tobias_platen's blog

For many years I have been a hobby linguist and also liked doing math. When learning French and Spanish long time ago, I discovered that Grammatical Gender is binary in these languages. Nouns are classified as female or male, a third neuter gender, as it exists in German does not exist. Adjectives and articles are gendered too. In Spanish and French the World (el mundo/le monde) while in German we say die Welt. German also has neuter as in Das U-Boot (a well known boot loader). Old English was gendering too, but in many cases this has been dropped. Other languages such as Finnish and Esperanto do not have a grammatical gender, or more precisely it is unary in these languages. Only one form exists. In Finnish the Moon is called kuu and in esperanto she is called Luno. Luno is derived from latin Luna, a Luna is the divine embodiment of the Moon. In many langues including Spanish and Russion Luna/луна is female. Not so in German where we say der Mond. In Esperanto Luno sound male, but remember there is no gender in that language. The o at the end just indicates that Luno is a noun.

When I studied computer science I heard of “Aussagenlogik” which has two truth values. Those are True (Die Wahrheit) and False (Der Widerspruch) often represented as bits (binary digits). At that time I had never heard the term Nonbinary, but I had heard of Nonboolean Fuzzy Logic and Quantum Computing. In my head I added a third truth value Unknown (Das Unbekannte) which uses the third neuter gender. When one operand of a binary operator is unknown, the whole result becoms unknown. With Quantum Computing we do not have bits, instead qbits which are superpositions of one and zero. My gender feels the same, it is a superposition of both male and female, so I prefer to call myself genderqueer.