Most languages are gendered, it’s weird that English isn’t. German certainly is, and that’s what English descended from.
Chinese characters are horribly sexist once you start understanding the etymology. The character for “traitor” is invade next to woman, and it just gets worse from there. They should have stuck to the “eliminate characters in favor of pure pinyin” movement, but unfortunately didn’t.
Most languages are gendered
Assuming you’re talking about grammatical gender (not semantic gender, as in Modern English): most Indo-European languages are gendered, but those are a tiny portion of the world’s languages. As far as I know, on a language-by-language basis (i.e. not considering the number of speakers) it’s about as common for grammatical gender to be absent rather than present. This is true of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese (all from distinct language families) as well as the Turkic languages and some Indo-Aryan languages (e.g. Bengali and Persian), to name a few.
I both agree and disagree. From a progressive perspective and a language learning perspective, pinyin is the right move. From a cultural perspective, however, so much is lost through the elimination of the characters.
Most languages are gendered, it’s weird that English isn’t. German certainly is, and that’s what English descended from.
That’s completely untrue. The majority of language are gender neutral. What happened is that the languages of most imperialists (Indo-Europeans languages) have grammatical gender. And it’s strictly untrue that English doesn’t have grammatical gender. It absolutely does. That’s why pronoun discourse is even a thing. If English was truly non-gendered, everyone would just have they/their pronouns.
They should have stuck to the “eliminate characters in favor of pure pinyin” movement, but unfortunately didn’t.
An absolutely terrible idea since Chinese characters paper over differences within Chinese varieties. If you write stuff in pinyin, you’re pretty much forcing everyone to learn standard Mandarin because pinyin is designed exclusively for Mandarin. Cantonese has their own romanization. Hokkien does as well. And so do many Chinese varieties. But since they all share a common origin of Middle Chinese, they share the same Middle Chinese cognate which means they share the same corresponding Chinese character.
Depending on what variety you speak, Hong Kong can be Xiānggǎng, hoeng1 gong2, hiang1 kong2, Hiông-kóng, hiong1 guong3, Hióng-gǒ̤ng, Hiŏng-gē̤ng, Hiong-káng, hiang1 gang2, or xian-kaan. But every variety agrees on the same Chinese characters 香港.
