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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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Artemis1992 said:
It's kinda funny, you just "know" the gender for literally thousands of nouns if you are german (or from any language with similar rules).
I couldn't even tell if there is a set of rules governing it, picking up examples it seems extremly arbitrary.

I totally understand why people learning the language later in life will forever have issues with that.
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Similar with Spanish, most pronouns referring to something or someone else are essentially gendered masculine and feminine (el/la, los/las, ellos/ellas). Rules are very iffy but in my experience as a native speaker even if you've never heard of a certain noun before you can sort of get a feel for which gender it is just by speaking it out loud.

Things that usually indicate some word is masculine (el/los/ellos):
  • All numbers
  • All days and months
  • All cardinal directions
  • All musical notes
  • The names of rivers, hills, mountains, volcanoes, etc
  • Most winds, with exceptions like brisa (breeze) and tramontana (tramontane)
  • Most words ending in -o
  • Most words ending in -dor or -miento: for instance verdor (greenery), pudor (modesty), sentimiento (feeling/sentiment), pensamiento (thought)…

Things that usually indicate some word in Spanish is feminine (la/las/ellas):
  • All letters
  • Most words ending in -a
  • Most words for abstracts ending in -ción, -ad, -ez, -anza, -ancia, -encia, -eza, -ía, -ura: for instance emoción (emotion), libertad (freedom), embriaguez (drunkenness), esperanza (hope), constancia (constancy), vivencia (experience), crudeza (crudeness), cortesía (courtesy), cordura (sanity)...
And of course, a few of the bullet points above say 'most', not 'all'. For instance...
  • Of words ending in -o, foto (photo), moto (motorcycle) and mano (hand) are all feminine.
  • Of words ending in -a, día (day), tranvía (tram), planeta (planet) and mapa (map) are all masculine.

Words which end in -e can go either way. For instance...
  • Madre (mother), gente (people) and mente (mind) are all feminine
  • Padre (father) and héroe (hero) are both masculine.

Some words have male/female forms by just changing the last letter from -o to -a or viceversa, or just adding -a at the end:
  • Hermano/hermana (brother/sister), or emperador/emperatriz (emperor/empress).
  • It can also be stuff like doctor/doctora (both meaning doctor).
Some words don't conform to that despite having similar structures and when using them their gender depends on the individual that you are referring to (usually jobs or occupations):
  • Periodista (reporter), artista (artist), dentista (dentist);
  • This also applies to words like joven (young person) and adolescente (adolescent/teenager).
Some words are epicene and always used with a specific gendered pronoun regardless of the actual gender of the thing they refer to. For instance:
  • Serpiente (serpent/snake), victima (victim), persona (person) and criatura (creature) are all feminine, regardless of the gender of who or what they refer to.
Plurals referring to a group of similar people tend to be masculine as long as there is a single male in the group - but if every single member of the group is female you use the female form, if there is one. For instance:
  • Trabajadores (workers) and trabajadoras (female workers), amigos (friends) and amigas (female friends). This is even if the singular form of the word is used to refer to a specific gender - amigo usually referring to male friend, for instance.
The gender of a handful of words is ambiguous, sometimes depending on region, sometimes either is usable. For instance:
  • Mar (the sea) can be referred to as either masculine or feminine; arte (art) is masculine, but in the plural, artes (arts), it is feminine.

And finally, the gender of some words depends on which meaning you're using for them, because of course words can have more than one meaning. For instance:
  • Coma when you mean a grammatical comma is feminine, but when you mean it as a person in a coma then it is masculine; lila (lilac) referring to the color is masculine, but if you refer to the flower it's a feminine; capital (capital) referring to a nation's governing city or other location is feminine, but if you mean in the financial sense then it's masculine.

...That's a lot of rules and things to keep in mind, but every language has its own set of bugbears and things that make it harder or easier for certain languages to learn.

For instance, Spanish is very consistent with the spelling of a word matching up with the word's pronunciation, so native Spanish speakers have a lot of difficulty with English - I've seen a lot of people learning English who learned a lot of words from books but never looked up how they're actually pronounced and they're surprised when it's different from how they thought.

By contrast, since the Japanese language is also very consistent with how the way they write their characters matches up to their pronunciation, I've heard that native Japanese speakers who can get past the R/L problem can pick up Spanish pronunciation actually really quickly!
 
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Codex said:
I remember that about French. Drained all the interest I had in the language as a kid. I didn't want to memorise if the table was masculine or feminine, and thank god that didn't take up precious brain space.
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English only dropped grammatical gender (as others note, around 800 years ago) because it was trying to force a grammatical merger between an old form of French spoken by the Normans, with two noun genders, and the Old English spoken by the Anglo-Saxons, which had three.

