TIL: Chinese had no gendered pronouns until the 20th century (youtu.be)

submitted 3 months ago by cfgaussian@lemmygrad.ml to c/china@lemmygrad.ml

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Did you know that Chinese didn't have a word for "She" until about 100 years ago? In fact, Chinese operated without a female 3rd person pronoun for thousands of years, and it wasn't a problem -- until interaction with the west. Watch this video to learn the fascinating (albeit winding) history of Chinese gendered pronouns.

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[-] cfgaussian@lemmygrad.ml 6 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

That's interesting. I know very little about indigenous North American languages. Near where i grew up the main languages without gendered pronouns are Turkish and Hungarian.

Apparently it is more common for languages to not have gendered pronouns than you would think if you only looked at European languages.

This analysis seems to suggest that only 30% of languages worldwide have them?

this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2026

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