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Comment by telotortium | Hacker News Reader

> I dislike the term "gender" in linguistics. Many languages have grammatical gender that has nothing to do with masculine/feminine.

You realize that the use of gender for grammatical noun class is the original meaning of the word, correct? Gender comes from the Latin genus, generis (via Old French), which means type, kind, sort. The genders in Latin were called masculine, feminine, and neuter because one of the noun classes contained most, but not all of the nouns that refer to males, one of them contain the nouns that refer to females, and the last one, neuter, literally means neither.

If anything, it's English that is to blame here for taking the original meaning and corrupting it. I believe most non-english languages, when they want to use the modern English sense of gender, either borrow the word directly from English or just use a translation of sex role.

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Um... From TFA:

When the Romans started to get interested in grammar, genus came to mean “kind” of noun or “gender”, but because genus could also refer to biological sex, male and female, these concepts were occasionally conflated.

Thanks for that - I didn't see that.

This is overstated. They used genus contextually, in an abstract sense, for biological sex, in the same way we might use kind for a brand of soda ("what kind of soda do you want?"), but genus didn't have the concrete meaning of biological sex for them any more than kind has the concrete meaning of soda brand for us.

It's the same for Greek γένος, e.g. in Plato's Symposium:

> πρῶτον μὲν γὰρ τρία ἦν τὰ γένη τὰ τῶν ἀνθρώπων, οὐχ ὥσπερ νῦν δύο, ἄρρεν καὶ θῆλυ --189d

It's fair to translate that into modern English as "Originally there were three genders [or sexes] of human being, not two like now, male and female", but the specific meaning of sex or gender isn't there, just kind. It's a general word being used in a general way (literally, in fact: genus -> general).

that's a bit of a stretch.

Genere in Italian comes from the Latin word genus and means biological sex for people and animals but also kind.

  Translate genere to English

  noun
  1. gender
  2. kind

They ate not conflated, they depend on the context

What kind of beast is that? -> Che genere di bestia è?

What's that book genre? -> Di che genere è quel libro?

How to write gender questions -> come scrivere domande sul genere

great rebuttal, i learned something new! i wonder, do you happen to know how this might impact the conversation between gender and sex being two different descriptors? i'm unsure of how to go about looking at the etymological origins of both words, so help in that regard could prove just as useful. thanks.

Two different descriptors of what?

i've found that there are arguments being had between people my age that sex is a biological descriptor (M/F) and that gender is a looser, more amorphous descriptor. for instance, you can be born a man (your biological sex) and identify as non-binary (your gender). i'm interested to see how the origin of the words could contribute to that discussion.

Various philosophers, such as Wittgenstein, have pointed out that much of what sounds like discussion only exists because one can arrange words into grammatically sensible sentences. That doesn't mean the discussion is actually about anything. People who know the words “Earth” and “flat” can theorize about whether the Earth is flat, but it’s a waste of time to pay any attention to them. A “non-binary” “gender” is just a noise with no idea attached to it.

> A “non-binary” “gender” is just a noise with no idea attached to it.

Are you talking about grammar here? Because in many (most?) languages gender is not binary.

I was replying to something. Just read the comment I was replying to. Also, yes, many languages have more than two genders. That’s a non-binary gender system. But no particular word in those languages is “non-binary”.

Words can certainly change gender over time or be non-gendered if that is what you mean. But it doesn't make any sense to say that a word is non-binary in a trinary gender system like in Latin.

I don't think the etymological origins of the words really impact the current conversation. The meaning of words depends on how they are used, and "gender" today have quite a different meaning when talking about human gender identity than when talking about grammar.

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