The structural conflict apparently caused the English said "ah, fuckit" and just give up that entire concept for typical nouns referring to inanimate objects, with only a handful of exceptions such as a cultural tendency to use she/hers pronouns for ships. Because the English are a little weird about ships.

Nerdasaurus Rex said:
Unless you were talking about an "ancient knife" that is silver, as opposed to a "silver knife" that is ancient.
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No, even then people subconsciously expect the customary English-language adjective order to be preserved. If you want to emphasize that an ancient knife is silver without sounding weird, but also without actually saying "it's an ancient silver knife," you really do have to come up with some other circuitous concept. Such as "the ancient knife is silver."

Parabola said:
For instance, Spanish is very consistent with the spelling of a word matching up with the word's pronunciation, so native Spanish speakers have a lot of difficulty with English - I've seen a lot of people learning English who learned a lot of words from books but never looked up how they're actually pronounced and they're surprised when it's different from how they thought.

By contrast, since the Japanese language is also very consistent with how the way they write their characters matches up to their pronunciation, I've heard that native Japanese speakers who can get past the R/L problem can pick up Spanish pronunciation actually really quickly!
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Spanish has extremely simple pronunciation, to the point where you can very easily learn to pronounce the written language without actually understanding what you are reading.

It is very rare that someone will be able to accurately pronounce a complete sentence in English that consists entirely of words they do not know; in Spanish, the feat is trivial.
 
My explanation for beastwomen being allegedly more timid and gentle is that if they did all the dying in childbirth (which given beastman medicine is probably a lot) and half the dying in chaos infighting and half the dying in war, the beastmen would rapidly cease being a thing (outside of magic moon silliness), and they have the requisite number of braincells needed to wait for a problematic gor or whatever to be asleep before "gently" sticking knives in their important bits. Knives which may or may not have nurglish fun coating them.
 
Parabola said:
For instance, Spanish is very consistent with the spelling of a word matching up with the word's pronunciation, so native Spanish speakers have a lot of difficulty with English - I've seen a lot of people learning English who learned a lot of words from books but never looked up how they're actually pronounced and they're surprised when it's different from how they thought.
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In all honesty this is also not particularly unusual among native english speakers who are heavy readers or at least were heavy readers when they were young.
 
I think monogender male orcs are fine. Got no problem with monogender factions in general - it's basically just Steven Universe - so long as the setting overall is one with good gender representation, which Warhammer isn't, but I don't think the orcs are at fault for that.

soulcake said:
Drunken Dynasty has a less terrible take given the canon material on hand IMO, where beastwomen are timid compared to beastmen, but by any other metric they are still feral madmen that hate all traces of civilization and the other races with a burning passion bordering on absolute zealotry. Still got all the baggage of beastmen tropewise but its egalitarian baggage?

Still not great but aaaah. It is what it is.
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Drunken Dynasty has one named beastwoman character when several major beastman OCs have been introduced, and her special ability is giving birth.

Alratan said:
WFB once made reference to Amazons, but they faded out in later editions, which is probably a good thing.
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Codex said:
They still exist in offhand mentions, and Blood Bowl made an excellent team consisting of them that had designs which I universally liked. I'm holding out hope that they exist in DL too in that depiction, although it is unlikely we get to see them because of how far Lustria is.
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WFRP 4e: Lustria reintroduced Amazons. There's not an abundance of information on them, I think because C7 doesn't want to decide whether they have boltguns or not, but they definitely exist and we get some lore on them.
 
Andres said:
I think monogender male orcs are fine. Got no problem with monogender factions in general - it's basically just Steven Universe - so long as the setting overall is one with good gender representation, which Warhammer isn't, but I don't think the orcs are at fault for that.
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I have similar thoughts, honestly. It also helps that most Warhammer orcs are fungi that behave as football hooligans - that's somehow still better than whatever nonsense with racial undertones the usual author drawing on Tolkien tends to do. It's very easy to run into uncomfortable questions when someone writes in an always-violent/crudish/unpleasant species or race.

Like, I'm not gonna pretend there aren't blatant issues in canon here (such as Savage Orcs and how they look), but this quest got me past my wariness of the setting in general - I trust Boney will use the scalpel called Nuance and cut away at canon as he pleases to make something nice.
 
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Parabola said:
For instance, Spanish is very consistent with the spelling of a word matching up with the word's pronunciation, so native Spanish speakers have a lot of difficulty with English - I've seen a lot of people learning English who learned a lot of words from books but never looked up how they're actually pronounced and they're surprised when it's different from how they thought.
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Hell, I'm a native English speaker who read a lot growing up and this happened multiple times - occasionally I'll still get corrected upon saying a word out loud that I've only ever read before.

