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I love learning writing systems and think the Semitic languages, including Arabic, are especially fun to learn and write. I thought about trying to learn more

I love learning writing systems and think the Semitic languages, including Arabic, are especially fun to learn and write. I thought about trying to learn more Arabic for fun, but this part convinced me not to bother: > My absolute favorite is that all non-human plurals are grammatically feminine singular: al-kutub hadra' (الكتب خضراء) "The books, she is green" After attempting a minor in French, I hate dealing with arbitrary gender in languages. I'm convinced that the grammatical construct of gender exists only to make it easier to identify foreign or uneducated speakers!

pault 7y ago
I agree, this plagued me throughout the years I was living in Brazil and I still can't fathom how a language (Latin in this case) could evolve with the concept of gender applied to inanimate objects!
kissickas 7y ago
In case that actually dissuaded you from learning and you would want to otherwise, I want to point out that gender is extremely simple in Arabic. It is not at all arbitrary in the way Romance languages treat it - nearly every word is clearly masculine or feminine (with very few exceptions, like war, sea, sun) and treating all nonhuman plurals as feminine simplifies things rather than complicating them.
dalbasal 7y ago
Are there any semetic languages that don't have arbitrary gender rules? Correctly gendering numbers (depending on the gender of the noun being counted) in hebrew is hard for native speakers.
- 2rsf 7y ago
  Most of it is not actually HARD, we simply became lazy
  - dalbasal 7y ago
    I'm a native speaker and I get it wrong all the time.
rolleiflex 7y ago
This is a common opinion even amongst language specialists. So much so, in the process of modernising Turkish, about 90 years ago, whatever little concept of gender Turkish had was completely stripped from the language, leaving only 'it', alongside its conversion to Latin alphabet. The good thing is that it's truly a structural, mathematical language now, though still hard to learn, and it can avoid the whole his / her awkwardness for people whose gender is unknown to the writer. The gaps left by the Arabic words dropped from common use was filled by French (11% of its corpus is 1:1 to French) and if you know a Romance language, you can make pretty decent guesses. The bad thing, on the other hand, is that Turkey is full of ancient history, and so much of that history is adorned in Imperial Turkish, using Arabic alphabet that no one can read. Even if they did, they wouldn't understand, since Imperial and Modern Turkish has diverged so much they are no longer mutually intelligible, not even the slightest clue. It makes you feel like a foreigner in one's own country, in a way. Always found it funny that I can understand Middle English from 1300s, and I can read inscribed colonnades in Rome from 500 BC – but I can neither read nor understand Turkish from 1922.
- amdsn 7y ago
  > So much so, in the process of modernising Turkish, about 90 years ago, whatever little concept of gender Turkish had was completely stripped from the language, leaving only 'it' Do you have a source for that at all? Lack of grammatical gender is a feature of the entire family so I would be surprised if there were somehow "remnants" of it that were present as recently as Ataturk's reforms. Removing loans that happen to be gendered in their source language don't really count.
  - rolleiflex 7y ago
    Turkish grammar never had gender, but Arabic loanwords it had did. They tried to remove those from mass circulation.
- ssener2001 7y ago
  Turkish from 1922 is Ottoman Turkish. Most Words are from arabic.You should work on a Ottoman dictionary and to understand Arabic Words is easy because The Root/Pattern System of arabic Words. To read arabic Letters in turkish is a bit difficult than Latin Letters but not very difficult after learning words.
DonHopkins 7y ago
Is there an actual purpose for gendering in languages, beyond obsessing over sex? What purpose does it serve? Are languages without gender somehow less powerful or efficient or expressive (or romantic ;)?
- giaour 7y ago
  One theory is that gender in languages aids in first langauge acquisition (while making second language acquisition more difficult). Children learning their first language are helped when there are multiple, redundant ways to recognize words and phrases.
- vram22 7y ago
  Another interesting thing about language differences, is that some languages don't have articles (like "the" in English - if I remember my English grammar [1] and my Hindi and Sanskrit [2] correctly, heh). [1] Slightly funny anecdote: When in school (maybe class 5 or 6), I once mixed up the dates of the English Grammar and English Composition semester exams (they were within a day or two of each other), and thought that the next day's exam was Composition, so did not prepare (because you do not prepare for composition a.k.a. essay writing, you just do it on the spot). Turned out that it was actually the Grammar exam, for which you can prepare. I was surprised and pleased to learn later, that I got as good a grade / mark on it - a high one (as I could guess) as if I had actually prepared for it :) I think I had and (still have) some natural aptitude for English grammar, and maybe of some other languages too, for which I am thankful. Good fun. [2] I studied both Hindi and Sanskrit for many years in school (and did well on both), but don't remember all the grammar rules now, I just speak Hindi naturally, same for English grammar. Native Hindi speakers have told me in the past that my Hindi is pretty much indistinguishable from that of a native speaker.
  - geff82 7y ago
    I speak Persian quite fluently and Persian is completely free of articles. It is also an absolutely gender neutral language (Persians really have to ask if you are talking about a woman or a man if they need context). Besides that, there are no irregular verbs at all. I love it.
zouhair 7y ago
It's funny as an Arabic native speaker who also speaks French I don't even think about these kind of things.
solidsnack9000 7y ago
Japanese and Chinese lack plurals and grammatical gender but have noun classes that influence how things are counted. One counts “1 little animal of cat” or “2 flat thing of paper”. These words can serve a kind of poetical function; but in principle you could use the generic one — “ko” in Japanese and “gè” in Mandarin Chinese — for everything, and it is even accepted that as a foreigner you will. However, doing so is taken to be a sign of infelicity with the language. One instructor related to me that failure to use an advanced counter when the opportunity presents itself is a sign of poor education, rather like missing the opportunity to use a word like “infelicity”.
- unhammer 7y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun_class#Common_criteria_for_noun_classes https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun_class#Common_criteria_f... has some more fun ones. When I first heard of noun classes in school, we were introduced to them via Borges' story about the Chinese Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge[0] (which may have been inspired by Chinese noun classifiers?). [0] https://multicians.org/thvv/borges-animals.html https://multicians.org/thvv/borges-animals.html
sdiq 7y ago
And this is the one thing that i mess all the time in my mother tongue - Somali. Yet, i was introduced to the language while 8 years old.
ajuc 7y ago
> I'm convinced that the grammatical construct of gender exists only to make it easier to identify foreign or uneducated speakers! It makes pronouns more useful. "I put the book and the apple on the table. Throw him/her/it away" If apple is neuter, table is masculine and book is feminine (as is the case in my language) - "him/her/it" is uniquely identifying what you want to throw away. In fact my language goes even further and there are 5 grammatical genders (masculine is subdivided into personal/animate/inanimate). And there are distinctions between fully-feminine plural and mixed plural so you can uniquely identify groups of people with pronouns if one group has males in it and the other one doesn't. Like: "Eve's sisters met Smiths family yesterday, I invited them(mixed plural=Smiths/feminine only plural=the sisters)" I agree it's weird when you think about it, possibly not worth it, but I like the quirkiness. It allows for brevity that is very hard to translate properly, especially in dialogs.

