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> These extra structures are superfluous if you think about it If they were completely superfluous they wouldn't arise in the first place. You could argue they
by ajuc 3y ago
> These extra structures are superfluous if you think about it
If they were completely superfluous they wouldn't arise in the first place. You could argue they aren't worth it, but that's a separate argument.
I'm Polish, my language has 3-5 genders (gender is a misnomer BTW, should be called "noun kinds" or "categories"), and while the complexity is hard on non-native speakers, it also allows for using lots of pronouns in shortened sentences without losing precision.
If you say "book is on the table, burn it" - the "it" can mean "book" or "table". In Polish you say "book is on the table, burn her" if you want to burn the book and "book is on the table, burn him" if you want to burn the table, because book and table are different genders. You can see how useful it is by the fact English sailors often call ships "her". Not many other "hers" on the sea in the age of sail.
I also think it's not an accident proto-indo-european (the language of people whose main thing was domesticating animals) had grammatical genders. It's nice to have that feature when you're mostly talking about cows and horses.
Then there are other features, like regular multi-degree diminutives you can form from any noun. You ever wanted to say somebody invented "cute little abstracion" - in Polish you can create a diminutive from the noun "abstraction" if you ever need it. "Abstrakcyjka" or "abstrakcjunia" if you're curious. Same with any other noun, no matter if it makes sense or not. In English you have a word for "cute little dog" ("doggy") but not for "cute little dinosaur" or "cute little blue color", "cute little love" or "cute little death". In Polish "dinozaurek", "niebieski kolorek", "miłostka", "śmiertka". I like this feature very much, because it's pretty regular, not much overhead to learn, but it adds a lot of color and expresivity to the language. There's whole slangs where people speak only in diminutives (for example truck drivers for some reason :) ).
Grammatical features like these are the best, because they are multiplicative - you have N nouns in your language, with small constant overhead you create 2xN new potential words.
On the other hand there are features that provide very little to no value - usually historical baggage. Like the non-phonetic spelling in many languages. English is by far the worst here, but in Polish there's a few problems to fix as well.
- programmer_dude 3y agoDefinitely not worth it.
- ajuc 3y agoThat's a valid opinion :) What's your opinion on "the" vs "a"? Cause in my language there are no articles. If you mean "a book" you say "any book". If you mean "the book" you say "this book" or "that book" or something to that effect. If you don't care (which is 99% of the time) - you say "book". Do you think this distincion is worth it? BTW I'm wondering if AI and programming will eventually create a new distinction, similar to the grammatical genders caused by domestication - it would be useful to be able to distinguish between antropomorphized but non-intelligent entities (this function threw an exception) and actually intelligent actors (this AI decided you should be fired).
- wst_ 3y agoA 3 to 5 seems pretty inconclusive. If it's 3 the case seems obvious. But assuming it's 5, what would the genders be?
- ajuc 3y agoDepends on how you count. For 200 years people can't agree :) The most common count is 3 because in singular nominative there's 3 - male/female/neutral - same as in English, but he/she/it applies to all nouns not only to people. In plural nominative there's 2 - malepersonal and nonmalepersonal. So that's 5 in total. But some people join singular and plural kinds to get 4 - malepersonal, malenonpersonal, female, neutral. But that's only in nominative. Polish has 7 cases and in some of them the pronouns and endings behave differently depending on whether the group is grammatically male animals or grammaticaly male things. So some people separate these as well and get 5 (if you join singular and plural kinds) or 7 if you don't. It's fucked up when you think about it, but you don't think about it when you speak - you just know what sounds good and use that. It causes a lot of problems with translations from other languages - you need more information that authors usually provide to know what pronouns and verb/adjective endings should be used.
- wst_ 3y agoSorry, I should probably have stated that since the beginning. I am native I just was surprised about 5 cases. I've never heard about the 2 latter one you've mentioned. I've been told in school that male is just male, doesn't matter it it's person or object. But I am engineer, not a linguist so it may be as you say. Either way, interesting. Thanks for sharing.
- ajuc 3y ago> I've been told in school that male is just male, doesn't matter it it's person or object (CI mężczyźni) vs (TE psy, TE stoły) = (male people vs everything else) widzę (TEGO mężczyznę, TEGO psa) vs (TEN stół) = (male animate vs male things)
- tanvach 3y agoIf the language has low cost to repeat words then I think the value of gender or tenses is going to be low. Thai, for example, has tones so our words tend to be shorter (more information can be packed per syllable). Languages are solving compression in different ways. Another fun example - we repeat an adjective to turn it into adverb. Since most adjectives are 1 syllable, it has the same cost as adding ‘ly’ in English.