4 ms·

I think all the focus on PIE derivatives is boring and we should get Europeans some better languages without pointless features like noun genders.

AlexanderDhoore 3y ago
Feature creep is a real problem with language design nowadays.
misja111 3y ago
If you don't like noun genders, you should check out Finnish
- littlestymaar 3y ago
  English is already a good progress in that direction, in many (most?) European languages we have gendered nouns for everything, no matter how nonsensical it is. (la baguette / le pain).
  - totetsu 3y ago
    I heard this was down to Viking raiders moving into the anglish isles and not wanting to be bothered with all that complicated stuff
    - littlestymaar 3y ago
      Given that the Viking's language was itself fairly complex pronoun-wise[1] I suspect that this is an urban legend. [1]: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Old_Norse/Pronouns https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Old_Norse/Pronouns
      - vidarh 3y ago
        And indeed, modern Scandinavian languages have retained gendered nouns. Though it's gradually being watered down. Eg. in Norwegian Bokmål (there are two official variants of Norwegian, Bokmål is the dominant one) you can now mostly choose whether to use feminine or masculine forms for a noun if a word takes either (but you can't do this for neuter), e.g. en sol (masculine; a sun) vs. ei sol (feminine; a sun) are both valid as long as you're consistent (combining "en sol" (m; a sun) with "sola" (f; the sun) in the same text, mixing genders, is frowned upon, though some of us do that intentionally - "solen" (m; the sun) sounds to stuffy/posh to me, but I prefer "en sol" to "ei sol").
      - Tagbert 3y ago
        The problem was that the pronouns and declensions didn’t match. Since this was a case of large numbers of adults learning a new language, they just learned enough to get by and didn’t bother with the complicated bits.
  - jagrsw 3y ago
    English is increasingly using the singular 'they' as a workaround, since alternative options like 've,' 'ze,' 'zhe,' and 'xer' didn't gain traction. This comes with its own set of issues—initially, it was a bit disorienting for me, and even now it often requires a mental pause to parse what the speaker is referring to. I'd welcome a more authoritarian approach here: globally adopt a new pronoun, go through a transitional period, and then we're all on the same page. Some sci-fi novels have toyed with this concept. IMO gendered pronouns don't add much value in many languages (with exceptions - poetry etc.). In Slavic languages, it's relatively straightforward to deduce gender from the pronoun, but in Germanic and Romance languages, it's more obfuscated.
    - littlestymaar 3y ago
      I actually love “they” because it waves off every ambiguity at once: not only you don't have to care about the gender of the person, you don't even have to bother whether it is an individual or a collective (this super convenient when discussing about open-source projects).
      - tough 3y ago
        they built this and that and did it all by themselves doesn't sound to bad ymmv
    - mcv 3y ago
      English is definitely leading in terms of genderlessness, but that advantage is more than offset by its complete detachment between spelling and pronunciation. It would be nice to have a language with sensible spelling/pronunciation but no gender.
      - kitd 3y ago
        Welsh is about 95% phonetic in spelling. Maybe English with Welsh spelling?
