This is a common opinion even amongst language specialists. So much so, in the process of modernising Turkish, about 90 years ago, whatever little concept of gender Turkish had was completely stripped from the language, leaving only 'it', alongside its conversion to Latin alphabet.

The good thing is that it's truly a structural, mathematical language now, though still hard to learn, and it can avoid the whole his / her awkwardness for people whose gender is unknown to the writer. The gaps left by the Arabic words dropped from common use was filled by French (11% of its corpus is 1:1 to French) and if you know a Romance language, you can make pretty decent guesses.

The bad thing, on the other hand, is that Turkey is full of ancient history, and so much of that history is adorned in Imperial Turkish, using Arabic alphabet that no one can read. Even if they did, they wouldn't understand, since Imperial and Modern Turkish has diverged so much they are no longer mutually intelligible, not even the slightest clue.

It makes you feel like a foreigner in one's own country, in a way. Always found it funny that I can understand Middle English from 1300s, and I can read inscribed colonnades in Rome from 500 BC – but I can neither read nor understand Turkish from 1922.

Turkish from 1922 is Ottoman Turkish. Most Words are from arabic.You should work on a Ottoman dictionary and to understand Arabic Words is easy because The Root/Pattern System of arabic Words. To read arabic Letters in turkish is a bit difficult than Latin Letters but not very difficult after learning words.

> So much so, in the process of modernising Turkish, about 90 years ago, whatever little concept of gender Turkish had was completely stripped from the language, leaving only 'it'

Do you have a source for that at all? Lack of grammatical gender is a feature of the entire family so I would be surprised if there were somehow "remnants" of it that were present as recently as Ataturk's reforms. Removing loans that happen to be gendered in their source language don't really count.

Turkish grammar never had gender, but Arabic loanwords it had did. They tried to remove those from mass circulation.

I don't believe changing Turkish to latin alphabets was about process of modernising Turkish but because of making distance to Islamic roots here, any thing has relation to Islam was removed like Arabic alphabets, changing the capital to Ankara, Changing Mosques to museum.

It's really sad that a language has more than 700 years was changed because of man ego and hate to a religion. even if you agree with the guy, killing a language because of hate it's really a shame.

That is a little bit of a revisionist history, curiously perpetrated both by Turkish conservatives and liberals. For the liberals, it’s the case of, ’look how backwards the country was in the Empire, and Mustafa Kemal saved it from certain oblivion, vote for us’. For conservatives, it’s more ’Mustafa Kemal destroyed our glorious Islamic past by making Turkey into an European nation state, and suppressed all dissent for the contrary, vote for us’

The reality is, Turks historically had a distant relationship to Islam, being the last major adopter of the religion, and Turkey’s Empire has kept and retained, in some cases proudly, many traditions that were openly in violation of quite a few tenets of the Muslim religion, traditions coming from Turks’ pagan past, from Europeans, and from everywhere else.

Ataturk’s ‘revolution’ was much more incremental than most people realise. Just like you cannot plant a parliament in a country that was previously governed by tribesmen, you cannot come up with the idea of ‘secularism’ in a country who was ruthlessly monocultural before and have it survive past your death. For better or worse, the laws Ataturk enacted had its roots in the culture of the land, and that’s the only reason he could, and that’s the only reason they survived past his death.

Muslims were a minority in the Ottoman Empire until the last 50 years of its 600+ year existence. Laicite is just a natural extension of the culture of tolerance that allowed the OE to even exist in the first place, and the extinguishment of which ultimately led to its downfall.

>.. like you cannot plant a parliament in a country that was previously governed by tribesmen. I don't know which is your country. But you dont know anything from history. Ottoman is one of the greatest country in his ages. like suleiman the magnificent and the Mehmed II the Conqueror. He conquered Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul) It is widely quoted as the event that marked the end of the European Middle Ages.

Selim the Grim was known for being a fully-observant Sunni and mass murdering Shiite and non-Muslim population.

One area where lack of gendered nouns is valuable is for non-binary people (those who are neither men or women). In languages like Arabic or Hebrew, this gets very difficult as a binary gender generally must be assigned to first-person pronouns to be grammatically correct!