pault 7y ago

I agree, this plagued me throughout the years I was living in Brazil and I still can't fathom how a language (Latin in this case) could evolve with the concept of gender applied to inanimate objects!

kissickas 7y ago

In case that actually dissuaded you from learning and you would want to otherwise, I want to point out that gender is extremely simple in Arabic. It is not at all arbitrary in the way Romance languages treat it - nearly every word is clearly masculine or feminine (with very few exceptions, like war, sea, sun) and treating all nonhuman plurals as feminine simplifies things rather than complicating them.

dalbasal 7y ago

Are there any semetic languages that don't have arbitrary gender rules? Correctly gendering numbers (depending on the gender of the noun being counted) in hebrew is hard for native speakers.

2rsf 7y ago
Most of it is not actually HARD, we simply became lazy
- dalbasal 7y ago
  I'm a native speaker and I get it wrong all the time.

rolleiflex 7y ago

This is a common opinion even amongst language specialists. So much so, in the process of modernising Turkish, about 90 years ago, whatever little concept of gender Turkish had was completely stripped from the language, leaving only 'it', alongside its conversion to Latin alphabet. The good thing is that it's truly a structural, mathematical language now, though still hard to learn, and it can avoid the whole his / her awkwardness for people whose gender is unknown to the writer. The gaps left by the Arabic words dropped from common use was filled by French (11% of its corpus is 1:1 to French) and if you know a Romance language, you can make pretty decent guesses. The bad thing, on the other hand, is that Turkey is full of ancient history, and so much of that history is adorned in Imperial Turkish, using Arabic alphabet that no one can read. Even if they did, they wouldn't understand, since Imperial and Modern Turkish has diverged so much they are no longer mutually intelligible, not even the slightest clue. It makes you feel like a foreigner in one's own country, in a way. Always found it funny that I can understand Middle English from 1300s, and I can read inscribed colonnades in Rome from 500 BC – but I can neither read nor understand Turkish from 1922.

