I prefer dealing with complicated but ultimately rule-based stuff like は/が over the utter nonsense that is grammatical gender (and I’m German).
Edit: and because I see heated discussion about it elsewhere: grammatical gender is a very convenient thing to have (not to learn) and I wouldn’t abolish it (just wouldn’t want to learn it).
What’s convenient about it? I genuinely see no benefits, as a native speaker of a gendered language.
Take this example:
“Bob took his hat out of the bag and dropped it.” What did he drop?
“Bob nahm seinen Hut aus der Tasche und ließ sie fallen.” “Bob took his male hat out of the female bag and dropped her.” Ah, he dropped the bag!
There’s better examples, I’m sure, but having gendered pronouns makes references clearer than everything just being “it”. It’s a way to structure sentences that may not be vital to understanding (because obviously there are languages that work perfectly fine without it) but makes it easier. Like capitalising nouns or clear rules for where to put commas can make reading easier.
That only works if they have different genders. Which is often not the case in most gendered languages.
“Bob sacó su manzana de la caja y la dejó caer.”
Bob took his female apple out of his female box and let it (female) fall
Also from my experience growing and going to school in a gender language (not Spanish btw), grammar classes are way more intense and thorough than for something like English. Most people don’t really have grammar classes in English speaking countries, while I studied it until the last year of high school…
More complex grammar certainly makes it more difficult to learn, even for native speakers.
Yes, that doesn’t negate the fact that genderedness serves a purpose. It’s not simply there to annoy language learners.
Wow, nice, danke.
But I honestly don’t think the effort/price is worth it. You can make unambiguous references if required.
That’s the thing, it’s only an effort if you’re actively learning the language. Natives think about the gender of nouns only in certain, rare edge-cases that are ill-defined, like loanwords or “artificial” words (Nutella is gender-fluid). It would make more sense to just define those edge-cases than to try to get rid of gendered nouns.
I understand all of these languages.
but I also never have sex.
life is full of trade-offs.
Yeah but I have you tagged as manosphere, so that is probably a you problem.
oh and how do you label yourself then?
I have them tagged as judgmental lmao
Me? Thanks.
I can’t keep track of who is who without notes
How do I unlearn languages?
I know Hungarian, English, and a very little Japanese. I feel really lonely.
You speak Hun-glish? I knew a little old lady way back in the day that spoke Hun-glish. As a medic, it took several conversations before I could even begin to understand her spoken symptoms.
You need to reach like 6 or 7 language before you can experience fifo overflow
6 or 7
ahajjahajajakaka
6 or 7
🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮
I don’t know about Russian but at least Croatian which is also a Slavic language confuses the hell out of me (and I’m German)
confuses the hell out of me (and I’m German)
And rightfully so. I’m also German, I learned Sorbian (slavic minority in Lusatia), and I can very much feel your pain.
Russian has 6 cases. two more than german.
the added ones are instrumental and prepositional.
Technically it’s the other way around - the ones German lost in comparison to Russian were the Instrumental and Prepositional (Locative).
This is from the original 8 (or 9) cases in their ancestor, Proto-Indo-European: Nominative, Accusative, Instrumental, Dative, Ablative, Genitive, Locative, Vocative, (Allative).
Russian doesn’t have definite/indefinite articles?
it doesn’t really use article at all.
it’s highly cased, the cases and inflection do all the work.
That doesn’t sound more simple.
English has strict word order and all these stupid helper words, how is that simpler?
By being the devil we know, I guess? 🤷🏻
Lol. English is the opposite of simple.
Ok, it is relatively simple to learn for the indogerman family. And looks like, for chinese/korean/japanese as well.
The case are quite complicated, yes. But not having articles is way simpler. And I can’t say it ever caused confusion growing up.
And they aren’t clear when to use them either, it’s kinda cute when they look at you questioningly if they did correctly after formulating a sentence.
Neither does Polish. I know at least one polaka who confuses the/a(n) 15% of the time.
One of my Polish colleagues, who otherwise speaks pretty perfect English, seems to choose he/she/it at random when putting sentences together. Which is fine for objects, but misleading for people. “I saw a friend yesterday and she said such-and-such” for a male friend, and so on.
