3 ms·

As a student of German (80 on DuoLingo) I'm fascinated by the definite articles. If we're going to manage gender and case across nouns appearing in sentences,

• danans 6mo ago
  > If we're going to manage gender and case across nouns appearing in sentences, why not make them more distinct, please? > We've got 'die' owning far too much real estate here, in my opinion. German has a relatively simple case inflection system, one that mostly applies to particles. Fully inflected languages often apply case and gender to the nouns and adjectives themselves, in many cases with overlap between cases only distinguishable via context.
  • smitty1e 6mo ago
    Oh, don't drop a pfennig in me about the arbitrary genders. I'm contending that enumerating the article variations should spare us the ambiguous overlaps. Millions of Germans are all: "Deal with it".
    • danans 6mo ago
      > Millions of Germans are all: "Deal with it". Yeah because it makes perfect sense to them, just like it doesn't confuse us that the pronoun "them" in English can refer to either a singular non-gender-specified individual as a verb object or plural individuals of any genders (or even non persons) as objects. That's three distinct meanings of "them" in standard English, and there are even more in dialectical speech.