Read your classmates' entries. Like the ones you like the most. Then select one of them to deepen the discussion by replying to it.
Freda’s post:
Why is this topic relevant whereas Spanish distinguishes between male and female nouns and pronouns?
This was a great and inspiring article. Rigid gender identification and stereotyping are one of the main issues underlying societies' most pressing problems, past and present. Feminine and masculine are concepts and important, but their embodiment is not exclusive. Interesting, but it will be short-lived. Spanish has had grammatical gender for a thousand years, inherited from 2,000 prior years of common and classical Latin. The gender of the nouns and pronouns is important because the adjectives and articles must also be masculine or feminine. The adjective must match the noun in terms of gender and number, singular or plural. All Spanish nouns have lexical gender, either masculine or feminine, and most nouns referring to male humans or animals are grammatically masculine, while most referring to females are feminine. In terms of markedness, the masculine is unmarked and the feminine is marked in Spanish. Gender awareness is necessary because no one is ever completely able to 'step outside' of the social and cultural processes that partly shape our identities, values, and perceptions, but we can still develop ways of reflecting and ways of interrogating ourselves. The way we speak can shape the way we think. Sometimes gendered differences can have real implications in society. In fact, there are three genders in Spanish grammar, not two: masculine, femenino, and nuetro. Unlike English, gendered languages are not so easy to simplify. Outside of fantasy and science fiction, there is no such thing as gender neutrality. Genetics and DNA do not lie. People may choose to live, act, or comport themselves any way they want to, but their genetic makeup remains what it always was.