      - kwhitefoot 3y ago
        > its complete detachment between spelling and pronunciation. Whose dialect are you going to choose to render phonetically? Mine from the West Country, or that of my friends from Newcastle? Will you standardise on short a in castle (Newcastle upon Tyne, North East England) or long a in castle (Restormel Castle, Cornwall)? Or should each person just write phonetically so that we have millions of idiolects?
- astrange 3y ago
  Everyone in between Finland and Basque Country should try adopting one of those.
- OfSanguineFire 3y ago
  Meh, Finnish doesn’t have noun genders, but due to phonological changes obscuring what was, centuries ago, a regular declension, it now has a large number of different noun classes that have to be memorized as such. These are so laborious for foreigners to learn that a Finnish language workbook like Harjoitus tekee mestarin can spend 300 pages just on drills of noun classes.
gumby 3y ago
If you don’t like the use of two or three grammatical genders, Japanese would like to have a word with you (so to speak). There are a lot different classifier systems in language around the world; gender is just a small example. All these mechanisms are kinds of ECC.
- grozzle 3y ago
  presumably means "error correcting code", to save the next person from looking up jargon.
- astrange 3y ago
  I'm well aware, but kanji and pitch accents are a lot cooler than remembering whether a table is male, female or neuter.
  - gumby 3y ago
    Japanese has tons of classifiers, not just the two or three that come with languages with gender.
    - astrange 3y ago
      The counter words are a pain…
edgyquant 3y ago
Gender nouns are not pointless features.
- astrange 3y ago
  Don't know what a gender noun is, but it sounds different from a noun gender.
tomjakubowski 3y ago
Eh, gendered nouns are kinda helpful in spoken language. It's an extra bit of redundancy which can help distinguish similar-sounding words in noisy environs. Same deal with verb conjugations and adjective declensions. Granted they don't have much of a point in written word, at least not today when writing is easy to preserve digitally without accumulating errors over time. (No smudges making it hard to make out a word) I really do wonder though how English seemingly uniquely in I-E languages ended up dropping those features, for the most part.
- retrac 3y ago
  > I really do wonder though how English seemingly uniquely Not uniquely. Just within the Germanic languages, Afrikaans, an offshoot of Dutch, is without gender, in a way similar to English. And there are others in the IE family that have lost gender. Persian is a notable example. English lost its noun gender right after the Norman conquest. The language underwent rapid and extensive change, different populations merged, dialects flattened, and a lot of vocabulary was borrowed from the new French overlords. Many language structures, other than gender, were also lost at that time. Some have argued English almost underwent a sort of creole effect, where the native grammar of the parent languages is lost, and the next generation invent a new heavily regularized grammar to fill the void. That's going a bit far, I think, still there was a great deal of simplification. The lack of gender in Persian and Afrikaans has a somewhat similar history, in terms of social upheaval/displacement/dialect flattening, having an influence on the loss of gender.

