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Tradition perhaps? I mean for years and years women couldn't go to school, maybe they would just like to keep it that way....I could be off xd
:needs sleep:

I use the women's speech pattern then the boys
I grew up with a lot of friends that were girls

Not in the singular form, no. It's like the English "she", "he" and "they". There's no neutral there either, just a plural. There is "one" or "a person" in English, but in Hebrew even that is either feminine or masculine when you're not generalizing.



No, because that would be discrimination, as you're not appealing only to one gender. There is a rather simple solution, which is to use the plural conjugation, and Fritz says that it is being done, but it's not done in all of the textbooks and not in the bagrooiot (the Israeli equivalent of the SATs/ACTs.)



The problem is that you can't compress all into one in the singular form of Hebrew because it is grammatically incorrect and causes women (who are usually the compressed) to be ignored most of the time.



The segregation of the sexes and how big it is is a different discussion for a different time. But as for Actress, I do use it because it means that there is a woman there, not a man. there's an important distinction to be made between continued segregation by means of language and giving women the respect they deserve. The title actor means male actor, and by definition, excludes women, so using it on a woman or a group pf women, is, in my opinion, not only insulting (because they are not men with vaginas, they are women), it is also incorrect by most dictionary definitions.

lol There's only 11 girls I can remember being friends with. And like 20-30 who were boys. lol Yeah, most of my friends were boys. lol

I wasn't being distinctive enough. sweatdrop Just some forms have completely vanished - 1st person plural female in the future tense (יכתבונה) and 1st person plural female in the imperative tense (כתבונה).
It sounds kind of archaic, and most people don't even write like that anymore. It is the correct way to say it, though.
I've never heard a specific rule about the way you should address groups. People make up lots of rules but I don't think it really matters, gramatically.

I found it so much easier to ignore grammatical genders when I discovered that the Russian word for "masculinity" is FEMININE and that the word for 'man' is declined like a feminine noun. xd

PRECISELY my reaction. xD

It helps one stop taking grammatical cases seriously at all.

Well that is, as I was saying, a matter of debate among Feminist Scolars. Personally, untill the distinction was made to me as a young child, Actor for me meant both a male or a female. It's in the eye of the beholder. But English is inconsistent with this as well. For example, the word Doctor only has the one form (as far as I know anyway), whereas in German, there is a male and a female form. But the social wiring of people to, in most cases, associate doctor with a man in English, is due to, social wiring.

If, in Hebrew, you suddenly removed the gender forms over-night, there is still that social correlation of gender to career, and a number of other gendered words I'd imagine, that would be difficult for people to get around, but with time it would simply make no difference.

Again in German, there is a female and a male form of vegetarian, but as far as I can tell, there is no social connection between gender and whether you're a vegetarian or not.

F. Fritzi -- That's because it uses the deminutive -chen which in German always changes the word into a neutral form. This works with any compound word, as far as I know. The new gender is derived from the end word. The best example I can think of is all the wurts. They're all feminine, because wurst itself is feminine.