Slavic languages notoriously have gender for every object. In russian “friend” have two variants, one for male gender, one for female. Same at least with Ukrainian and Serbian. So when I translate sentence to English (which only have one word for “friend”) I subconsciously use default word + she/he to empathize gender.
It’s annoying habit, cause when I say or refer to “user” for example, I always assume it’s “he/him”.
Guess same for your colleagues.
…which sounds surprising to me, because AFAIK Polish also has separate he/she words (on/ona).
I assume he’s aligning the pronouns to the gender of the noun, rather than the person. “Susie is a great worker, he’s very efficient” kind of stuff.
I’d be surprised if there weren’t a female “worker” in Polish, “workeress” as it were, same for any other such nouns.
Depends on the exact word. For example, person is grammatically female, even if the actual person isn’t. Or, a lot of times you can make a different form, but you don’t strictly need to.
It’s actually somewhat of an ongoing debate in places WRT professions: declaring whatever the current word is to be gender neutral, or having mandatory versions for both male and female (German /inen approach).
I think it’s the case with most Slavic languages. My wife’s native tongue is Serbian, and knowinf when and how to use articles was one the hardest parts of learning English for her.
Dude, I’m trying to learn German and those goddamn articles are so infuriating. I wonder how difficult it would be for there to be a linguistic reform to make it simpler
Quite the statement for an English comment. English spelling is nonsensical and in desperate need of a major reform. RobWords even made the case for using runes again as it would probably fix a lot of issues already. The language simply isn’t made for Latin letters.
But I don’t want to make this a sole whataboutism comment. Each language poses it’s own challenges. I will say that changing how roughly 100 million speak is easier said than done and would destroy a lot of culture. It would be much easier to force everyone to speak a different language entirely.
Personally I don’t think it should or could be done at all. Unlike a spelling reform that English needs desperately and German had plenty of recently. There is nothing wrong with a language being complicated but there’s plenty wrong with arbitrary spelling if you ask me.
My native language isn’t English in case you were assuming that. I mention it because my native language has gone through a reform for the reasons of simplification. English may be shit, but it was much much easier to learn than the hell I am going through with German. Even Japanese, which I touched for a few years wasn’t nearly as bad. The point of languages it to be simple and efficient, and they should evolve to that goal eventually.
My native language isn’t English in case you were assuming that.
I wasn’t assuming that, don’t worry. That’s why I phrased my message like that.
I guess I agree to disagree here. Language is an expression of culture and heritage too. I would never speak German differently now just because of a reform. Neither would 99% of German speakers I assume. Yet we freely integrate English words into our language because it feels natural. These English words often come and go anyway so I’m not actually concerned the German language will become deluded from Internet lingo or anything.
Gendered nouns in German are just as stupid and arbitrary as spelling in English. Why is a pencil masculine? Why is beer neutral but coffee masculine? Why is school feminine?
It’s that way because languages grow naturally and are part of a culture. Although if you have breakfast with people from different parts of Germany or even just different households, you may find yourself arguing about the nouns of a popular nougat cream brand. It’s quite controversial for some reason.
Whatever the case, the same can’t be said about spelling, however. Writing is often reformed in many languages many times and it generally works. A language changes the way we think as much as the way we think shapes how we speak. You can’t really reform how people speak from the top. It either happens or it doesn’t.
I am German and can emphasize. You can do it, but don’t try to be perfect.
In my lifetime we had 2 reforms I think (1 small one big) but that didn’t make it better to be honest…
i’m doing my part. fuck grammar rules. der/die/das -> de
you’d have to have case endings for all the nouns instead.
Wait till you hear about Chinese measure words. Check out that table.
“The 100 most common…”
w.t.f.
thanks for the link though, the pīnyīn overview page on that site is pretty nice
English acting like it’s not a fucked up language where “the big, red, round, wrapped box” is fine but “the wrapped, round, red, big box” is wrong.
Oh, we know it’s fucked up. I still can’t spell recieve and receipt and I have to look up pretty much every single new word I learn to find out how it’s pronounced.
