'Françaises, Français': Why the French language need not be so sexist

[MineralMan]

9. Not in the same way French is.

English is very broadly a non-inflected language. However, it does use some gendered pronouns. It's much easier to change the use of a few pronouns and replace words like "waitress" with "server" and so on than it is to change the gendered grammatical structure of a language like French. And yet, we're having plenty of trouble eliminating gender-related words, even in English.

For example, the cat is le chat in French. All cats are les chats. A kitten is un chaton. Obviously, though, there are male and female cats. You could, perhaps, refer to a female cat as la chatte, which makes structural sense in that language. However, la chatte is already in use, as a crude word for "vulva." So, if you try that in Paris, you will be thought to be rather ugly with your use of the language, and you will be misunderstood.

Gender in inflected languages is structural, rather than indicative of the sexual characteristics of a noun. And, since the language is highly inflected, adjectives also reflect the gender of the noun.

English has no such structure, and has not had since the days of Chaucer. Even then, such structures were rapidly going away.