🇬🇧: 90+7 (ok, there is some jank in English numbers - 13-19 are in line with the Germanic pronunciation, i.e. pronounced "right to left", as a weird hold-over from the more Germanic Old English)
🇪🇸: 90+7
🇩🇪: 7+90
🇫🇷: 4x20+10+7
And if you think that's bad, the Danes actually make the French look sane...
🇩🇰: 7+(-½+5)x20
Even Danes generally don't really know why their numbers are like that, they just remember and go along with it.
You know everytime your mention French number, there is always belgian or Swiss who will tell you :
While learning Danish I figured out that's just the arcane incantation for the number. It's language juju, and you just have to know that it be like it do. Yes, it's syv og halvfems, but the reason behind it doesn't matter anymore. The rest of the double digit numbers are a mess as well; 30 is tredive (three tens in old norse) but starting with 50 it's this weird score (20) and half-to-score system.
When I first started learning my brain was desperately trying to make heads or tails of it and rationalize it somehow. And then I realized that was stupid, abandoned reason, and now I just utter these backwards ass numbers and we all nod and everyone is happy lol. Language is weird.
"We've just been the the musée de l'automobile in Mulhouse"
"Sorry, where?"
"Mulhouse"
"Where?"
"Mulhouse"
"Aaaaaah I see! It's pronounced [pronounces Mulhouse *exactly the same FUCKING way I just pronounced it]
😂 Happens very regularly
Just because your ears can't hear a difference doesn't mean that there is none. I deal with this a lot when Japanese ask me for help and can't differentiate between certain sounds
Yeah in Japanese a few consonant sounds like 'r' and 'l' sounds or 'h'/'f' or 's'/'th' or 'z'/'ð' are basically heard as the same (an American 'r' might even sound like a weird 'w' to Japanese), and English has around 17 to 24 distinctive vowel sounds generally (based on quality) while Japanese has 5 plus vowel length and tones (pitch accent). As a result of the phonetic differences between the languages, it can be hard to hear or recreate the differences in sound quality (especially when it's Japanese on the speaking/listening end, but Americans also sure have a terrible time trying to make Japanese sounds like the "n" or "r" or "ch"/"j" or "sh"/"zh" or "f" or "u". they just perceive it as the same as the closest sounds in English)
In my experience, only God can hear the difference between Polish "dż" and "dź" / "cz" and "ć" (and the others)...
English also doesn't have gemination (small tsu) which does make a difference in Japanese as well. Hearing that in very quick Japanese for words I don't know can still be different. Same with vowel length. Once you know the word, it doesn't matter as much how someone says it, but when it's new vocab and the speaker is very quick, it can be tough.
I didn't know the technical term gemination for っ, appreciate it. Can't it manifest somewhat similarly to stops/plosives though? English doesn't generally use those followed by the same consonant within the same word, but the phrase "port ten" is almost like the t consonant in itte, but with less of a pause in the middle. Contrast it with the word "portend" and you can see that we have a little bit more of a pause in "port ten".
When I say "port ten" and ポッテン (with or without the long 'o') it seems I'm doing something different. Maybe a glottal stop and hard attack? I'm not actually a linguist though, so I could be very wrong.
Wait, how does ch/j or sh differ from the English sounds? And what words use zh? I don't think I've seen that romaji
They are all palatal sibilants in Japanese, while in English they're palato-alveolar sibilants. Very hard difference for English speakers to hear, but the distinction is common enough to exist in many languages. And the "ch"/"j"/"sh"/"zh" sounds I speak of are just common variations of "t"/"d"/"s"/"z" that occur before "i" (they are spelled si -> shi, zi -> zhi/ji, ti -> chi, di -> ji).
Usually "zhi" isn't spelled out in Rōmaji though, actually it's often spelled "ji" even when they're sometimes pronounced differently (so "zi" and "di" end up being spelled the same, perhaps confusingly, but most people pronounce them the same so it doesn't really matter). But I think pronouncing them differently is more of an archaic, obsolete, ot dialectal thing anyways.
The "h" in "hi" also sounds different.
The spelling also changes in the same way before a syllable that starts with a "y" sound, e.g. syu -> shu or dyo -> jo.
Before "u" some consonants also change (hu -> fu, tu -> tsu, du -> dzu).
These sound changes don't occur for all speakers/dialects, some don't have a "shi" and just say "si" for example, but they are the most common and standard I believe.
No offense intended since I'm fully incapable of pronouncing tons of English words properly (fuck "squirrel" specifically), but as a Frenchman who has lived near Mulhouse for a few years and interacted with a lot of foreign students, what you said probably wasn't close to being the exact same as that guy
For all languages I have learned so far 'squirrel' is really hard to pronounce for non-native speakers.
