kobo.com/…/the-alphabet-versus-the-goddess-the-co…

is a book which points-out that language-cultures gendering EVERYTHING … don’t do women’s-equal-validity.

English, which doesn’t gender nouns, is where women’s rights has traction.

Languages program our ability to know meaning, & there are, same as in programming, consequences of every single language-design decision.

I’ve been told that to start a fight among French people, all you have to do is demand to know whether grapefruit ( pamplemousse ) is male or female.

( that’s for Quebec, it may not be true of France, or Lebanese, or African French )

The inability to get women’s-equal-validity to get anywhere in Latin America, fundamentally, comes down to the language disallowing equal-validity: everything’s gendered, & THAT IS THAT, & you are powerless to change established-categories…

A group of women is apparently a female-noun, but if you add ONE male, then suddenly the gender of the noun changes, to male.

Women’s-rights don’t have real traction in that kind of language-culture: it’ll never work or happen.

_ /\ _

Usually I don’t waste my time with bigoted (yes) bullshit. But your comment is so fucking bad that I feel the need to.

And by “bad” I mean that it’s 1. extremely incorrect, 2. stinking assumptions and similar filth, and 3. being used to babble inane cultural supremacy.

English, which doesn’t gender nouns, is where women’s rights has traction.

This map shows social gender inequality, something clearly correlated to women’s rights. I want you to notice a few things:

• Canada scoring better than USA, even if ~30% of the population of Canada is Francophone. French uses grammatical genders.
• USA scoring roughly the same as Chile and Uruguay; in both, the majority of the population is Hispanophone. Spanish also uses grammatical genders.
• The UK scoring lower than lots of continental countries in W. Europe. Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, German, Italian, and plenty other languages of the region use grammatical gender.
• Turkey scoring considerably low. Note the Turkish language does not use grammatical genders.
• Sub-Saharan Africa scoring extremely low, even if a lot of people in the region speak Bantu languages. Bantu languages typically have noun classes, but not grammatical gender.

Now, are you noticing any pattern that would back your idiotic claim up? No, you aren’t. (But I bet you can associate it just fine with purchasing power or similar economic data.)

This alone would be already enough to debunk your bullshit. But I’ll go further.

Languages program our ability to know meaning, & there are, same as in programming, consequences of every single language-design decision.

Human cognition is not programming, human languages are not programming “languages”, and the hypothesis that language dictates your worldview and/or cognition (“strong” Sapir-Whorf) has been debunked a long time ago. Fuck, language isn’t even necessary for thought; it only streamlines it. Saying “languages program our ability to know meaning” is as silly as saying “streets program our ability to walk”.

Your comparison is misleading, incorrect, and outdated.

I’ve been told

“I’ve been told”? You’re taking conclusions from… hearsay???

that to start a fight among French people, all you have to do is demand to know whether grapefruit ( pamplemousse ) is male or female.

Wrong. You’re confusing biological sex (male, female, plus more) with grammatical gender.

Biological sex concerns the body of some living beings, including humans. It does not apply to fruits, like that citrus. And it does not apply to words. What applies to words is grammatical gender: a type of noun classes system where words referring to men and women usually end in different classes.

This distinction is blatantly obvious for anyone who speaks a gendered language. Including French speakers; note the same French speakers will happily use the grammatically feminine word “personne” (person) to refer to males who present themselves socially as men, this shows they are aware (unlike you) that sex is not the same as grammatical gender.

In the meantime, German speakers use the grammatically gender word “Mädchen” (girl) to refer to females who present themselves socially as women. Same deal: the grammatical gender applies to the word, not to the person the word refers to.

Also. If I had to take a guess, the “fight” in question is on the same level as the “fights” they have over “pain au chocolat” vs. “chocolatine”. Or like English speakers have over “colour” vs. “color”. It isn’t a real fight, it’s simply poking fun at variation within the language.

The inability to get women’s-equal-validity to get anywhere in Latin America, fundamentally, comes down to the language disallowing equal-validity: everything’s gendered, & THAT IS THAT, & you are powerless to change established-categories…

Let us pretend for a moment I didn’t debunk this shit right off the bat, and that you would have found some actual correlation. You didn’t, but let’s pretend you did: you’d still be assuming correlation from causation, that’s bloody dumb.

Side note, as someone who’s actually from Latin America, and see those lands in his everyday instead of “i’Ve BeEn ToLd”: sexism here is not caused by Spanish and Portuguese having grammatical gender; it’s caused by a bunch of social institutions inherited and replicated over and over. Such as, you know… patriarchy. That exists also in societies speaking non-gendered languages, as the English-speaking ones.

A group of women is apparently a female-noun [SIC], but if you add ONE male, then suddenly the gender of the noun changes, to male.

Or you can use a feminine word to refer to the whole group: “las personas” / “as pessoas”. That doesn’t change jack shit because, as I said, sexism is caused by social institutions, not language.

Also relevant to note that this grammatical system (mixed social gender = assigned to the masculine grammatical gender) popped up in the same ancestor of those languages that is also an ancestor for English: Late Proto-Indo-European. And the only reason English got rid of it is because English eroded the endings of the nouns and adjectives.

Women’s-rights don’t have real traction in that kind of language-culture: it’ll never work or happen.

Yeah, and gravity doesn’t work on Fridays. /s

[link to a book] is a book which points-out that language-cultures gendering EVERYTHING … don’t do women’s-equal-validity.

I left this one to the end because I wanted to actually rebuke the whole bullshit first.

If you’re clearly ignorant about this topic (and odds are you know you’re ignorant about it), the least you could do is to look for reliable sources of information, before vomiting certainty and re-eating your own vomit, like you are doing. But you couldn’t, right? Otherwise you wouldn’t be taking Leonard Shlain seriously.

Look at his bibliography:

• Art & Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time, and Light (1991)
• The Alphabet Versus the Goddess (1998)
• Sex, Time and Power: How Women’s Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution (2003)
• Leonardo’s Brain: Understanding da Vinci’s Creative Genius (2014)

What was this guy again? Artist and physicist? Nah. Linguist? Nope. Anthropologist or sociologist? Nah. Historicist and psychologist? Nah.

He was a surgeon who served the suicidal butchers (military) of USA. From the fact that he was publishing “best sellers” about random topics outside his area of expertise, you can pretty much guess nothing he said in those books is worth your time.

Side note #2: your claim becomes specially hilarious when we think about the archetype of the Goddess, that he used in the name of one of his books. That archetype is from the Celtic religions; followed by peoples who spoke languages with grammatical gender. Yup, Celtic languages have gender. And it works either the same as in Latin (see: Gaulish) or as in Spanish+Portuguese (see: Irish).

You couldn’t make a bigger fool of yourself.

Wow. Don’t hold back. Lol.