6 ms·
What's so bad about gendered nouns? They are quite useful, especially when the language allows you to omit the noun and leave only a pronoun, or maybe the entir
by mrkrab 9y ago
What's so bad about gendered nouns? They are quite useful, especially when the language allows you to omit the noun and leave only a pronoun, or maybe the entire subject altogether.
- twiss 9y agoThey may be useful, but they make a language much harder to learn to speak correctly, which is a downside for a lingua franca.
- fkistner 9y agoBut so do inconsistent spellings. There is a reason, most languages apart from English have no use for spelling bees. [1] [1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/05/30/spelling-bees-are-only-fun-in-english-heres-what-other-countries-do-instead/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/05/30/spell...
- _kst_ 9y agoHow are gendered nouns useful? (I'm referring specifically to assigning genders to nouns that refer to objects that aren't intrinsically gendered.) My native language is English, and I never have to remember whether a "keyboard" or a "rock" is masculine or feminine. I've studied a few other languages (French, German, Spanish) that do expect me to remember such things. To be clear, I'm not trying to refute your statement that they're useful, just asking how. I'm interested in learning about a different perspective.
- greglindahl 9y agoI translate Italian 16th century dance manuals into English. There are many pronouns in dance descriptions, and having gender as an extra clue is very helpful when I'm trying to figure out what pronouns refer to. Now, in English, the author might have used fewer pronouns if they were ambiguous... but I've seen a lot of ambiguous pronouns in English writing.
- nicky0 9y agoI don't think anyone is objecting to gendered pronouns (he, she, him, her) but rather gendered nouns in general. For example in french "night" and "baguette" are female whereas "book" and "chair" are male. It seems arbitrary and makes learning the language more difficult.
- greglindahl 9y agoI was speaking about gendered nouns. They help me resolve pronouns.
- nicky0 9y agoOops I'm sorry about the mansplaining then. Can you give an example? I'm struggling to conceive what you mean.
- greglindahl 9y agoThe nouns for heel, foot, and toe have gender. When I get to the end of a dance step mentioning all 3, and it says "and in the final beat you lift <pronoun>", I use the clue that the pronoun gender should match the noun gender to try to finger out what the antecedent is.
- faho 9y agoI'd imagine the use is that it sometimes makes pronouns more useful. Substituting "he" and "she" for gendered articles: "I have he keyboard and she rock. He is large and she is grey" Without that, I'd have to repeat the "keyboard" and "rock". The question of course is whether this is worth all that rote memorization (since no language I know is fully logical here - german's "Das Mädchen" - girls are apparently of neutral gender - being a particularly egregious example).
- clhodapp 9y agoThe thing about this, though, is that it only works if you get lucky and none of your nouns share a gender. I feel like that undermines the argument at least a bit.
- emodendroket 9y agoThere are other possibilities, but trying to apply logical rules seems pointless; the whole point of language -- what actually makes something a language -- is a completely arbitrary set of rules.
- vizeroth 9y agoI feel like I could come up with some examples if I had kept up with German after high school. I remember it being difficult for a year or two, then it seemed more helpful as we got into more complex language mechanics. In any case, German felt more consistent than English, and most of the words just felt right with one gender or another (and in speech you could usually get away with something between "the" and "duh" if you weren't sure about der/die/das).
- clhodapp 9y agoThey are generally going to sound good together because the word and the pronoun co-evolved. If they didn't sound good together, either the pronoun or the word would have changed. That isn't about the gender being right so much as just the sound, though.
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- mrkrab 9y agoIt's really easy, because "keyboard" is "teclado" which ends with o (so it's masculine) while "rock" is "roca" which ends with a (so it's feminine). :)
- tremendo 9y agoAnd there are, of course, counter-examples: el águila, el ala. I believe the rule should just be "it sounds right", as to say "la águila" is well, a third 'a' in there, two or them consecutive, and is just harder to even pronounce.
- mrkrab 9y agoThat only happens with a handful of words: those that 1) are feminine and 2) their first syllable begins with an "a" and 3) their first syllable is stressed. It's similar to English which uses "an" instead of "a", but it happens very very very rarely. (Needless to say, "águila" and "ala" ARE feminine nouns, what's changing here is the determiner so the two a's don't clash, not the gender of the nouns)
- bitwize 9y agoIt gets worse in French: un livre (book), une livre (pound, in France equal to 0.5 kg). They're even pronounced the same.
- emodendroket 9y agoYes, yes, but this example is so well trod that it immediately popped into your mind, and, what's more, try to think of a sentence where you might honestly be confused about whether "pound" or "book" was meant.
- gjjrfcbugxbhf 9y agoLe port and la port.
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- lbebber 9y agoIf it's your native language, or if you're at a good level of fluency, you don't have to "remember" it, it comes naturally. I agree it's harder for students though.
- emodendroket 9y agoWhat you find hard is mostly a function of what other language or languages you speak. People who speak languages without articles find articles extremely confusing in English and honestly I have a hard time articulating rules for when "the" or "a" would be appropriate.