English: squirrel
French: écureuil
And the germans kill it with: Eichhörnchen
American English - SKWOOOOOORL
Ignore the letters in English, it helps just as much as ignoring the letters in French.
Squirrel is pronounced like skwir-rel.
He he he ... No. It's closer to skwurl.
NO IT FUCKING ISN'T 😂 Only if you pronounce mirror as MEEEEEER
To add to what that other person said, when you grow up your brain gets used to hearing the sounds common to your accent and you can even stop hearing the difference between certain sounds when someone speaks your language with a different accent!
In Quebec french there's a big difference between the sound of "pré" and "prè" that doesn't exist with some of the french accents in France and they're unable to recreate that difference and might even be unable to hear it!
Yep. I took a language psych class in college, and we saw some examples of this that were crazy, especially being one of the people that can’t hear the difference.
I can’t remember the example, but just imagine somebody saying the same word to you twice and then a third party telling you the first person just said two different words.
"Pré" and "prè" consistently sound distinctly different in most, dare I say almost all, accents in mainland France. The difference is the same with basically all words spelled with those vowels. "Ê" also sounds like a long "è" in most words for most people. "e" also sounds like "é" when before silent letters except for "t", and sounds like "è" when before multiple letters or before "x" or before silent "t" or if it's the last sound except for open monosyllabic words, and it sounds special or is silent elsewhere. "-ent" is always silent too. Obviously doesn't apply to "en/em", also special exception for "-er/-es".
This video wouldn't exist with the Quebecois accent because the three words wouldn't be considered homonyms.
Maybe not in proper Quebecois, but I feel like most people here use the é/è sounds interchangably. Take “Il prétend” for example. It feels like that accent could be either é or è and people would still pronounce it the same.
The vowel sounds in "près" and "pré" are very clearly different, and the sound in "prêt" changes from "è" to "é" when in liaison because it always sounds like "è" at the end of words (and separately, in closed syllables) and always sounds like "é" in open syllables otherwise (liaison triggers a change in the syllable structure which changes the vowel here). This does not contradict what I said. You said "(pr)é" and "(pr)è" sound the same, nothing about "(pr)ê".
Enter German and Gendering: You can not say Programmer to address all Programmers in the room. You have to call them Programmerin und Programmer or Programmer:in or Programmende. And yes, most of these words aren't even German but if you don't use them you are a Grammar Nazi.
And btw, the fact that we address females with "die" does not mean we want them dead, thank you and have a good day.
It's a little bit worse than that in fact.
"Programmiererinnen und Programmierer" or "Programmierer:innen" or "Programmierende". And if you get it wrong you are not a grammar nazi but more of a regular nazi.
/s just in case
Was ? L'écriture inclusive ist schwerer in deutsch als in französisch und es ist schwer genug in französisch (T_T)
Are you for real?
It is real. People have gotten mad at me for saying the 1 general (in my opinion in that case not-gendered) word instead of the slight pause and adding *innen. It's quite difficult for non-native speakers to get used to it.
Meanwhile, in Dutch language, many female doctors, bosses, directors etc all prefer to be spoken to with the general "male" word, because they prefer to be spoken to on an equal term as their male colleagues and for the difference not to be made. Witnessing Germanic languages growing apart a tad further I guess.
In English we have a few gendered professions (waiter/waitress, actor/actress) and I feel like most people.lean towards the "male" term as the general term as well. In general it's fine to call anyone an actor or a waiter but it would be weird to call a male actor an actress.
Actress seems to have fallen out of fashion, at least in personal experience.
"actrice" is one the few in dutch where it does still seem to matter to use the female version! Calling a female actress the male "acteur" would weird out a room i think. But if it's a group of both male and female people, and you use the general "acteurs" it would be fine i think and "actrices en acteurs" would be fine too. While in german, only the "schauspielerinnen und schauspieler" of "schauspieler*innen" would be okay and just saying "schauspieler" to a mixed group would be very frowned upon.
I get the idea, i hate the implementation. I think it would be easier for everyone to just cancel one word and call everyone the same, instead of doubling down on everything, it's doable in writing, but it's a real hassle in talking.
Have you watched Drag Race? Many actresses on this show.
It is also quite difficult for native speakers. I have nothing against the general idea, but the ":" solution is just shit. Destroys the whole flow of the language. Takes me out of a conversation/speech/whatever every time somebody uses it.
Language is a tool and is shaped and molded to be used by its bearers. You'll get used to it and it'll come natural to you. If it's important to you, you'll get there.
Btw: the slight pause you insert between the main noun and the gendered suffix is called a glottal stop. You do it without thinking about it for a bunch of words already. Consider "Spiegelei". Notice the pause between "Spiegel" and "Ei"? Apply this same principle whenever you want to gender appropriately and you're golden.
