🇳🇴 Thor — backup account
Years ago, I had fallen into the bad habit of taking the Norwegian-English dictionary too literally, and would go around typing phrases like "my female cousin" and "my male cousin" to English speakers I knew on the Internet.
One day, one of them asked me why I would repeatedly state the sex of my cousins, and I realised that, in English, there are no direct translations of the words fetter and kusine. The default is to leave the sex ambiguous unless you're asked about it.
🇳🇴 Thor — backup account
For a Norwegian speaker, using the genderless word "cousin" in a sentence like "my cousin is tall" is about as natural as using the genderless word "parent" in a sentence like "my parent is tall". Even an English speaker would then want to know whether you're talking about your mother or your father, because that is considered important information. There is a genderless word in Norwegian too, but that one's typically only used to refer to cousins collectively, or if the sex is unknown to you.
🇳🇴 Thor — backup account
So the gist of it is that the gendered Norwegian words for "cousin" feel direct and personal, while the ungendered words in Norwegian and English feel indirect and impersonal, and that need to refer to them in a more personal way was what prompted me to add gender specifiers when speaking English, ironically making them sound even more impersonal, since "male" and "female" are very impersonal words.
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