In those cases, you assign to default (non-inflected) gender of the language (in case of Arabic, singulars default to masculine and plurals default to feminine).

Japanese and Chinese lack plurals and grammatical gender but have noun classes that influence how things are counted. One counts “1 little animal of cat” or “2 flat thing of paper”.

These words can serve a kind of poetical function; but in principle you could use the generic one — “ko” in Japanese and “gè” in Mandarin Chinese — for everything, and it is even accepted that as a foreigner you will. However, doing so is taken to be a sign of infelicity with the language. One instructor related to me that failure to use an advanced counter when the opportunity presents itself is a sign of poor education, rather like missing the opportunity to use a word like “infelicity”.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun_class#Common_criteria_f... has some more fun ones. When I first heard of noun classes in school, we were introduced to them via Borges' story about the Chinese Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge[0] (which may have been inspired by Chinese noun classifiers?).

[0] https://multicians.org/thvv/borges-animals.html

In case that actually dissuaded you from learning and you would want to otherwise, I want to point out that gender is extremely simple in Arabic. It is not at all arbitrary in the way Romance languages treat it - nearly every word is clearly masculine or feminine (with very few exceptions, like war, sea, sun) and treating all nonhuman plurals as feminine simplifies things rather than complicating them.

Are there any semetic languages that don't have arbitrary gender rules? Correctly gendering numbers (depending on the gender of the noun being counted) in hebrew is hard for native speakers.

Most of it is not actually HARD, we simply became lazy

I'm a native speaker and I get it wrong all the time.

Is there an actual purpose for gendering in languages, beyond obsessing over sex? What purpose does it serve? Are languages without gender somehow less powerful or efficient or expressive (or romantic ;)?

Wikipedia’s article on grammatical gender offers some strong reasons, the main one being disambiguation of antecedents (for example, which of multiple objects in the sentence the subject or verb is referring to) and homophones (different words with the same spelling or pronunciation).

I don’t think it’s an obsession with sex per se, as much as just a legacy many thousands of years old. Some suggest it didn’t even start as a male/female thing, but perhaps animate/inanimate. It’s worth noting how many very different languages globally have grammatical gender, and that in many of them, the gender of words frequently contradict what you’d guess, as well as reverse gender in many situations. Learning languages like German and Icelandic, you’ll be warned not to think of words as gendered so much as just categorized arbitrarily, because grammatical gender and natural gender so often have nothing to do with each other.

Anyway, the rest of the article is pretty interesting too!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender#Useful_ro...

> the gender of words frequently contradict what you’d guess, as well as reverse gender in many situations.

Indeed! In Arabic, the sun is feminine and the moon is masculine; quite the opposite of its sultry huntress associations in the Greco-Roman world!

In Norwegian too, "sola" fem and "månen" masc.

Another interesting thing about language differences, is that some languages don't have articles (like "the" in English - if I remember my English grammar [1] and my Hindi and Sanskrit [2] correctly, heh).

[1] Slightly funny anecdote: When in school (maybe class 5 or 6), I once mixed up the dates of the English Grammar and English Composition semester exams (they were within a day or two of each other), and thought that the next day's exam was Composition, so did not prepare (because you do not prepare for composition a.k.a. essay writing, you just do it on the spot). Turned out that it was actually the Grammar exam, for which you can prepare. I was surprised and pleased to learn later, that I got as good a grade / mark on it - a high one (as I could guess) as if I had actually prepared for it :) I think I had and (still have) some natural aptitude for English grammar, and maybe of some other languages too, for which I am thankful. Good fun.

[2] I studied both Hindi and Sanskrit for many years in school (and did well on both), but don't remember all the grammar rules now, I just speak Hindi naturally, same for English grammar. Native Hindi speakers have told me in the past that my Hindi is pretty much indistinguishable from that of a native speaker.

I speak Persian quite fluently and Persian is completely free of articles. It is also an absolutely gender neutral language (Persians really have to ask if you are talking about a woman or a man if they need context). Besides that, there are no irregular verbs at all. I love it.

