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| Thread: The Cat's Gender |  This thread is pages long: 1 2 3 · «PREV |
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The_Polyglot
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posted August 16, 2016 02:50 PM |
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artu said:
The poll is just a tongue-in-cheek way of asking do you agree with the general tendency to associate dog characteristics with masculine traits and cat characteristics with feminine ones.
And this is why it does not make sense. If you restricted the poll by adding 'in the context of English', it could have an answer, but as you didn't limit it by language, you opened it up to every language's social conventions, which are by nature irrational and contradict each other's anyway. And yes, I'm including 'feminine' and 'masculine' characteristics in that. How could I, as a speaker of multiple languages agree with one given social convention more than with any other? They are all equally valid, and you have to shift your perspective according to what language you are communicating in at a given moment. Having personal preferences is pointless, close-minded, and in my biased personal opinion, also ridiculous.
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artu
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posted August 16, 2016 03:04 PM |
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Edited by artu at 15:05, 16 Aug 2016.
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The poll is already in English and if I added something like "in the context of English," that would probably be the most irrelevant, tasteless and idiotic overcomplication in internet history, ever. The context is NOT the language(s), the context is, characteristics of cats and dogs and how people tend to associate them with each gender. You can have the same context in a language that only has a single unisex pronoun, you just wouldn't be able to express the situation by using pronouns like you can in English, that's all.
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The_Polyglot
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Nuttier than squirrel poo
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posted August 16, 2016 03:13 PM |
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artu said:
...the context is, characteristics of cats and dogs and how people tend to associate them with each gender.
That changes according to dominant language. Since I don't have any, I can't answer the poll, and since every one of us is equally fluent in at least 2 languages, asking them is pointless, as it becomes synonymous with 'What characteristics are usually associated with cats and dogs in your dominant/native language, and are they considered typically male or female characteristics back where you come from?'
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artu
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posted August 16, 2016 03:25 PM |
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Edited by artu at 15:30, 16 Aug 2016.
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No, it doesn't change by language. You can say it changes according to gender of the person that makes the association or it changes according to culture (which would reflect on the language, like in 50's jazz lingo, players complimenting by calling each other cool cats), but language itself does not determine any origin in this regard. And there is always the option you can click which rejects the relatively popular association anyway. What you said would have made sense IF all dogs or cats were really referred to with a specific male or female pronoun or they had grammatical gender in significant majority of world languages. If one has such a situation in his authentic mother tongue, that may cause a bias, but that would be a really exceptional situation.
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Homer171
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posted August 16, 2016 05:13 PM |
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As it's wrong to label as She or He nowdays, I just call them The Cat. Not that it had any truth behind it, but general opinion is more important than that. Yes, that's bullpoop 
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OhforfSake
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posted August 16, 2016 05:24 PM |
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Where I'm from we usually say "it" about babies too.
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The_Polyglot
Promising
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posted August 16, 2016 05:27 PM |
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Language influences culture, which in turn influences language. I find it impossible to separate the two, sorry for wording errors on my part. Thank you for the discussion, but I think we've reached the point where further arguing would be detrimental, as it's clear we can only agree to disagree. 
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Miru
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posted August 16, 2016 08:36 PM |
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Why can't we, as a society, accept that some things can't be simplified to male and female?
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Gryphs
Supreme Hero
The Clever Title
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posted August 16, 2016 08:42 PM |
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The fact that this is a three page long thread debating one of the most inane questions I have ever heard stupefies me.
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OhforfSake
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posted August 16, 2016 08:48 PM |
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Miru said:
Why can't we, as a society, accept that some things can't be simplified to male and female?
You're all too complicated for me. 
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AnkVaati
Famous Hero
Nighonese National Front
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posted August 16, 2016 09:37 PM |
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Edited by AnkVaati at 21:42, 16 Aug 2016.
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French far-right intellectual Alain de Benoist apparently loves cats:
Quote:
The cat is taken for an ‘animal of the Right’, but what Right could it be? In that case, if the dog is ‘Left wing’, what Left do we speak of?
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We have numerous empirical studies showing that there exists a close correspondence between the preference for cats and the ‘cat temperament’, or the preference for dogs and the ‘dog temperament’ among men. When we encounter someone who doesn’t like cats, we know immediately that we will not sympathise with him.
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Maurice
Hero of Order
Part of the furniture
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posted August 16, 2016 10:56 PM |
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artu said:
No, it doesn't change by language.
I tend to agree with Poly on this one. Different languages assign different genders to words. It's most predominantly present when you hear people speak a non-native language while both the native and non-native language have different genders for a given word. They tend to use the - for that language - wrong gender for that word, which sounds odd for a native speaker.
Note that gender can be male, female or neuter. In German, those three exist separately (der, die, das), while in Dutch, there are only two (de, het), as Dutch has heaped male and female on the same pile for the most part. Dutch people speaking German have a tendency to botch up the gender for various words . Here in the Netherlands it's a tendency for Moroccans and Turks to mix up the male/female designation with the neuter form, which sounds weird for native Dutch people .
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artu
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posted August 17, 2016 01:02 AM |
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Edited by artu at 01:12, 17 Aug 2016.
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That's quite selective quoting on your part, Maurice. I also said "If one has such a situation in his authentic mother tongue, that may cause a bias, but that would be a really exceptional situation." Language, of course, shapes the way people think, especially in matters involving abstraction. However, in a poll where the lingua franca is English, you don't write "since gender is not sexuality, are all dogs he and are all cats she, keep in mind that if these animals already have grammatical gender in your mother tongue, that may put you in a biased position." That would be like trying to display local highways on a world map.
The third person pronoun in Turkish is always unisex, so I'm really not the one to ask, but I don't think even if your mother tongue has grammatical gender on cats or dogs, it wouldn't be something that you can't overlook while attaching them contextual gender characteristics. Like, in French, even if professeure is always grammatically masculine, it wouldn't cause you to think of female teachers as more masculine people, would it? You'd just use un with the word instead of une and that would be it.
@Poly
Btw, I got curious, how many languages do you speak in total and how many of them have grammatical gender on cats and dogs and what gender are those for each?
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AnkVaati
Famous Hero
Nighonese National Front
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posted August 17, 2016 01:15 AM |
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Edited by AnkVaati at 01:17, 17 Aug 2016.
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I've always imaged Alamar as being Turkish. Ignore the blond hair and look at the eyes and the skin colour. Maybe he's an Ottoman court astrologer or something?
Oh and burek is very nice.
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Miru
Supreme Hero
A leaf in the river of time
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posted August 17, 2016 01:20 AM |
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Edited by Miru at 01:21, 17 Aug 2016.
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artu said:
Like, in French, even if professeure is always grammatically masculine, it wouldn't cause you to think of female teachers as more masculine people, would it? You'd just use un with the word instead of une and that would be it.
Maybe this is a bit of an oblique comment but if I heard a guy was a cheerleader I'd assume he was feminine and possibly gay, versus if I heard a woman was a power lifter I'd assume the opposite. Maybe I wouldn't assume a professor was completely masculine, but I might assume a coach was 20% more masculine. If a role is typically associated with that gender, then people of that gender do that role more often. Even if it isn't because the role has any correlation with testosterone just the stigma of it. Wouldn't you assume a man who as a therapist was softer and maybe a bit more feminine? A therapist could be a suck-it-up-kid tough love type and be effective for some clients.
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