5 ms·
It's easy to look at these various grammatical gender systems and to think it's a bit of weird useless complexity. But systems like this are useful: you can see
by canjobear 5y ago
It's easy to look at these various grammatical gender systems and to think it's a bit of weird useless complexity. But systems like this are useful: you can see them as providing error-correcting parity bits on nouns which make information more robustly distributed through a sentence.
- retrac 5y agoSame thing with verb agreement. While noun classes/gender are relatively rare and many language families do not have them, verbal agreement is much more common. Most though not all languages have verbs that agree with the subject, and quite a few with the object, too. Even English (which lost its Latin-style morphology long ago) retains a trace of this with its single verb inflection: "I run." vs "He runs." So in a partially heard phrase like "I would like to meet the ... who run the company", you know that the grammatical number of the noun you missed must be plural. Grammatical gender for nouns is doing something similar.
- School-Cotton 5y agoFor what it’s worth, English still has some remnants of a case system, too. We still distinguish the genitive case of nouns (with a case ending usually written “‘s”), and personal pronouns have four cases (I, me, my, mine).
- canjobear 5y agoYou're right although the English 's technically isn't a case marker. You can see this because 's doesn't mark nouns, it marks whole phrases, in things like "the Queen of England's hat." Since it modifies phrases and not single words, while not being a word in its own right, it's a clitic and not a case marker. It does descend from the Germanic genitive case, though.
- School-Cotton 5y agoThank you, you’re right! So I suppose English only marks case on pronouns.