- obituary_latte 9y agoI think a simple way of putting it (as a native non-bilingual English speaker) would be to think of it as "a" -> non-specific and "the" -> specific. Example: A basket is in the car -> some kind of basket of unknown shape or color. The basket is in the car -> a specific, known basket. HTH
- mantas 9y agoHaving a simple way to put it doesn't mean it's easy to do right. My native language don't have anything like articles. I frequently misuse a/the in borderline cases. Or just omit the article completely.. Yet gender is super easy in my language! Each noun has gendered suffix. Once you know the word, you know it's gender. Or once you know the gender, you know the suffix... :)
- obituary_latte 9y agoBut it is easy once you understand :-) A == non-specific The == specific 'A dog' could be any old dog. 'The dog' is a specific dog we know. Thus A == any The == thing Perhaps I'm not clear where with this understanding it would trip you up. Can you think of an example?
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- smsm42 9y agoI speak two languages with gendered nouns, and I didn't find much specific usefulness for it. It's just something that is part of the package, so you go with it, and you can claim that provides more rich texture or such (though I'm not sure why knowing "table" is "male" and "government" is "female" really has any meaning, but maybe poets have one more tool to play with), but I'm not really sure it's that useful outside of using it for objects for which gender does make sense. But even then saying different word for "walked" depending on whether it was male or female walking doesn't really seem to me much of an advantage. It's just what it is.
- CodeMage 9y agoJust out of curiosity, which language are your examples from? I'm asking because my native language is Serbian and it also features "male" tables and "female" government.
- allendoerfer 9y agoGerman, too. He might accidentaly be onto something.
- tom_mellior 9y agoAnd it's the exact opposite in French and presumably all (most?) other Romance languages as well: female table, male government.
- smsm42 9y agoHebrew has the same. Spanish though has it reversed (I didn't mean it among languages I speak since I'm just beginning studying it).
- int_19h 9y agoIt certainly does provide some extra flavors for poets to play with. It also makes translations to other languages hell, when noun genders are used for allegoric purposes.
- usrusr 9y agoIt's a significant bit just like the ones that form the letters: la tour, le tour, entirely different words that have their most famous examples within visual range once a year.
- freehunter 9y agoEnglish lets you omit the noun and only use a pronoun. Colloquial English lets you omit the subject sometimes, too. And it doesn't have official gendered pronouns. This sentence is short. It is short. "What did you do today?" "Rode bike" Sometimes we even use genders for nouns even though it's not official: The ship sank. She sank. Compared to German: The dog jumped on the table and bit the man. Aww shit there are three "the"s in there... if I'm speaking, I can just slur through it and say "d'Hund" or "d'Tisch" but that doesn't work when I'm writing... okay let's try to get through this. Der Hund sprang auf... Hmm, well "the table" is Der Tisch, but hang on, I have to figure out what case this is... ah, accusative! den Tisch und biss Ah fuck, "the man" is "der Mann" but what case is this... I don't even care anymore... d'Mann. Nailed it. It's not like anyone is going to say "he jumped on him and bit him", so the genders serve absolutely no purpose.
- yehi 9y agothe benefit of languages with cases is that you can switch the order of the sentence without changing the meaning. In those languages I can say "the dog bit the person" and "the (accusative) person bit the (nominative) dog" and it would not change the meaning of the sentence but it would allow me to emphasize one object more.
- nicky0 9y agoThe person, the dog bit. - Yoda
- TulliusCicero 9y agoYou can still do that in English though: the dog bit the person, the person was bit by the dog
- krylon 9y agoMmmh, but in German you can say "Der Hund sprang auf den Tisch und biss ihn". This kind of ambiguity can be a lot of fun. (It can also be confusing, I admit. But it can be fun, too.) EDIT: Well, in English you can say "The dog jumped on the table and bit him", but it is not ambiguous. ;-/ The ambiguity in German is not due to gendered pronouns, but due to the gender of table/Tisch. :-|
- clhodapp 9y agoThey make a language harder to learn and increase it's cognitive profile, especially for newer speakers. I'll also make the contentious claim that they are clearly visible as being kinda sexist to progressively-oriented native speakers of languages that don't have them. Of course, if you honestly follow that train of thought, it doesn't stop at having gendered pronouns for inanimate objects. See https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.html https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.htm...
- briandear 9y agoIf they appear to be sexist to progressively oriented speakers of languages without gender, the problem isn’t the language, but the ignorance of the progressively oriented speakers of languages without gender. The masculinity or femininity of a table ought not be controversional except among those who are eager for things about which to be offended. It would seem there are certain groups of people that seem to derive pleasure from being offended. It might also seem, to speakers of languages with gender, that these so-called progressives are being regressive by imposing their linguistic ideology upon others. Of course I support sex equality for humans, but really sometimes so-called progressives venture into Newspeak territory or at the very least, absurdity. “Womyn” is another example of similar nonsense.
- nicky0 9y ago> What's so bad about gendered nouns? Gendered nouns are a significant barrier to learning a new language.
- mantas 9y agoDifferences make learning difficult. More at 11...
- lomnakkus 9y agoGrammatical genders are nonsensical and almost completely arbitrary. For example "girl" is an "it" in German. Languages also differ significantly in terms of which grammatical gender they assign to things. It's worse than useless.