Is "female" offensive?
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 ^^
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But also important to remember that quite a bunch of people are note native speakers without the feeling for finer distinctions in meaning. Like for me, since I learned english mostly in a scientific setting, those words habe little negative connotation on their own. They became negative co-notated through the use of misogynistic communities.
Yeah, I definitely wouldn't judge someone who doesn't know better. I'm not a native speaker myself. I just wanted to clarify as good as I can because it seems like OP wants to make an honest effort to use it correctly.
Speaking of non-native speakers. This is a phrase that's clear enough and makes complete sense, but does come across as quite clunky and unnatural to a native English speaker. I couldn't articulate why exactly, but "a bunch" doesn't really take "quite" quite as well as some other similar words. "Quite a few", or "a bunch" (without the quite) would have worked better here. Or just "many", which is probably what I would have gone with.
I think it's German slipping in. Thanks for feedback.
This might be a regional thing. For reference I grew up in Oklahoma and "quite a bunch" seems natural and familiar. In British English quite has the opposite meaning so I could see why it wouldn't make sense in that context. I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't sound right to other Americans due to regional linguistic differences.
Yeah, seems like a more recent thing. Like if there were a bunch of varying ages then I'd just go males or females, but because of how meanings change I just don't use it anymore to not even risk the chance of offending someone. If they find it offensive than who am I to say it isn't. So I just removed it from my vocab outside of science, since I don't want to deal with the drama.
Honestly, anyone who can speak a second language has a better grasp of what a noun and an adjective are than yer average English speaker. They're just at risk of picking up colloquialisms from the manosphere, if they hang around in the wrong kinds of places.
Why?
Because you don’t have to have any formal education in your native language to speak it; you could blow off or fail English in school. But if you know a second language, there is a much higher chance that you had some formal education in the way of classes or books. You could still fail it or blow it off, but it seems like a reasonable assumption that you’d have a higher chance of having a grasp of grammar concepts.
sorry but I think you are misjudging just how much you learn both grammar and vocabulary from speaking a language natively and possibly misjudging how well education can teach someone a language
languages are these surprisingly complex and irregular things, which are way easier to learn by doing than by trying. often entering school you can already use tenses or grammatical structures that students learning English as a second language will struggle with a few years later in their educational journey, while you can spend that time unknowingly building up an even better subconscious understanding of the language.
Besides, from my experience, having basic Polish and extended English mind you, the tasks you are expected to do in the lessons of ones native language require a way higher degree of mastery than those in the second language of a pupil.
Also, it should be noted that non native speakers, or fluent speakers of multiple languages, can often borrow things from another language into English, either translating fraises literary (ex. once in a Russian year instead of once per blue moon) or using a unrelated word which happens to have a connection in the other language for other reasons (ex. castle and zipper both translate to "zamek" in Polish)
also mind that for a not insignificant number of people, though due to how more connected our world is today this has slightly decreased in the recent years, the level of English they ended up with from school is quite poor.
It sounds like you are confusing having an ability to speak and understand a language with having a formal education in a language, or just misunderstanding what I was saying. As you point out, people can already speak their native language (more or less) starting from the first day of grammar school. In fact, school isn’t necessary at all for a person to be a native speaker.
The children starting out in school don’t have a clue what a noun or verb is in the language. When someone reaches the point in school where they learn these grammatical concepts, they can do poorly at grasping them or forget about them after they’ve learned them and they are no longer part of the curriculum. They don’t actually need to know these things well (or at all) in order to speak, read, and write. High school students can write an essay in English that shows total mastery of the past progressive verb form without being able to tell you what it is.
On the other hand, when learning a second language (unless one does immersion), a person can’t rely on their native-speaker instinct and therefore will struggle to speak, read, and write if they don’t get the hang of formal grammatical terms to process their language input and compute the output.
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
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.
Maybe it's only true of my aging generation but we never really encountered grammar until we were required to learn French.
Interesting, english is my third language - but I'm just bad at grammar and spelling in general. Definitely learned grammar in school - just forgot all about it.
something I'd like to add is that while you were not told the rules, you likely learned quite a few of them subconsciously.
personally to this day I struggle with what present perfect and others are, but I can use them easily. similarly I can't say which grammatical case is which in my native language but I have no issue using them.
Of course. But understanding why calling women "females" is a big red flag is not about your intuitive grasp of the language. We dehumanise people by nounising their adjectives all the time. Are you epileptic, or an epileptic, or just a person with epilepsy?
It's harder to explain to someone with a poor grasp of English grammar, that's all. People who are fluent or near fluent because they grew up hearing and speaking a language will often struggle to explain something like this. People who had to learn the grammar consciously probably would not.
Only biologists and coppers need to use "female" as a noun. Everyone else can speak proper, like.
ah I must have misunderstood your comment , I think you may have replied to a different comment than you have intended to ?
also just as a side note , one counter example is many autistic people , myself included prefer the term autistic person rather than person with autism , though to be fair that is moreso an adjective but the way you worded that sentence suggests its also incorrect in some cases yeah um
also I have never met a single copper , really must open myself to new experiences /j :)
No, I was responding to your perfectly correct comment about the way we learn language, which is as little kids gradually working out the rules from exposure, not by being taught them.
We pick up on how language is used, not why it is used like that.
And that is exactly why some people with a condition like autism or epilepsy find attempts to rehumanise the language used to refer to them patronising or unhelpful. In my examples, "an epileptic" would be the dehumanising nounisation. And because of those attempts to rehumanise the language, people sometimes avoid the adjective too (in exactly the same way it's happened with woman/female).
I mean you could argue americans aren't native speakers either. But on the other hand, they did what the british wanted to but couldn't, purge much of the french from their language.
I would argue that US-americans are native speakers of US-American english, which is a bit different from english spoken in england.
I know that this is popular especially among Latin American speakers, but the phrase "US-American" is very unidiomatic in English and makes you stand out quite significantly. In English, the term "American" means someone from the United States of America. It's clear enough because "America" is always a shortened form of that country, while the large western hemisphere landmass is collectively "the Americas", since the anglosphere almost universally uses a seven-continent model with North and South America being two continents (and with some more "enlightened" people preferring a six-continent model merging Eurasia—but you'll rarely find a native English speaker who refers to "America" as a single continent).
You got it, I just happen to have quite some friends from south and middle America and since it was important to them and make sense to me I took it over in my vocabulary.
Fun fact (that I have heard and was not able to verify with a quick search so take this with a grain of salt): the English spoken in the US is closer to the way it was spoken in Britain in the 1700s. The gentry made an intentional change to their pronunciation in response to the rise of the middle class, which filtered down to the masses.