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> we can learn each other languages in a matter of weeks Not so fast. Even if you limit yourself to a vocabulary made of the most common 10000 words, you still

> we can learn each other languages in a matter of weeks Not so fast. Even if you limit yourself to a vocabulary made of the most common 10000 words, you still need a lot more practice to differentiate between nouns that have a gender in Italian and another in Spanish, irregular verbs, idioms, etc. Understanding a language is one thing. Speaking and writing it is a whole new level.

douche 11y ago
Gendering nouns that aren't actually gendered is one of the stupidest concepts humanity has inflicted on itself.
- stefantalpalaru 11y ago
  It's not. Even Old English had grammatical gender, you just lost it with time, along with proper vowel pronunciation ;-)
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  > Gendering nouns that aren't actually gendered is one of the stupidest concepts humanity has inflicted on itself. The objects referred to by nouns aren't inherently gendered, gender is a feature of grammar (sex is a feature of some classes of objects, and fairly recently the grammatical term was adopted as a euphemism for sex by people afraid of the word "sex", and even more recently, inspired by that use, as a name of a social construct associated with, but distinct from, biological sex.) But grammatical genders, while in some languages they have some correlation to sex distinctions, have no necessary relation to them, as gender distinctions may be on other axes entirely. So the whole statement seems based on not understanding what "gender" is at all.
  - throwaway1967 11y ago
    > So the whole statement seems based on not understanding what "gender" is at all. Your parent was just saying gender is unnecessary, and you did not answer anything to disprove that, or to prove that they were once needed. For instance (speaking of Latin), why is Lapis (stone) masculine but Saxum (stone) neuter? The Romans could have chosen to place all new words on the 2nd declension neuter (the simplest) but instead it (Classical Latin) created 3 more 3rd declension variants on top of the existing ones! And it was more productive, in this 3rd declension, in assigning masculine and feminine rather than neutral, which the 3rd declension also supported! So what is the reason for that?
    - hugh4 11y ago
      I suspect that sometimes we deliberately complicate our languages to make it harder for the less educated classes to speak them properly, thus creating a larger barrier between us and them.
    - dragonwriter 11y ago
      I think it's a mistake to think of natural languages as being rationality, deliberately constructed. They evolve organically, most often without -- and often in direct resistance too -- conscious design efforts. Elements of language are sometimes imposed by deliberate, premeditated campaigns, but these tend to be the exception rather than the rule. Languages aren't generally products of design.
    - dreyfiz 11y ago
      A few great comments from /r/linguistics on Reddit really enlightened me on this topic. Gender isn't senseless, it's a checksum strategy for information. It's not even about sex, lots of grammars have genders that have nothing to do with male/female. The point of gender is agreement: if you're talking about something female, all verbs, adjectives, and adverbs in the sentence have to agree, or the listener gets a syntax error. The syntax error helps the listener figure out that they missed something, or that the transmission was garbled. https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/3i1695/eli5_why_do_some_languages_assign_gender_to/cuce7gc https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/3i1695/eli5_wh... If you get rid of gender, as English mostly has, you end up forced to adopt different constraints that seem equally arbitrary and wasteful, like strict word order and lots of prepositions. https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/3i1695/eli5_why_do_some_languages_assign_gender_to/cucmfb7 https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/3i1695/eli5_wh... Very excellent comment demonstrating the point about English and word order - in Russian, you can say three words that mean "the dog saw the rabbit" in every possible order, and it's still a valid sentence that means the same thing, because Russian doesn't depend on word order. If it was English, "the dog saw the rabbit", "saw the rabbit the dog", "saw the dog the rabbit", "the rabbit the dog saw", and "the dog the rabbit saw" would all mean exactly the same thing, unambiguously, because the gender of "dog" would have to match the gender of "saw". https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/1kdxsc/are_there_any_reasonable_theories_as_to_why_nouns/cbo3fk5 https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/1kdxsc/are_the...

douche 11y ago

Gendering nouns that aren't actually gendered is one of the stupidest concepts humanity has inflicted on itself.

stefantalpalaru 11y ago
It's not. Even Old English had grammatical gender, you just lost it with time, along with proper vowel pronunciation ;-)
dragonwriter 11y ago
> Gendering nouns that aren't actually gendered is one of the stupidest concepts humanity has inflicted on itself. The objects referred to by nouns aren't inherently gendered, gender is a feature of grammar (sex is a feature of some classes of objects, and fairly recently the grammatical term was adopted as a euphemism for sex by people afraid of the word "sex", and even more recently, inspired by that use, as a name of a social construct associated with, but distinct from, biological sex.) But grammatical genders, while in some languages they have some correlation to sex distinctions, have no necessary relation to them, as gender distinctions may be on other axes entirely. So the whole statement seems based on not understanding what "gender" is at all.
- throwaway1967 11y ago
  > So the whole statement seems based on not understanding what "gender" is at all. Your parent was just saying gender is unnecessary, and you did not answer anything to disprove that, or to prove that they were once needed. For instance (speaking of Latin), why is Lapis (stone) masculine but Saxum (stone) neuter? The Romans could have chosen to place all new words on the 2nd declension neuter (the simplest) but instead it (Classical Latin) created 3 more 3rd declension variants on top of the existing ones! And it was more productive, in this 3rd declension, in assigning masculine and feminine rather than neutral, which the 3rd declension also supported! So what is the reason for that?
  - hugh4 11y ago
    I suspect that sometimes we deliberately complicate our languages to make it harder for the less educated classes to speak them properly, thus creating a larger barrier between us and them.
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
    I think it's a mistake to think of natural languages as being rationality, deliberately constructed. They evolve organically, most often without -- and often in direct resistance too -- conscious design efforts. Elements of language are sometimes imposed by deliberate, premeditated campaigns, but these tend to be the exception rather than the rule. Languages aren't generally products of design.
  - dreyfiz 11y ago
    A few great comments from /r/linguistics on Reddit really enlightened me on this topic. Gender isn't senseless, it's a checksum strategy for information. It's not even about sex, lots of grammars have genders that have nothing to do with male/female. The point of gender is agreement: if you're talking about something female, all verbs, adjectives, and adverbs in the sentence have to agree, or the listener gets a syntax error. The syntax error helps the listener figure out that they missed something, or that the transmission was garbled. https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/3i1695/eli5_why_do_some_languages_assign_gender_to/cuce7gc https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/3i1695/eli5_wh... If you get rid of gender, as English mostly has, you end up forced to adopt different constraints that seem equally arbitrary and wasteful, like strict word order and lots of prepositions. https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/3i1695/eli5_why_do_some_languages_assign_gender_to/cucmfb7 https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/3i1695/eli5_wh... Very excellent comment demonstrating the point about English and word order - in Russian, you can say three words that mean "the dog saw the rabbit" in every possible order, and it's still a valid sentence that means the same thing, because Russian doesn't depend on word order. If it was English, "the dog saw the rabbit", "saw the rabbit the dog", "saw the dog the rabbit", "the rabbit the dog saw", and "the dog the rabbit saw" would all mean exactly the same thing, unambiguously, because the gender of "dog" would have to match the gender of "saw". https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/1kdxsc/are_there_any_reasonable_theories_as_to_why_nouns/cbo3fk5 https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/1kdxsc/are_the...