NavySeel said:
Pretty sure that was before they got into the whole navy thing, hence the weird relationship with ships.
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To be fair, it's not like using female terms for ships and the sea is required - you can use gender neutral terms just fine, and often you'll be more correct. Referring to them as "she" is for when you're being admiring/poetic, mostly.
 
Elbrasch said:
Half remember the beginning of (the?) Skarsnik novel I read 10 years ago insinuating that goblins are biologically capable of gangraping their female captures while slow boiling and roasting the males. Chucked that one up to the generic grimdarkness going on at the time, through I will never look at the "eat captives" button in TW:WH the same again.
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Was that in-character, or third person semi-omniscient?

Because, in setting, I'm sure the average pleb in the towns and villages of the Old World have various misunderstandings and myths like that. Goblins are well known to be vicious and cruel little bastards, so commoners who don't know any better, accidentally anthropomorphising them by attributing various cruel and horrible human behaviours to them isn't surprising.
 
I can understand, if not approve of the writers going, 'the empire and bretonnia are medieval hellholes and there's just not going to be a ton of prominent nonmagical women.' Even if that's kind of dumb in a fantasy setting. But the lack of awesome elven and dwarf women feels less acceptable. Where's the centuries old badass elf ladies hacking apart monsters with superhuman sword skills? The Caledorian princess riding in on a dragon? The dwarven runelady smiting armies with her anvil of doom? If only descendants of thungni can become runesmiths, it feels silly they wouldn't train the women too.
 
Breadnaugt said:
Was that in-character, or third person semi-omniscient?

Because, in setting, I'm sure the average pleb in the towns and villages of the Old World have various misunderstandings and myths like that. Goblins are well known to be vicious and cruel little bastards, so commoners who don't know any better, accidentally anthropomorphising them by attributing various cruel and horrible human behaviours to them isn't surprising.
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Assuming it's the novel called Skarsnik, it's "As told by the playwright & lunatic Jeremiah von Bickenstadt In his own words to Noted Academic and Professor of Veridology Kaspar Wollendorp von Averheim zu Heisenstadt Adapted from the notes of the above by Guido Kleinfeld"

I think Veridology is supposed to be study of greenskins, drawing on verdigris.

Wiggy said:
I can understand, if not approve of the writers going, 'the empire and bretonnia are medieval hellholes and there's just not going to be a ton of prominent nonmagical women.' Even if that's kind of dumb in a fantasy setting. But the lack of awesome elven and dwarf women feels less acceptable. Where's the centuries old badass elf ladies hacking apart monsters with superhuman sword skills? The Caledorian princess riding in on a dragon? The dwarven runelady smiting armies with her anvil of doom? If only descendants of thungni can become runesmiths, it feels silly they wouldn't train the women too.
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The setting was largely built in the 90s, and this kind of thing wasn't a consideration at the time, especially in a male dominated and niche field like tabletop wargaming. They should have fixed it, but GW aren't great at that (either fixing things or representation).
 
deathofrats0808 said:
The setting was largely built in the 90s, and this kind of thing wasn't a consideration at the time, especially in a male dominated and niche field like tabletop wargaming. They should have fixed it, but GW aren't great at that (either fixing things or representation).
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I think it's also how many fantasy stereotypes it draws on, at least apart from the elves.
Tolkien Dwarves I don't think had a single actual character that was a female.
 
Talon TigerDino said:
they have the requisite number of braincells needed to wait for a problematic gor or whatever to be asleep
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Seems like this would also end the beastmen pretty fast; I kinda thought the whole point is that all gors are problematic. Its kinda a problem of making a whole faction as awful as possible- you can't really single out individual members of it for being worse, given the way that 'they are all like that' is driven home.
 
Glau said:
Seems like this would also end the beastmen pretty fast; I kinda thought the whole point is that all gors are problematic. Its kinda a problem of making a whole faction as awful as possible- you can't really single out individual members of it for being worse, given the way that 'they are all like that' is driven home.
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Nonsense. The one that eats human babies is fine, the one that eats the warherd's is not (unless the herd is starving or they are a chaos champion or something). There's a range to evilness/usefulness in any faction that has individuals.
 
Ok, but you are presuming a beastmen pro-social enough to not eat the beastherd's babies.

And from the pushback to the idea that the beastmen can be anything but chaos soaked wretches, I'm not sure what the evidence for such a thing existing is.

Having and protecting the next generation is the bedrock purpose of civilization, after all.
 
I feel like a society that is insufficiently pro-social enough to not eat their own babies would select themselves out of existence pretty quickly.
 
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