#language rants

I’m Cebuano by ethnicity, and the variety of Bisaya I speak is also Cebuano since I was born and raised in Cebu. And can I just say that I actually hate it when people refer to the Bisaya language as a whole as simply “Cebuano” instead of just “Bisaya” or “Visayan.”

Cebuano is only one variety of Bisaya, and it just so happens to be the basis for the standardized form of the Bisaya language. The Bisaya varieties in other regions have their own names and nuances, so boxing all of them under “Cebuano” just sounds so wrong to me. It’s like saying you speak American or British instead of just English.

???

あの子 does not imply any gender, because 子 is gender neutral, the same as the word 人 used in the similarly constructed あの人. It is no more gendered than the term “that child” or “that person” in English. In the absence of 女, 男, 彼, or 彼女, you simply cannot determine gender from these terms. In fact, this is the reason there can be mistakes in translations, especially serializations, if the gender wasn’t specified in early chapters but is clarified later on. It’s fairly natural to be able to go through a conversation in Japanese, especially manga dialogue, without a single personal pronoun.

Only when 子 is used in names (Midoriko, Touko, etc.) does it become feminine. Although, if you want to be pedantic, historically this wasn’t the case (Nakatomi no Kamako was a man and founder of the Fujiwara clan), but as far as what is applicable to modern times, it is true.

I could pull a million examples from dozens of dramas and anime, as well as natural conversational Japanese, which refer to a young child of any gender as あの子. 

Blatant misinformation drives me crazy, especially because this isn’t obscure or complex, it’s quite basic if you know the language.