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Comment by kgeist | Hacker News Reader

In Russian, gender confusion is mostly about professions (the rest of the gender system makes no sense, like a car is "she" but the plane is "he" -- so no one bothers with it).

For example, the word for "doctor" is, well, "doktor". But the word is masculine. There's a feminine derivation, "doctorsha" - "female doctor" -- but it sounds somewhat condenscending to me, like you doubt her competence. "Oh this doktorsha prescribed me wrong pills again".

So the neutral, respectful way to refer to a female doctor is to refer to her using the "neutral" masculine form "doktor". And it doesn't sound odd to me at all. But here's where the fun starts: adjectives need to agree in gender with their noun. And the correct grammar is "good (masc.) doctor (masc)". However, there's a recent trend to have it like "good (fem.) doctor (masc)". I.e. the grammar is completely bonkers but somehow it sounds acceptable to my ear.

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In Spain's Spanish we ended up with "new" feminine forms for professionals. Now it's commonplace but some of them sounded pretty strange back then.

For instance you talked about female doctors using "la médico". It's perfectly natural to change that to "la médica", yet you referred to the guard as "el/la guardia" and we still do, we don't talk about a masculine "el guardio".

Here's the funny thing: we had/have "juez" for judge, and albeit is was ordinarily masculine it's not an obvious masculine form according to phonological conventions, so "el/la juez" was common and sounded very right. Then female judges started to prefer the new form "jueza" that sounded awful (it still does), but we ended up adopting it because it's their prerogative anyway, who can argue about that?

It's interesting to compare this with the deprecation in English of the term actress. Well, in Spanish the non-sexist attitude is to preserve the feminine forms (actriz for actress) and to come up with new explicit ones, exactly the opposite that is. So nope, there isn't a universal sociolinguistics that you can extract from the use of contemporary English and I don't understand how come anybody might expect such a thing.

>It's interesting to compare this with the deprecation in English of the term actress. Well, in Spanish the non-sexist attitude is to preserve the feminine forms (actriz for actress) and to come up with new explicit ones, exactly the opposite that is. So nope, there isn't a universal sociolinguistics that you can extract from the use of contemporary English and I don't understand how come anybody might expect such a thing.

Exactly. Now that I think about it more, it's not so black-and-white in Russian. As I said above, the female form of "doctor" doesn't sound acceptable/neutral, but the female form of "football player" sounds completely neutral. So go figure.

> the rest of the gender system makes no sense, like a car is "she" but the plane is "he" -- so no one bothers with it

It's actually pretty straightforward. Generally, nouns ending with an "a" are feminine, with an "o" are neuter, the rest are masculine.

I meant that no one pays attention that, for example, a teapot is "he", there's no meaning behind it.

>Generally, nouns ending with an "a" are feminine, with an "o" are neuter, the rest are masculine.

It's a rule of thumb, but it's incomplete.

"Starosta" & Co. are masculine, neuter nouns also end in -e (except for "kofe"); nouns which end in a palatalized consonant can be either feminine or masculine; there are words like "sudia" or "umnica" which can be masc. or fem.; some words like "nozhnicy" only have plural form and don't have gender.

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