7 ms·

There was a joke that Estonian is more closer to Japanese than any other European language. As to not say its related to Japanese, but how much it differs from

• a_imho 8y ago
  What is the benefit of genders anyway? Especially when gender neutral alternatives are available. It never made much sense to me, they introduce a lot of complexity for very little. Worse, nowadays you have all the problems of misaddressing and offending folks.
  • iainmerrick 8y ago
    There was an interesting/amusing post here the other day about learning German and how it relates to programming concepts. They suggested that gendered words work as a kind of parity bit for error correction.
    • wolfgke 8y ago
      > There was an interesting/amusing post here the other day about learning German and how it relates to programming concepts. They suggested that gendered words work as a kind of parity bit for error correction. Slightly off topic (not about grammatical genus, but about German's case system): I often compare German's case system to a type system in a programming language: the verb expects the sentence's object in the suitable case. If you use a wrong type, it gives a compile error. In most cases, the case (type) that you have to use makes sense, but there are rare cases where you simply have to learn the case. The latter is like having to use a (programming) library that was designed by some other programmer with an interface that you would design differently. Just like you have to write a computer program that gives no compile error (e.g. because of typing), in German, you also have to formulate your sentences in a way that gives no compile error to its case (type) system.
      • bravura 8y ago
        I am trying to learn German and gender is infuriating there. Why? Because you can't simply scan an existing sentence and color-code the words based upon simple heuristics to guess the gender. The first thing you learn is that three genders are indicated in the nominative case using der (masculine) / die (feminine) / das (neuter). So you see "der" in a sentence and that thing must be masculine, right? Nope, because "der" is feminine in the dative case. The gender system in German wouldn't be such garbage if the articles weren't overloaded. Imagine if in your type system "float" could mean two different types, and you needed more information to figure out which type it is (like, for example, memorizing the type of the object its referring to). It breaks the idea of locality.
        • wolfgke 8y ago
          > The first thing you learn is that three genders are indicated in the nominative case using der (masculine) / die (feminine) / das (neuter). I personally would never teach it that way. To me the four cases are like different faces of, say, a cube (I know a cube has six faces - sorry), where the cube represents the noun. Just like looking at a cube from different perspectives (in the direction of some face) gives you a different view on it, each case gives a different "perspective" of a way that the word relates to some different clause in a sentence. How the articles and endings "rotate" when the case changes ("as the cube rotates") is something that I developed a really smart scheme for (which can be found in no book on German grammar that I am aware of) that every "mathematical-minded person" immediatelly grasped, told me it perfectly made sense and wished that someone had taught it this way in school. On the other hand, nearly every "humanities-minded person" told me that they cannot understand what I am even talking about and what advantage this perspective is supposed to have. Typical language teachers are "humanities-minded". :-( Unluckily, I have far too less time to write this all down in sufficient detail that other people can learn from it; I have far too many other things to do. :-( > Imagine if in your type system "float" could mean two different types, and you needed more information to figure out which type it is (like, for example, memorizing the type of the object its referring to). You are describing declarations and definitions in C++ and the problems of parsing C++? ;-)
      • 8y ago
    • Jenz 8y ago
      > There was an interesting/amusing post here the other day about learning German and how it relates to programming concepts. This one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19109371 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19109371
  • nyagaga 8y ago
    I don't know what you mean exactly, but genders can be something intrinsic to a language and I don't think they have been introduced as such. If you wanted to call a table in Italian, you could choose the masculine or feminine noun for it (tavolo - tavola), no neuter form though. Ask the table first.
    • a_imho 8y ago
      Why would it be intrinsic? Somewhere in their evolution they must have been introduced for some reason I would guess. Also, they could be removed the same way if there is no benefit distinguishing between a masculine and feminine table.
      • ivoras 8y ago
        Could it mean that gender was something so obvious and useful as a concept that early people, while trying to figure out the world around them and how it all fits together, just naturally extended the idea to just about everything? It doesn't really make sense to anthropomorphise things once you're an adult, but I bet everyone can remember trying to figure out the world as a kid and just assuming things are of similar nature as people. I think that even languages which currently don't have gender forms of words, like English, still have the concept psychologically firmly embedded in the culture. The generic "cat" is more female than male. The "tom-cat" is only male. A "rock", I'll bet, is also subconsciously male, and a "river" more female than male. It's all there, even if not explicit in language. OTOH, it's not really universal, different languages assign gender pretty much randomly - but they do assign it. Social determinism and radical neutrality go against the grain of this "making sense of the world" phase of development, and probably don't result in a practical world-view.
      • raverbashing 8y ago
        I believe the intrinsicality of it has to do with alliterations/rhymes/rhythm (more in the vowel than in the consonantal sounds) Similar to effects of (past) umlauts in English or the a/an difference.
