[split] Names, pronouns, articles... and gender

[Nuytsia]

Whoa I missed so many posts on this topic it's hard to respond now!
Scarily I realised later that night after I made that initial post that Chinese uses a gender neutral pronoun........... it's funny how much you forget about something you studied at school for 5 years! GAH!
I think school has faded into oblivion in my mind.......

Hehee, I think I should split the conversation since we're so off-topic now. Just to add a few bits to the pot:
- As similar as Mervi looks to Mervyn (and its variants) or Merve (which is in use in Turkey and was also an ancient city somewhere in modern Iran I think) it has nothing to do with either name. It was first used as a first name in 1911 and is said to be derived from the name of a medieval mansion here in Finland - but no one seems to know the actual etymology (which bothers me quite a bit).

Interesting!
I suspect I thought Mervi was a female name because it ends in 'i' .... I don't think there's many male names in Australia that end in i

I thought thul was male, but not because of the name, just general impression.

- I've always thought that the obsession that some languages have (I'm looking at you, German and Spanish) to define EVERYTHING with a gender and then letting it affect how the rest of the sentence is formed is rather silly. How can I know whether lettuce is "female" or broccoli "male" in the minds of Spanish people? (For the record, I don't, those were just examples.) The first few words in German I learned were: das Auto, der Hund und die Katze. Look, I understand that non-living objects are gender-neutral. But animals? I think labeling dogs as masculine and cats as feminine has HUGE implications, both for the animals and for what is considered "feminine" or "masculine" in humans.

Yup!
Also, I wonder if there's any language that assigns genders to nouns that would make cat male and dog female? I'm guessing not. Weird isn't it.

- That being said, while we only have gender-neutral pronouns and don't use gender-defining articles (err actually we don't have articles at all OH THE SHOCK, THE HORROR ) we do have rather strict name laws that prevent (among other things) giving a "girl's" name to a boy or the other way around. Most, although not all, Finnish names are clearly boy or girl names. There have been a couple of recorded males with my name in the past though, before the name laws changed and there are still a handful of names that, when you hear them you can't be sure of the gender (especially since you can't use a gendered pronoun to give that detail). Those are mostly "old people's names" though and not fashionable so it's almost rare to hear them now.

Name LAWS? Whoa! I wonder if we have any laws about naming children? I am sure we don't have laws about specific names for males and females. That's really interesting........ I guess it puts a whole new perspective on what sort of assumptions could be made about a society where there are no gender specific pronouns?