I thought through it and I’d wager a stiff draught that it ought not be so rough, though as I’m taught, it’s nothing to cough at that a sturdy, taut bough would snap under the weight of its idiosyncrasies.
I haven’t had a proper crush in over a decade, but I think that sentence just might make it. That is beautiful, and thank you for sharing it.
🫶😘
I still can’t spell recieve and receipt
Hey, you got one of them right!
In Anglophone school, We were taught as children “I before e, except after c.” This works most of the time, but “reign” breaks the rule. It is not even word orgin as both recieve and reign come from French.
Yeah… English is a frankenstein language…
Also the adjective order is fucked…
Lithuanian: “”
Persian(Farsi) also doesn’t have a word for “The”. We just say the word. There’s also no gender prefixes. The whole language is gender neutral.
Our ancestors were really up to something thousands of years ago.
In English, there is an implied difference between “the girl downstairs was playing violin” (‘the girl’ implying expected knowledge - “oh, her”) versus “a girl downstairs was playing violin” (‘a girl’ - random, likely unknown).
More broadly “a thing” - one of many, “the thing” - a specific one.
How would that translate to Farsi?
I guess the is implied, count is explicit. A thing becomes one thing and the thing becomes thing.
Is the number one used like “a” then? Like a direct translation of the 2 phrases would be “Girl downstairs is playing the violin.” and “one girl downstairs is playing the violin.” As opposed to English using the/a respectively?
Yes. Almost. We have a special prefix for unknowns to make it simpler. Read my response above
Don’t know about Farsi, but in Russian you would have to declare your knowledge and specificity of the subject. You can transmit some of that information by changing word emphasis, but it’s not very clear.
As for your sentences I would translate them as:
- The girl downstairs was playing violin → Девушка [girl] внизу [downstairs] играла [was playing] на скрипке [violin].
- A girl downstairs was playing violin - Внизу [downstairs] девушка [girl] играла [was playing] на скрипке [violin].
The first one puts more emphasis on the “girl”. The second one puts more emphasis on “downstairs”, almost suggesting that the identity of the girl doesn’t matter, kinda “some girl who happened to be downstairs”. But it is not as explicit as a definite/indefinite article for sure.
If you want to make it certain that the identity of the girl doesn’t matter, you could use an adjective to that extent: Внизу [downstairs] какая-то девушка [some girl] играла [was playing] на скрипке [violin].
If you want to make it certain that both you and the person you’re talking to know about the girl, you can use a determiner: Та девушка [that girl] внизу [downstairs] играла [was playing] на скрипке [violin].
I think this is the first time I’ve seen this meme format with more than two panels.
I’ts great work)(whoever actually came up with it!)
Czech is even worse than German.
Elaborate.
I thought there wasn’t a word for “the”.Never mind. I didnt realize it was for “the”. You’re correct, there is no “the” in Czech. I saw the German part and i was triggered by Czech cases (7 of them).
Oh! Well Czech is at least worse than Russian which has ‘only’ 6, then.
Ōlelo Hawaiʻi: ke / ka
Depending on the first letter of the next word.
Hebrew:
the: prefix “ha” ה-
in the: prefix “ba” ב-
to the: prefix “la” ל-
example:
book: ספר sefer
the book: הספר hasefer
in the book: בספר basefer
to the book: לספר lasefer
Let’s add dialects to the mess:
While not written in “book” German*, colloquial German may feature des, dat, det or dit instead of das, shorten der to dr or elide parts (like the French l’, except it may be attached to the previous word): Das ist das Problem mit der deutschen Sprache -> Des isch’s Problem mit dr deutscha Sproach
(“That is the problem with the German language.” Bonus: notice how the demonstrative pronoun “that” is also
das? Just in case you were hoping it was restricted to “the”…)* Hochdeutsch or Standarddeutsch (“High German” or “Standard German”), originally a written form slowly evolved over centuries to be most widely understood and has since been formalised. Informally, the term is also used for a spoken counterpart properly called Bühnendeutsch (“Stage German”), which isn’t always quite as “pure”, hence my distinction.
I bloody love my language.
