4 ms·

Why don't you think removing genders will make the language easier? I studied German in college and memorizing these was my only complaint.

• lolc 8y ago
  Not being too much of a linguist but ever ready to expound on the concept of economy in speech: We have a strong pressure to minimize communication effort both for speakers and for listeners. I would assume that genders help disambiguate and aid the listener discern words with higher certainty without increasing the syllable count. Our mind builds hypotheses of the words to follow while listening to a sentence. Without this, we couldn't follow a conversation. You can decide faster on what you heard the more the words preceding a noun preclose on the choice of noun. So gender can make communication more robust over a noisy channel, or more compact over a clear channel. In the midst of a German sentence, some nouns will be precluded because they would be impossible due to gendered articles and adjectives. This lessens the cognitive load (of the trained listener) or conversely allows omitting words when the gender narrows down the selection enough. I'll go further out on that limb conjecturing that if you haven't been exposed to a gendered language as a kid, that facility will be untrained and quite the bother to acquire as an adult. If acquiring it as an adult is possible at all. After all that wild guessing, I should close with the observation that in this case German would be more difficult to learn than ungendered languages, _for untrained adults_. To close off (and to partially answer your question) I'll just say that gender takes little neurons overall in the habit that is language. Whether it'd come out a net plus in syllable economy I can't say.
  • posterboy 8y ago
    > In the midst of a German sentence, some nouns will be precluded because they would be impossible due to gendered articles and adjectives. This lessens the cognitive load (of the trained listener) or conversely allows omitting words when the gender narrows down the selection enough. This is an example for OP's notion of hard to parse foreign speaker English. I'm not sure what you are trying to say. No offense. I also noted the ease that comes from omission of a noun after an article if the grammatical gender hinted at by the article already indicates the noun (Was there anything else you were trying to say?). It's comparable to use of the indefinite it. I've seen that exposed as "omitting a word if the article makes it (word) clear" - you'd use "the" instead, then omit the noun, getting "... makes the clear". It's used especially in subsentences "_Der_ Hund in dem Haus, _der_ dieses und jenes tat, ist ...", so the referred noun does not have to precede the subsentence directly. However, I find this a bad use of the language and think it's unnatural for spoken speech. I suppose relational algebra would be informative to understand the problem better. One thing I remember from a first course is the limitation of one primary key per table. I like to liken this to the definite article. Hence, I find your first sentence is missing a definite article, but I don't know where to put it (there's so many options).
    • lolc 8y ago
      Regarding the first of the two sentences you quoted: While the two conjunctions do make it hard to parse, I don't see why there should be a definitive article in it. I'll reword it for you: While we're listening to a German sentence, the choice of the next noun can be restricted by gendered articles and adjectives.
• posterboy 8y ago
  In some cases, the gender serves merely for contrast, sometimes historically grown, and it would be a shame to loose that. E.g. female sun, male moon, female night, male day. Those examples might stem from codified personifications (e.g. nox). In many cases though, I suppose it's a case of vowel harmony. If there was only one article, it would be "d'" with a semi-vowel ablaut, schwa, as in English "the". I don't know exactly why, I just recently heard of vowel harmony (ie. part of the native speaker's feeling for what sounds right) existing. Gender has a minor advantage in some situations, I guess. I'm not sure whether the free word order is an advantage, but it helps for parsing this one: "Der Frau gibt der Briefträger einen Brief." - (to) the women gives the postman a letter. Conversely, I find totally odd the neuter pronoun used on dogs. However, I do call all dogs "he" no matter the genitals, so that's no better, also because I don't exactly look for it. Whereas cat's are a priori female. It's not OK to neutralize (pun intended) a human person in any case. Defaulting to "es", "they" or any alternative is still a crutch, as long as the inflection remains. And that has probably some reason to be there. Indo European had a two case gender system distinguishing animate and inanimate, female being a later innovation. In fact they had two words for fire, whence the ignition (animate) and the fire (inanimate). I do not know much about the case system, but taking Latin for example, that clearly got out of hand. So, "die Flasche" (bottle) holds spirit. "der Wind" (wind) acts. But "das Wasser" just sits there waiting to be consumed. If it flows, it's "der Fluss". The sea is weird, "das Meer" is neuter, perhaps because as diminutive (Märchen, nightmare ...?), but "die See" is an abstractum (die Nordsee, rarely Nordmeer), whereas "der See" is any determined lake. Der Teich (pond), die Leiche (corpse), das Reich (realm), der Streich (trick) seem to resist the argument for vowel harmony, but if Streich and trick are from frankish or French, estrich, estriquer or sumsuch, then that's a different matter, same if Leiche was Lyke or so ... I don't know much about that.