Cultures where men and women don’t speak the same language (2017)

Re:Cultures where men and women don’t speak the same languag... by earthboundkid on Monday December 13, 2021 @04:17PM (#29544758)

I disagree. Yes, it's trivial to avoid saying Atashi and ending sentence in wa, but feminine language differences are a lot more pervasive than that. There's a ton of subtle stuff, and you end up sounding strange if you aren't really careful. To just give one example, there are a ton of places you can choose to throw in an o- or not, just like in English, you can choose to say "the" or not. As in English, it's about pattern matching and getting used to the subtle frequencies for this stuff. Just like French people sound silly when they use "the" in the wrong places, a man sounds silly when using o- in the wrong places.

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Re:Cultures where men and women don’t speak the same languag... by thaumasiotes on Monday December 13, 2021 @05:33PM (#29545567)

> To just give one example, there are a ton of places you can choose to throw in an o- or not, just like in English, you can choose to say "the" or not.

Definiteness marking is certainly an area where speakers of languages that don't do that get confused. But I'm not comfortable saying that there are a ton of places in English where you can choose to say "the" or not. In most cases, there's only one correct choice.

Going back over the nouns in my previous paragraph: (marking area[0] speakers[1] languages[2] I ton[0] places English you cases choice[1] [there])

[0] rival article already marked

[1] "the" permissible; presence and absence are both fine

[2] "the" possible; presence may raise eyebrows

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Re:Cultures where men and women don’t speak the same languag... by rendaw on Tuesday December 14, 2021 @07:37AM (#29550929)

I think GP was talking about honorific/humble o not the object marker o, and chose a poor metaphor. Because honorific/humble o is often a signal for feminine language... there was a trending tiktok video about prefixing "toilet" with "o" for example.

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Re:Cultures where men and women don’t speak the same languag... by earthboundkid on Tuesday December 14, 2021 @08:25PM (#29560800)

If I meant the direct object postposition, I would write “-wo” not “o-”.

The problem with o- is that both men and women use it, but women use it slightly more, and getting that right is hard for a non-native.

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Re:Cultures where men and women don’t speak the same languag... by larsbrinkhoff on Tuesday December 14, 2021 @08:21AM (#29551179)

If the overusing of the articles makes me sound like the Starfire, so be it!

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Re:Cultures where men and women don’t speak the same languag... by novok on Monday December 13, 2021 @06:02PM (#29545862)

I think that exists in most languages, including English! I also don't think it's too much of a problem, since once you have exposure to a broader spectrum of people you start to pick up what is masculine / feminine speech and how different social classes talk.

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Re:Cultures where men and women don’t speak the same languag... by dreamcompiler on Monday December 13, 2021 @11:40PM (#29548307)

This is one of ways I can tell whether email was written by the native English speaker. Articles are missing or in wrong place.

The plurals is other dead giveaway. Apparently articles and plurals are very difficult in English, but to me--a native English speaker--they are the most natural thing in the world.

Of course I'm complete shit at the Latin-based languages because I can never get the masculine/feminine words right.

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