The phrase "I'd love to."

[Barb_D]

The short answer: to learn to navigate English, you simply need more time listening to how English speakers actual talk. It will take a while, but you'll get there.

Truth!

 

[Charlie Bernstein]

. . . Can we close the thread before it escalates?

Sorry. I posted my response before yours appeared. Just another case of simul-posting.

 

[Skrej]

I've no intent of escalating the original point, (maybe a mod could break part of the thread out into General Discussion or other appreciate forum) but would like to point out that Popri's question is understandably based on a real linguistic phenomenon in Japanese - Gender differences in Japanese, which was an interesting revelation to me.

Lots of languages tie grammatical aspects to gender. With Navajo, active verbs are considered feminine while stative verbs are considered masculine (although otherwise Navajo doesn't bother with grammatical gender). I know most Semitic languages have a gender marker in the verb conjugation - you don't even need a pronoun. Many languages have different forms for formal and informal address, as well as indicating social rank, so why not along gender lines too?

Robin Lakoff studied and wrote about gender and language usage in English.

Short answer is that while there isn't a formal grammatical difference in 'male' versus 'female' language in English as there is some aspects of Japanese, the two sexes do use language differently. However, I think we've established that the term in question isn't one of those breaking points.

Pretty fascinating stuff, actually - worthy of some research and reading. I'm curious to hear if anybody knows or can find if there are other languages that have at least a semi-formal, grammar- based male/female language differences.

 

[GoesStation]

I was told by a student of Thai that men and women use different first-person forms.

 

[Tdol]

In Khmer, there are gender-based words for yes.

 

[Skrej]

You know, the notion of having a special way to say 'yes dear' seems like something English is lacking, now that I think about it. ;-)

 

[GoesStation]

Is the sentence in red grammatical? What is the subject of the underlined verb made?

The sentence contained two typos which I've corrected here: I confess, seeing that "women's language" would make you seem "emotional" and "subjective" briefly made me want to scream.

Here's a shorter sentence to illustrate what made means in that sentence: Seeing that made me want to scream.

 

[GoesStation]

It's a typo, isn't it?

Yes. You fixed it correctly.