The ancestor of Western languages had no male and female pronouns

Why the debate over gendered words may be over a linguistic accident

If you asked someone what a woman is or what a man is, they might give a very different answer today than they would just 10–15 years ago. Their answer might also depend on their political leaning.

This line was only added in 2020, three years ago.

I have no background to comment on biology, sociology, psychology, or any of the other ologies that factor into such decisions, and, unlike some other physicists, I don’t feel like wading into debates where my knowledge and experience is no better than the average person.

I do want to comment on a particular aspect of the debate that I do know something about: the definitions of words and why debates over words and what they mean cannot be resolved.

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein taught us 70 years ago that words gain their meaning from how they are used. In other words, they do not have intrinsic meaning at all. Rather, they form a set of potential “moves” in a game he called a language game. That language game exists in order to facilitate human beings cooperating with one another to accomplish tasks.

Words in the dictionary, while appearing to have concrete definitions, are defined in terms of other words. We learn those words by observing human behavior and listening to them talk as they use them.

Words and how they fit together (grammar) do not, in fact, have to be logical or represent anything “real”. Instead, they are tools that help human beings work together.

As Jacques Derrida said, all language is self-referential. Thus, it exists apart from the world, neither representing anything real nor anti-real, yet it is the lifeblood of human thought.

Because of this, debates over what words “actually” mean are pointless, and they never stop. Words mean whatever we say they mean as a society. The only question is whether they are useful for…

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