AlexanderDhoore 3y ago

Feature creep is a real problem with language design nowadays.

misja111 3y ago

If you don't like noun genders, you should check out Finnish

littlestymaar 3y ago
English is already a good progress in that direction, in many (most?) European languages we have gendered nouns for everything, no matter how nonsensical it is. (la baguette / le pain).
- totetsu 3y ago
  I heard this was down to Viking raiders moving into the anglish isles and not wanting to be bothered with all that complicated stuff
  - littlestymaar 3y ago
    Given that the Viking's language was itself fairly complex pronoun-wise[1] I suspect that this is an urban legend. [1]: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Old_Norse/Pronouns https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Old_Norse/Pronouns
    - vidarh 3y ago
      And indeed, modern Scandinavian languages have retained gendered nouns. Though it's gradually being watered down. Eg. in Norwegian Bokmål (there are two official variants of Norwegian, Bokmål is the dominant one) you can now mostly choose whether to use feminine or masculine forms for a noun if a word takes either (but you can't do this for neuter), e.g. en sol (masculine; a sun) vs. ei sol (feminine; a sun) are both valid as long as you're consistent (combining "en sol" (m; a sun) with "sola" (f; the sun) in the same text, mixing genders, is frowned upon, though some of us do that intentionally - "solen" (m; the sun) sounds to stuffy/posh to me, but I prefer "en sol" to "ei sol").
    - Tagbert 3y ago
      The problem was that the pronouns and declensions didn’t match. Since this was a case of large numbers of adults learning a new language, they just learned enough to get by and didn’t bother with the complicated bits.
- jagrsw 3y ago
  English is increasingly using the singular 'they' as a workaround, since alternative options like 've,' 'ze,' 'zhe,' and 'xer' didn't gain traction. This comes with its own set of issues—initially, it was a bit disorienting for me, and even now it often requires a mental pause to parse what the speaker is referring to. I'd welcome a more authoritarian approach here: globally adopt a new pronoun, go through a transitional period, and then we're all on the same page. Some sci-fi novels have toyed with this concept. IMO gendered pronouns don't add much value in many languages (with exceptions - poetry etc.). In Slavic languages, it's relatively straightforward to deduce gender from the pronoun, but in Germanic and Romance languages, it's more obfuscated.
  - littlestymaar 3y ago
    I actually love “they” because it waves off every ambiguity at once: not only you don't have to care about the gender of the person, you don't even have to bother whether it is an individual or a collective (this super convenient when discussing about open-source projects).
    - tough 3y ago
      they built this and that and did it all by themselves doesn't sound to bad ymmv
  - mcv 3y ago
    English is definitely leading in terms of genderlessness, but that advantage is more than offset by its complete detachment between spelling and pronunciation. It would be nice to have a language with sensible spelling/pronunciation but no gender.
    - kitd 3y ago
      Welsh is about 95% phonetic in spelling. Maybe English with Welsh spelling?
    - kwhitefoot 3y ago
      > its complete detachment between spelling and pronunciation. Whose dialect are you going to choose to render phonetically? Mine from the West Country, or that of my friends from Newcastle? Will you standardise on short a in castle (Newcastle upon Tyne, North East England) or long a in castle (Restormel Castle, Cornwall)? Or should each person just write phonetically so that we have millions of idiolects?
astrange 3y ago
Everyone in between Finland and Basque Country should try adopting one of those.
OfSanguineFire 3y ago
Meh, Finnish doesn’t have noun genders, but due to phonological changes obscuring what was, centuries ago, a regular declension, it now has a large number of different noun classes that have to be memorized as such. These are so laborious for foreigners to learn that a Finnish language workbook like Harjoitus tekee mestarin can spend 300 pages just on drills of noun classes.

gumby 3y ago

If you don’t like the use of two or three grammatical genders, Japanese would like to have a word with you (so to speak). There are a lot different classifier systems in language around the world; gender is just a small example. All these mechanisms are kinds of ECC.

grozzle 3y ago
presumably means "error correcting code", to save the next person from looking up jargon.
astrange 3y ago
I'm well aware, but kanji and pitch accents are a lot cooler than remembering whether a table is male, female or neuter.
- gumby 3y ago
  Japanese has tons of classifiers, not just the two or three that come with languages with gender.
  - astrange 3y ago
    The counter words are a pain…

edgyquant 3y ago

Gender nouns are not pointless features.

astrange 3y ago
Don't know what a gender noun is, but it sounds different from a noun gender.

tomjakubowski 3y ago

Eh, gendered nouns are kinda helpful in spoken language. It's an extra bit of redundancy which can help distinguish similar-sounding words in noisy environs. Same deal with verb conjugations and adjective declensions. Granted they don't have much of a point in written word, at least not today when writing is easy to preserve digitally without accumulating errors over time. (No smudges making it hard to make out a word) I really do wonder though how English seemingly uniquely in I-E languages ended up dropping those features, for the most part.

retrac 3y ago
> I really do wonder though how English seemingly uniquely Not uniquely. Just within the Germanic languages, Afrikaans, an offshoot of Dutch, is without gender, in a way similar to English. And there are others in the IE family that have lost gender. Persian is a notable example. English lost its noun gender right after the Norman conquest. The language underwent rapid and extensive change, different populations merged, dialects flattened, and a lot of vocabulary was borrowed from the new French overlords. Many language structures, other than gender, were also lost at that time. Some have argued English almost underwent a sort of creole effect, where the native grammar of the parent languages is lost, and the next generation invent a new heavily regularized grammar to fill the void. That's going a bit far, I think, still there was a great deal of simplification. The lack of gender in Persian and Afrikaans has a somewhat similar history, in terms of social upheaval/displacement/dialect flattening, having an influence on the loss of gender.