@vaporeon_ oh shit that’s a cute sounding way to refur to cats
@vaporeon_ @onfy anglo-saxon (aka “old english”) had gendered terms catt and catte, male and female, respectively
@aescling Cool! How did you learn Anglo-Saxon? Do you have a degree in linguistics?
@vaporeon_ i only bits and bobs mostly because of etymology. i did study linguistics, actually, but i was boring and almost entirely studied things in modern english. (my other language of interest is classical latin, which is.... niche..... fur actual linguistics work)
@vaporeon_ incidentally i did briefly try to read a textbook on anglo-saxon in, like, high school
@aescling Linguistics mostly studied things in modern English? How?? 
There are so many cool languages in this world, both ancient and modern, why would they choose English instead of giving an overview of many of these and then letting you specialize...
@vaporeon_ the chomskyans (chomsky was american) believe that the underlying mechanics of language are universal to humankind and thus do not see an issue necessarily with focusing their work on english. this is a controversial position within the field though
@vaporeon_ fur the record, linguists are often less boring than i was in undergrad lol
@vaporeon_ @aescling in French male cat is chat, female cat is chatte (also means a body part with a similar vulgar meaning to English), but male is the default. Spanish also has gato and gata, default is gato (male)
@aescling It is! Sometimes, I look at our fluffy girl, and say "кошка 
" (obviously, I don't pronounce the emoji, this is just to represent the emotion that I'm having when I interact with the cat)
@aescling "kitty" would be "кошечка" (as an affectionate word for a cat; if you wanted to refer to specifically a kitten, that would be "котёнок")
@aescling Language fact: Actually, the word "cat" is gendered in Russian
"кошка" is female cat, "кот" is male cat
But cats are female by default, i.e. if you don't know the gender of a cat, you would call it "кошка"
This also happens in German ("Katze" and "Kater")... I wonder whether other languages have this, too... @onfy , can you tell me whether this also happens in French?