      • Sharlin 8y ago
  • kowdermeister 8y ago
    To make things 100x complicated in our "modern" world :) For example you can select a gender pronoun in English to match your gender. https://uwm.edu/lgbtrc/support/gender-pronouns/ https://uwm.edu/lgbtrc/support/gender-pronouns/ In Hungarian we just say "Ő" to refer to someone, privacy is baked into the language :)
  • xg15 8y ago
    A pragmatic advantage is that you use different pronouns to refer to multiple different persons (or things, with grammatical gender) in the same sentence without ambiguity. In programming terms, you have a "local variable" slot for each pronoun, instead of just a single one with gender neutrality.
    • usrusr 8y ago
      Like having separate registers for even and for odd numbers. Now try building a good compiler for that... (no bitshift trickery allowed)
      • xg15 8y ago
        I don't think that analogy works. You're not forced to use the gendered forms - you can just say "the person", "them", etc - and (at least as far as the language is concerned), it's only about communication, not about reasoning. So your "calculations" are unaffected.
  • peterwwillis 8y ago
    "Tommy, Frank, and Susan burned their homework and fed it to the dog." "Who fed it to the dog?" "That person." Overhearing this conversation, you don't know who they were pointing at. If they said "She did.", you know who they were pointing at. There are many other situations where gender provides extra data, which is convenient. Our languages keep having gender, so it's clearly been advantageous from an evolutionary perspective. The problem is when we let gender become more important than the data it's trying to express, like when a society lets gender dictate your social class. That shit needs to stop.
    • DFHippie 8y ago
      Noun classes are advantageous. Gender happens to be a useful way to categorize nouns because mostly we like to talk about other people. Gender (and animacy -- "it" versus "s/he") split things up efficiently for many conversations, where, say, paper versus non-paper wouldn't.
    • atombender 8y ago
      But that's human gender, not noun gender. In grammar, gender is a class of noun and generally unrelated to human gender. In German, words like "library" (Bibliothek) and "street" (Strasse/Straße) are feminine, for example. It's true that some feminine words, such as "woman" (Frau) and "mother" (Mutter), are feminine. But then you have words like "girl" (Mädchen), which are not. Your example ("she did") could actually have ambiguity in languages that extends the noun gender to pronouns, such as French. "She" doesn't need to refer to a woman, just a feminine noun. For example, "car" (voiture) is feminine, and you can refer to "it" as "elle" (she).
  • Balgair 8y ago
    > Worse, nowadays you have all the problems of misaddressing and offending folks. Languages are tightly inherited, even more so than genes. How languages are structured varies highly. Some have gender-like tenses for the cardinal directions, where things are not feminine but 'northy'. Some have no genders, but do have time-like tenses, where things are 'future-y' or 'present-y'. Just look at sign-language, with it's use of height similar to an exclamation point in English at times. Human communication is weird. Even in English, our sense of gender has changed over time. It used to be that we cared more about the number of items/people over their gender, but now we care about the gender. IE: Thee/Thou/You/ became Him/Her/You. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_in_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_in_English English is, herself, a pidgin language. The irregularity of the verbs and the reliance on context make it very accommodating to new terms and nouns, but VERY difficult to learn fluently. It is standardizing though, the Afro/Urban-American vernacular use of 'be' is a perfect example (I be going to the store, not, I am going to the store). This change of 'be' is very similar to the romance languages. English is very slowly being wrenched into standardization. It will be very interesting to see how Chinese and Computer Programming languages affect English. The Story of English is a great look into this language and it's story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mj9jJiPwsp0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mj9jJiPwsp0
• foldr 8y ago
  >No future tense Many European languages also lack a future tense. English, for example. (https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-English-has-no-future-tense https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-English-has-no-future-...)
  • vorg 8y ago
    > English has no inflected future tense like Latin and Romance languages. In linguistics, “tense” refers generally to how a verb is inflected English has no inflected future tense because of the way words are usually defined. Verbs in English only have 4 types of inflections because words are defined as whatever is surrounded by spaces in writing. If we define words as the unit that carries a single beat in speaking, so "He is-to-see-it tomorrow" is 3 words, then verbs also have prefixed inflections. English then does have an inflected future tense. The "is to" future form isn't mentioned in discussions on future tense very often but seems to have the most predetermination, whereas "is going to" and "will" indicate more volition by the doer.
    • foldr 8y ago
      No, it isn't just a matter of orthography. English has no future tense on any reasonable analysis. There is no unit of English syntax which (i) behaves like a verb and (ii) has a distinct future form. This is a completely uncontroversial point. See e.g. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=897 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=897 for further discussion. > If we define words as the unit that carries a single beat in speaking Note that this definition clearly won't do what you want it to do (even ignoring the imprecision of "single beat"), as the units you want to treat as verbs can be separated to an arbitrary degree. E.g. "Is he really, in your opinion, to see her tomorrow?"
      • vorg 8y ago
        > There is no unit of English syntax which [...] Here you're defining syntax around your orthographic definition of what a word is. > "Is he really, in your opinion, to see her tomorrow?" The opinion words "really" and "in your opinion" added into that syntactic structure parallel the manner that opinion word "bloody" is added into a lexical structure to become "abso-bloody-lutely".
• ubermonkey 8y ago
  That's a great graphic, but where are Arabic and Georgian?