Cool. Interesting. Then it must have diverged somewhat in that respect from Sanskrit, because both are descended from Proto-Indo-European languages, I've read. Sanskrit does have genders, IIRC - masculine, feminine and neuter. Sanskrit is also supposed to be a very regular language. I studied it for 3 or 4 years in high school. After you know the basics of some vocabulary and some grammar and some rules for joining words (called sandhi), you can easily understand compound words and even make up your own, like in German. Also, Sanskrit poetry can sometimes have good wordplay because many words have many different meanings (each).

Articles seem completely pointless to me as a Slavic speaker. In my language you can specify the a/the distinction if you want by using equivalents of "this/some", but it's optional and most of the time you just use the nouns alone.

I personally think articles can be useful, but I am not an expert on grammar or linguistics.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20292892 for some examples.

Also it's not really about sex. It's just an arbitrary division. For example one rare synonym for "a girl" (dziewczę) is neuter in Polish :) Male mouse is still a "mysz" which is feminine (it makes every kid in Poland think Mickey Mouse is a girl), there are more such examples :)

For me it's like articles in English - they have some use, but making them mandatory seems like a lot of boilerplate for little reason. What's wrong with saying "some book" vs "this book" if you care about definitiveness of a noun, and skipping it when you don't :)

One theory is that gender in languages aids in first langauge acquisition (while making second language acquisition more difficult). Children learning their first language are helped when there are multiple, redundant ways to recognize words and phrases.

Gender in modern European languages is primarily not about sex; in addition, the word itself just means "kind", in the same sense as "generic". Historically, there was only an "animate" vs. "inanimate" gender. The feminine gender developed from a couple suffixes (think -ic, -al, etc. though these are different suffixes) reanalyzed into a separate gender. Unfortunately nobody really knows why female names are feminine and male names masculine, unfortunately, since we don't have any evidence of PIE names.

> Unfortunately nobody really knows why female names are feminine and male names masculine

It was always kinda suspicious to me that in Polish (and other Slavic languages I think) feminine nouns end in -a, and genitive of masculine nouns also ends in -a.

Genitive denotes belonging among other things. So, if you have name "Mirosław" the female version is "Mirosława", and accusative for something that belongs to Mirosław is also "Mirosława" (for example "Mirosław's car" is "samochód Mirosława", and "Mirosław's wife" is "żona Mirosława").

It's kinda fucked-up, but it's not something people consciously think about, and at this point I think it's harmless.

Yes, this similarity between a suffix that eventually came to characterize the feminine gender and the male genitive was present since Proto-Indo-European. Some hypothesize a connection. Similarly, the feminine and the neuter plural in languages that still have the neuter plural usually have the same form, since the neuter plural and the feminine both evolved from a collectivizing suffix (transform a noun for sth. to a group for sth.).

I agree, this plagued me throughout the years I was living in Brazil and I still can't fathom how a language (Latin in this case) could evolve with the concept of gender applied to inanimate objects!

> I'm convinced that the grammatical construct of gender exists only to make it easier to identify foreign or uneducated speakers!

It makes pronouns more useful.

"I put the book and the apple on the table. Throw him/her/it away"

If apple is neuter, table is masculine and book is feminine (as is the case in my language) - "him/her/it" is uniquely identifying what you want to throw away. In fact my language goes even further and there are 5 grammatical genders (masculine is subdivided into personal/animate/inanimate). And there are distinctions between fully-feminine plural and mixed plural so you can uniquely identify groups of people with pronouns if one group has males in it and the other one doesn't. Like:

"Eve's sisters met Smiths family yesterday, I invited them(mixed plural=Smiths/feminine only plural=the sisters)"

I agree it's weird when you think about it, possibly not worth it, but I like the quirkiness. It allows for brevity that is very hard to translate properly, especially in dialogs.

And this is the one thing that i mess all the time in my mother tongue - Somali. Yet, i was introduced to the language while 8 years old.

It's funny as an Arabic native speaker who also speaks French I don't even think about these kind of things.