4 ms·

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.

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.