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English is the Microsoft of languages. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Part of the insanity of English grammar and spelling is that it's a weird polyglot mashup

by douche 11y ago

English is the Microsoft of languages. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Part of the insanity of English grammar and spelling is that it's a weird polyglot mashup of Old English/Frisian, Norse, French, Latin, Greek, and then whatever random bits of a hundred other languages. This flexibility is also a strength, in comparison to more ossified and standardized languages. To borrow another software analogy, English is the bazaar. On a completely different front, gendering sexless nouns is just silly, as an English-native speaker. At least German mostly puts things that don't have an actual gender as neuter.

gkya 11y ago
The one argument I'm aware of about grammatical gender is that found in the prologue of the second edition (1858) of the work titled De l'origine du langue of Ernest Renan, which holds that it may have originated in what I'll call sexual dialects, which diverge because of little intersexual social contact, and words most used by females become feminine, and those most used by males become masculine. He cites that in Indian dramas men speak Sanskrit and female Femprakrit, though I couldn't find anything about the latter. He also writes, little before this, that the older the language, the more apparent the grammatical gender, because of the instinct of ancient peoples to attach sexual identity to even the inanimate. The more modern the language, the lesser the effect of grammatical gender. He cites indeed English for being the most simplified in this respect. Grammatical gender is not merely about masculinity or femminility of words. For example, "giornata" is a femminine italian word meaning "the part of the day from morning to the evening", derived from "giorno", a masculine word which means "daytime, (whole) day (i.e. 24 hours). This is a feature of femminine past participle, which carries the meaning of quickness, something that happens at a certain time, a hit (testata: headbutt) etc.

by douche 11y ago

gkya 11y ago

The one argument I'm aware of about grammatical gender is that found in the prologue of the second edition (1858) of the work titled De l'origine du langue of Ernest Renan, which holds that it may have originated in what I'll call sexual dialects, which diverge because of little intersexual social contact, and words most used by females become feminine, and those most used by males become masculine. He cites that in Indian dramas men speak Sanskrit and female Femprakrit, though I couldn't find anything about the latter. He also writes, little before this, that the older the language, the more apparent the grammatical gender, because of the instinct of ancient peoples to attach sexual identity to even the inanimate. The more modern the language, the lesser the effect of grammatical gender. He cites indeed English for being the most simplified in this respect. Grammatical gender is not merely about masculinity or femminility of words. For example, "giornata" is a femminine italian word meaning "the part of the day from morning to the evening", derived from "giorno", a masculine word which means "daytime, (whole) day (i.e. 24 hours). This is a feature of femminine past participle, which carries the meaning of quickness, something that happens at a certain time, a hit (testata: headbutt) etc.