff in Spanish (i.e. everything!) because of some claims that they're sexist.

I'm still unsure what I think of the changing language thing, but keeping things the way they are because "they've always been that way" is the stupidest reason to keep things the way they are. This is why the US still uses the electoral college process for voting even though it makes no sense, and why cars are still running on fossil fuels, and why republicans exist.

Hey guys let's change a language because it's sexist. Man these languages have been around for longer than long and it's more TRADITION than anything else really that they should be kept as such. Of course languages evolve and such but, come on, no one's going to decide to remove all gender-related pronouns and nouns and stuff in Spanish (i.e. everything!) because of some claims that they're sexist.

no one is arguing that you should change entire languages, but similar to how you don't call blacks "boy" or "negro", language does change based on what's not horribly assholey to say.

But, the thing is, that's not what it's like at all. I'm talking about Spanish more than English really. As you probably know, every single noun in Spanish has a gender associated with it. So, removing the gender associations would actually change the language. Of course I'm not arguing that more, let's say, competent words should not be used instead of those worse ones that used to be used. I mean, I don't support bitch being a good term to associate with women, but to pick language itself, as opposed to those few words negatively associated with females or what have you, seems just plain silly to me. 'English, as a language, is sexist' just doesn't sound very intelligent. Perhaps there are sexist words which should be eliminated, but the language as a whole shouldn't be penalized or misrepresented or etcetera.

Also Xanqui, I meant more along the lines of women arguing that it's sexist how a group of 99 females and 1 male will be referred to as a male group, and things like women arguing against 'the desk' being a masculine word as opposed to feminine. I mean, there's really no way the Spanish speaking population as a whole is going to come together to decide on a new neutral-gender word for a mixed-gender group, so...

Anyway I think we've probably derailed this topic enough!

having grammatical gender is pretty sweet for sexist jokes though

hey lars do you know why the tree is a masculine noun?
no uwe I have no idea
because they are tall strong stalwart guardians of the forest thats why

hey inge do you know why the washing machine is feminine
no berthold I dont know
because it is primarily used by women and it makes things soft and smell good! *rimshot*

In French, each gender's reproductive gland's noun gender is of the opposite gender. Ovaries is masculine and testicle is feminine. Thee hee.
Same goes for flowers' reproduction parts: Étamine (male part) is feminine and pistil (female part) is masculine.

WE FRENCH ARE SEXUALLY CONFUSED GRAMMATICALLY

does it mean anything in the neutral gender debate NO but heh heh

whoa that's actually really strange.

la penis!!!

I'm going to have to agree with Magical Negro on this one, after all I think the value of language is very important, and how these things affect the individual genders.

I'm a Communication Studies major, together with one of the major emphases on feminism is that language is created by those in power (men), together with so women, who apparently think differently, struggle with the language.  It's like there aren't certain words for things they think, so they don't know in what manner or way to say what they feel.

I have never in my life had this problem.