No one says Spiegel...Ei. if I say Kund:innen like that everyone will just hear Kundinnen.
And I also don't think people will get used to it. When something new gets introduced into a language, the first natural thing is to adjust it to the speaking pattern. Which is not possible here as it is an explicit and intentional break of the speaking pattern. It will stay alien as it pretty much intents to stay alien.
Maybe children that are just learning to speak atm will, but current adults? Only those who want to really really convince themselves for ideological reasons.
As a German, I'm pretty sure they're right. Look into glottal stop, it's not really a long pause or anything. Think of the difference of the connection of "Spiegel" and "ei" in Spiegelei, and "Schreiner" and "ei" in Schreinerei. It's this short contraction that stops airflow and then releases it again, and it's present at the beginning of the "ei" in Spiegelei, but not in Schreinerei.
Here's also the IPA pronunciations from Wiktionary:
As I said, it's barely noticeable but you do make a stop in between. You're just used to using the word in your daily vocabulary that you don't notice it. And as mentioned before, if you care enough, you'll do it - if you don't, you won't. A little close-minded if you ask me but that's just my two cents. :)
Yeah, and as I said the whole point of the ":" is to make a explipcitly noticable stop. Thus breaking the flow of the language. Otherwise it will just sund like the female version. This is not comparable.
Sorry to hear that. For me it's the other way round. While I nearly always use the generic masculine form when speaking directly to others that never happened to me. Then again at work it's forbidden for me to gender in official postings since I did that once.
What I totally get is that online it's a totally different experience and no matter whether you gender or don't you may as well drop yourself into a vet of acid.
it was in real life and the person calling me out was a hardcore feminist. So yeah, the construction is being used to call out non-native speakers on their so-called ideological bias against feminists, or so it felt :s It weirded me out and continues to do so. To me it feels more inclusive to call everyone, male, female or non-binary, by one and the same word, instead of focussing on ones reproductive organs while talking about their profession or hobby or whatever.
Same in Spanish. We can say programadores (male gender plural form) to refer to a group of programmers, regardless of gender, as the standard says. However, in recent years it's become common to say programadores y programadoras (male plural and female plural) or programadoras y programadores (female plural and male plural). Using only the male gender causes many people to complain, or so I've heard.
Is "dokter" even a male word? What's the female version "dokterin","dokteres"?
The female version is Doktorin.
I'm dutch and didn't even know this was a thing, is it something that is common in Belgium?
Dokteres enkel in dialect hier, maar in lokaal dialect maken we de lidwoorden ook mannelijk/vrouwelijk.
Groot verschil tussen "de die" (vrouwelijk) en "den die" (mannelijk) om iemand aan te wijzen bijvoorbeeld.
Due to the increased acceptance of non-conforming identities, it's become more prevalent to either ask for pronouns, tell them to a person you meet, or have them somewhere visible in things like gameshows.
That's quite as silly to me as this whole "what gender is this washing machine" nonsense is to English-speaking people.
Here in Finland, we don't have gendered language. Even with third person pronouns, we usually default to "it" instead of "him/her/they". Except for pets. They always get the proper pronoun "hän". It's just respectful.
So yeah, just like the English wonder why they have to learn different words for something needlessly gendered in France, I too, as a Finn, wonder why I have to learn different words for something needlessly gendered in English.
Right or wrong, calling a person "it" in English is incredibly disrespectful
We could do with something though. 'Them' doesn't really cut it as it's not clear if it's plural or singular. 'It' is insulting.
If there was a good one, I'd just use it all the time for everyone. Why should gender be so important to identity? Isn't it a regression to be so hungup on gender?
’Them' doesn't really cut it as it's not clear if it's plural or singular.
Beyond the other reply about the history of the singular “they,” we also have another prominent plural pronoun we use in the singular all the time. So often we don’t even think about it as being plural anymore. So much so that we’ve created new plural versions of this already plural pronoun.
“You.”
“You” was originally the objective case plural 2nd person pronoun in English, with “ye” being the nominative.
But “thou” was considered informal, like the German “du” or the Spanish “tú,” and the plural 2nd person was used as the formal. And this eventually supplanted “thou” completely.
And now we think of “you” as singular to the point where we make slang words like “y’all” and “yous” to have a plural.
I think they maybe meant the gender neutral they/them, which we turn to "it" for the inanimate?
Edit: on second read I'm not sure
I do mean that we Finns use "se" very often in everyday speech to refer yo other human beings, and "se" would translate as "it."
Ofc I'm aware how horrible using "it" when referring yo people would be in English.
But if someone asked me to translate a sentence like "mihin se [a person] meni", I would ofc not use a direct translation because of how offensive and wrong it would be.
