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frankly, and people can call me an asshole for this but i truly do mean it as kindly as possible, talking to you doesn’t seem worth my time. someone who knows you in your life and cares is in a much better position to explain why what you’re saying is not just simple, but morally maladjusted.
yeah i was rude to you. you were espousing ideas that are racist in nature. no i don’t have a responsibility to explain before i respond negatively in turn. i really do hope you take this and your admitted previous bad receptions as an indication you should study what race actually is, and get a clearer idea of what “human classifications [sic]” really are. what you are saying is wrong and hurtful. it makes people’s lives worse when you say things like this and you don’t really care
“sub-variants” “blacks” “equater 🤠” “american blacks vs african blacks” just the entire lines between “it’s interesting…” and “…for people of kinds too.”
(((kkkomplex))) variant
had some neat ideas of classification
people might not see in the same light
think it meant to offend
gee, buddy, i wonder why.
look i won’t even begin to sit here and try to break down the problems with your rhetoric & diction for you, but whatever tf it is in your head that regards race; it got sum mad fucked up with it. like wtf does half of this racist drivel mean?? subvariants?? excuse me is it 1902??? i’d wager a bet your “neat ideas” for human classification are some of the most bigoted and awful things to come out of someone’s mouth, and you’d say them with complete unremorse and not a single wince of irony.
i like this comment but i feel the need to reply because it touches upon a pet peeve of mine in linguistics: there is a persistent myth in the modern period that grammatical gender is useless, pointless, or somehow arbitrary and is just some sort of vestigial, rotting, lexical limb that made it to the 21st century by fluke.
this is simply not true. just because grammatical gender often appears arbitrary or illogical doesn’t mean it actually is. and just because grammatical gender follows many, many rules does not mean there are no rules. grammatical gender is just a fairly common form of noun class system. as with most forms of noun classing, what the rules are in a given dialect can be a little wishy-washy but they are certainly not arbitrary.
for example, you point out the german Mädchen as an example of illogical noun gendering. this is an opinion often expressed by foreigners learning the language, and even by linguistically-ignorant germans. it makes sense on the face of it, this word has a similar meaning to the english phrase “little girl,” so it is strange the germans decided to sort this word into the neuter gender, no?
well, no. it isn’t strange and it isn’t illogical, in actuality. -chen is a diminutive in german. for those who are unaware, diminutives are suffixes/prefixes in languages that serve to make nouns feel smaller or more cute in a language. think booklet vs book or dog vs doggie for some english examples.
what are some examples of more german diminutives?
das Kätzchen - kitten
das Hündchen - puppy
das Plätzchen - a cookie (depends on dialect exactly what this refers to afaik but generally is always some sort of cookie)
das Ohrläppchen - earlobe
noticing a trend? these are all neuter! and thus we uncover a little grammatical rule that grammatical gender was trying to tell us. all diminutives are neuter.
most every “arbitrary” example of grammatical gender people provide has some sort of similar reasoning or rule behind it, some story or information it is trying to give you that makes speaking the language that much easier.
just because what it is encoding doesn’t seem useful or logical to (rhetorical) you doesn’t mean it is not. grammatical gender is much more than just gender-washing everyday speech for kicks and does carry useful meaning, if you can be bothered to puzzle it out. attempts i’ve seen to “de-gender” spanish (this is just what is local to me) all fundamentally misunderstand what it is they’re even trying to do and often opt for rotely tearing out the entire gendered case system without offering proper lexical and linguistic infrastructure for the language to actually effectively function without it. these attempts sound clunky because they are clunky! and to be perfectly clear i’m not dogging on the premise, just the serious attempts i’ve seen implemented in real life speech and their implementation. i think it’s relevant bc it showcases how modern misunderstanding of what grammatical gender is can realize as actual, negative manifestations in the non-conceptual world. why this is important to think about more than passingly!
edit:formatting