thinking about Tron translations again (Tronslations?)
and I got to thinking about linguistic genders
and well. there are two languages that I studied enough to know offhand what a Program is
German: das Programm
Spanish: el programa
which… actually makes me happy.
because I have always viewed program gender as very fluid and nonbinary (hah) (they are very familiar with binary, okay. they know what it is, and it’s Not That)
anyway
I like these translations because it shows that in both languages, Program is kinda genderqueer
in German it takes the neuter (not male or female) article “das”
in Spanish, there is no such neuter article; everything is either masculine or feminine, with masculine being treated more as the default and used when other languages would not be gender-specific
and Program is a masculine noun, taking both the masculine article “el,” and adjectives with the “-o” ending…
BUT, the noun itself ends with “-a” …which is… very gender-nonconforming for a masculine noun.
so yep. Genderqueer programs all the way.
-o and -a are not at all a reliable gender marker for spanish nouns. many, many masculine nouns end in -a and many feminine nouns end in -o. it is an adjective convention, and of course nouns and adjectives are a little blurry, but it does not extend as a rule to nouns.
in all languages, grammatical gender and human(oid) gender aren’t really the same. even in german, it has much much much more to do with the structure and origin of the word.
True– the tendency for masculine Spanish nouns to end in -o and feminine nouns to end in -a is just a general tendency, with many exceptions. And of course linguistic genders are not closely connected to the concepts of male and female for living beings.
But that’s part of why I find this slight deviation from the tendency to be symbolically pleasing. It reminds me of how all the societal expectations for gender are also just tendencies, with many many exceptions. And how the words we use for our own genders are also not very closely connected to what those genders actually mean to us in our minds– a feeling that can’t fully be defined or put into words.