amdsn 7y ago
> So much so, in the process of modernising Turkish, about 90 years ago, whatever little concept of gender Turkish had was completely stripped from the language, leaving only 'it' Do you have a source for that at all? Lack of grammatical gender is a feature of the entire family so I would be surprised if there were somehow "remnants" of it that were present as recently as Ataturk's reforms. Removing loans that happen to be gendered in their source language don't really count.
- rolleiflex 7y ago
  Turkish grammar never had gender, but Arabic loanwords it had did. They tried to remove those from mass circulation.
ssener2001 7y ago
Turkish from 1922 is Ottoman Turkish. Most Words are from arabic.You should work on a Ottoman dictionary and to understand Arabic Words is easy because The Root/Pattern System of arabic Words. To read arabic Letters in turkish is a bit difficult than Latin Letters but not very difficult after learning words.

DonHopkins 7y ago

Is there an actual purpose for gendering in languages, beyond obsessing over sex? What purpose does it serve? Are languages without gender somehow less powerful or efficient or expressive (or romantic ;)?

giaour 7y ago
One theory is that gender in languages aids in first langauge acquisition (while making second language acquisition more difficult). Children learning their first language are helped when there are multiple, redundant ways to recognize words and phrases.
vram22 7y ago
Another interesting thing about language differences, is that some languages don't have articles (like "the" in English - if I remember my English grammar [1] and my Hindi and Sanskrit [2] correctly, heh). [1] Slightly funny anecdote: When in school (maybe class 5 or 6), I once mixed up the dates of the English Grammar and English Composition semester exams (they were within a day or two of each other), and thought that the next day's exam was Composition, so did not prepare (because you do not prepare for composition a.k.a. essay writing, you just do it on the spot). Turned out that it was actually the Grammar exam, for which you can prepare. I was surprised and pleased to learn later, that I got as good a grade / mark on it - a high one (as I could guess) as if I had actually prepared for it :) I think I had and (still have) some natural aptitude for English grammar, and maybe of some other languages too, for which I am thankful. Good fun. [2] I studied both Hindi and Sanskrit for many years in school (and did well on both), but don't remember all the grammar rules now, I just speak Hindi naturally, same for English grammar. Native Hindi speakers have told me in the past that my Hindi is pretty much indistinguishable from that of a native speaker.
- geff82 7y ago
  I speak Persian quite fluently and Persian is completely free of articles. It is also an absolutely gender neutral language (Persians really have to ask if you are talking about a woman or a man if they need context). Besides that, there are no irregular verbs at all. I love it.

zouhair 7y ago

It's funny as an Arabic native speaker who also speaks French I don't even think about these kind of things.

solidsnack9000 7y ago

Japanese and Chinese lack plurals and grammatical gender but have noun classes that influence how things are counted. One counts “1 little animal of cat” or “2 flat thing of paper”. These words can serve a kind of poetical function; but in principle you could use the generic one — “ko” in Japanese and “gè” in Mandarin Chinese — for everything, and it is even accepted that as a foreigner you will. However, doing so is taken to be a sign of infelicity with the language. One instructor related to me that failure to use an advanced counter when the opportunity presents itself is a sign of poor education, rather like missing the opportunity to use a word like “infelicity”.

unhammer 7y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun_class#Common_criteria_for_noun_classes https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun_class#Common_criteria_f... has some more fun ones. When I first heard of noun classes in school, we were introduced to them via Borges' story about the Chinese Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge[0] (which may have been inspired by Chinese noun classifiers?). [0] https://multicians.org/thvv/borges-animals.html https://multicians.org/thvv/borges-animals.html

sdiq 7y ago

And this is the one thing that i mess all the time in my mother tongue - Somali. Yet, i was introduced to the language while 8 years old.

ajuc 7y ago

> I'm convinced that the grammatical construct of gender exists only to make it easier to identify foreign or uneducated speakers! It makes pronouns more useful. "I put the book and the apple on the table. Throw him/her/it away" If apple is neuter, table is masculine and book is feminine (as is the case in my language) - "him/her/it" is uniquely identifying what you want to throw away. In fact my language goes even further and there are 5 grammatical genders (masculine is subdivided into personal/animate/inanimate). And there are distinctions between fully-feminine plural and mixed plural so you can uniquely identify groups of people with pronouns if one group has males in it and the other one doesn't. Like: "Eve's sisters met Smiths family yesterday, I invited them(mixed plural=Smiths/feminine only plural=the sisters)" I agree it's weird when you think about it, possibly not worth it, but I like the quirkiness. It allows for brevity that is very hard to translate properly, especially in dialogs.