Asklemmy

43980 readers

675 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
[email protected]: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

250

Is "female" offensive? (lemmy.world)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

289 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I am not a native English speaker and I have sometimes referred to people as male and female (as that is what I have been taught) but I have received some backlash in some cases, especially for the word "female", is there some negative thought in the word which I am unaware of?

I don't know if this is the best place to ask, if it's not appropriate I have no problem to delete it ^^

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

reading through your comments I feel like the issue is of interpretation : what I , and possibly others , assumed you were trying to say is that non native English speakers have an advantage when trying to interpret the meaning of words , so sorry about that .

Thinking about it however , I believe I have been taught more about linguistics in my Polish lessons than in my English lessons . Unfortunately , as you have suspected many students will , I forgot a large portion of it , which I am especially unhappy about now that I am getting interested in recreational linguistics , I still remember some of it , with parts of speech (not to be confused with constituents (that joke would be quite a bit better in Polish as constituents literally means parts of (a) sentence in Polish)) being one of the most basic building blocks of language

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

You are an individual multilingual person from a specific place. I’m talking about how monolingual speakers on average would compare in their knowledge of formal grammatical terms to multilingual speakers, again, on average. In particular with English which has very little verb conjugation or case marking, it is very easy to ignore the class of a word if that’s the only language you learn about.