My Estonian friend was complaining about this — they don't have gendered pronouns.. so she was complaining that when you say "I went out with my friend and they something-something" everyone knows it was someone of a gender in which you might be romantically interested. (how's that for awkward phrasing? :-)
I often found it funny when talking to Hungarians who (despite having spoken English for years and years) would occasionally mix up "he" and "she" - sometimes even "it". English speakers are amazed at learning languages where there is more than one non-trivial gender. Hungarian speakers are amazed that there's more than one gender at all!
I wonder if any Uralic languages have any grammatical gender at all. And now I wonder how much non-Indo-European families use gender. I know Swahili has something like 18 genders, so it's clearly not just an IE phenomenon, but perhaps other families have similarly diverse types of genders that have little or nothing to do with human sex/gender.
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p.s. Hi Kenny!!
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I wonder if any Uralic languages have any grammatical gender at all. And now I wonder how much non-Indo-European families use gender. I know Swahili has something like 18 genders, so it's clearly not just an IE phenomenon, but perhaps other families have similarly diverse types of genders that have little or nothing to do with human sex/gender.