@sysop408
In Chinese, we often rely on the context to determine whether to use "he," "she," or "it".

However, most of the time, we're too lazy to bother, so we just... ah, whatever!

@sysop408 Interesting! It is the complete opposite in Spanish, where everything is gendered. Things are gendered.

There is "el", masculine. And "la", feminine. There's also "ella" for feminine, that's used when referencing a living being.

But that is why you have El Niño and La Niña. And which pronoun you use is based on the end of the noun. For the example above, "o" is masculine, and "a" feminine.

This sort of thing trips up everyone when learning Spanish for the first time, understandably.

@sysop408 I've been waiting to get my hands on this book: A Cultural History of the Chinese Character “Ta (She)” reviewed here: https://www.harvard-yenching.org/research/cultural-history-of-the-chinese-character-ta/

The review states that until the 1870s neither spoken Mandarin nor written Chinese had any differentiation between the male and female forms of the pronoun. This distinction arrived only because of interaction with western culture, and as one may expect at that period China was learning and assimilating everything western. IIRC Even the idea of punctuation was introduced to the Chinese language at that time.

@Justwes I'm constantly amused at how some bilingual people develop verbal tics where they swap words in unpredictable ways that have nothing to do with their vocabulary.

I know this one guy who grew up speaking Spanish and can speak perfect English, but any time he wants to say "but" he instead says "pero".

He'll say things like, "Oh, that hat looks good on you, pero I don't know about the shirt."

My dad and his siblings make interesting word substitutions too when they're talking to each other. If I use English when I'm attempting to speak in Chinese it's because I don't know a word. When they do it, it's because for whatever reason the English word just came out of their mouth first.

@likelyjanlukas I think people need to not always assume the worst of people when they don't get your pronouns right, forget your name, or pronounce your name wrong over and over again. There are lots of assholes out there, but also lots of people who are (ahem Mastodon) simply just neurodivergent in various ways.

I really hate when people say things like "if you can't get my name right, it's because you didn't care to get it right." That might be true for the person who says that, but so many people have brains that work far differently.

If I get someone's name wrong, the last thing I need is pressure to get it right. That'll actually make it more likely that I say their name wrong or give them an entirely different name altogether.

I've since stopped caring if I get people's names right and consequently, I got better at remembering their names.

I get called Shelton a lot. Used to piss me off. I've since realized after a well loved in-law has gotten my name wrong for 20 years that it's not intentional.

@skinnylatte I laughed so hard at that and it was also such an amazingly endearing scene because you initially are led to believe Michelle Yeoh doesn’t approve of her daughter being a lesbian or is being passive aggressive in calling her partner “he”.

You brace for it to be a not very funny scene where they’re portraying old world bigotry that many immigrants have held onto, but it’s flipped upside down immediately as both a language translation issue and a biting cross cultural joke that can only be fully understood if you’re bilingual or understand that context.

My wife doesn’t speak Chinese, but she laughed just as hard because she got the context from years of quizzing me about Chinese words and grammar… which I am not great at myself. It never took long before my explanations got so confusing that they stopped making sense to me too and I’d just have to say I had no idea.