I respect the distinctions languages have for genders, but I'm happy I grew up with one which didn't have them. Language shapes thought. We don't think of people as "it", it's just the colloquial form of the language.
In Finnish, if you had to give a formal speech or something, most people realise to default to "hän", the 3rd person singular.
And if you're doing customer service or addressing someone with the sort of respect you'd use titles with in English. Then you'd address the person in the second person plural instead of the second person singular.
Just like English did hundreds of years ago, and it worked so well that in the end, English left the second person singular out of the language altogether. It still exists, but isn't really used unless thou wants to pretend being from Elizabethan Britain.
Which is why I never do, obviously.
This is one of those things that, if translated directly, would be really, really bad.
Now I've spoken English for more than a quarter century, so my mouths used to it already, but I remember when learning the language, it was rather hard for the brain to keep switching between "he" and "she", as it was not a distinction my brain had to make before using English.
I mean obviously I could differentiate women and men, but having to use different pronouns for both?
Yeah I don't see anyone accepting being called "it" in English; that's how you refer to farm animals bound for slaughter or undesirable ethnicities you're going to exterminate.
Why would anyone ever want to try using "it" for people in English unless they're purposefully trying to demean someone.. ?
Sorry, I wasn't trying to say that's what English should do. I was describing what Finnish does.
I'm pointing out that lots of languages have less gender distinctions than English, so English calling French out on gendered nouns is rather silly.
My point is that despite Finland having a perfectly good third person singular for people, we usually use the even more general one, which is just for anything. Except when talking to and about pets, because then somehow everyone uses less colloquial language.
While English has a perfectly good second person singular, but doesn't even use it anymore.
You can't have more third person singulars before you finish your second person singulars, that's the rule. Now open up!
My point is that despite Finland having a perfectly good third person singular for people we usually use the even more general one
The reason for that is because “se” as strictly a “thing” pronoun is artificial “book language”. When standard literary Finnish was being developed in the 19th century, its inventors wanted to have a person/thing distinction in pronouns like the “civilized” languages had, so they arbitrarily assigned “hän” as a person pronoun and “se” as a thing pronoun. That distinction is artificial, and has never stuck in spoken Finnish.
Originally there was a difference between “hän” and “se”, but it was grammatical: se was the general third person pronoun, hän referred back to the speaker (logophoric pronoun). Compare:
Antti sanoi, että se tulee. (Antti said that someone else will come.)
Antti sanoi, että hän tulee. (Antti said that he himself will come.)
I believe women sometimes use them to aid in the release of gender fluid.
I tried this it doesn't work :(
Gotta use the dryer apparently
Why did my ex know this
You can use gender powder too
I use gender pods.
I hear that you can eat those.
Polish speaker here. We not only have gendered nouns but also verbs and adjectives.
Spanish speaker here. For as chaotic and wild as English is, I've always appreciated that it has no gendered nouns. Why are chairs female? Makes no sense
Dick in French is, you guessed it, female.
As are mustache and balls. Meanwhile, bra, vagina and boobs are male.
Don't tell Republicans
Maybe you are interested in Finnish. We do not have gendered pronouns either. Everyone is just "hän".
So you're saying Hän is Solo?
Hän man is Speedy
Hold my Duolingo owl, I'm gonna look up Finnish that sounds awesome
Can I keep it after that? I always wanted a pet.
Clearly, because chairs are obviously male (German). Anything else is just silly.
I'm sorry, French here, but a chair can be both. It depends of the type : Une chaise is obviously feminine while un siège or un fauteuil are definitely masculin.
Also Germanic language like English and German mixing these two meaning are silly languages.
Why. Just why? It's just you French and your obsession for...
la silla vs el asiento (Spanish)
Fuck.
I think we just spotted a cultural fracture btw people of Romance language and the one of Germanic language.
Grammatical genders are just that. Grammatical. It's a classification scheme. Latin had neutral nouns and plenty of languages make grammatical differences between animate and inanimate nouns. That current romance languages make a deliberate division between "male" and "female" nouns does not mean they have to correspond to actual features of human beings.
That being said. It's ridiculous that agua is femenine but with the definite article it has to be el agua in singular but las aguas in plural. All the explanations by RAE simply amounts to "we like it this way, lolol".
How does that work out? I mean in french you'd gender it by what it is defining. A yellow car, the "A" is gendered the same as the cars gender.
Oh.
I think I get it. That must be confusing for foreigners!
Cheers Polish brothers and sisters!
Nah. Having pronouns would be too easy. We are changing the end of the word. Yellow would be "żółty" if male, "żółta" if female and "żółte" if genderless or plural. Unless male plural, then it would be "żółci".
So a bit like French maybe, faché, fachée, fachés or fachées for example depending on gender and numbers.
While gendered nouns are stupid, I at least appreciate Italian because you can just learn the word and get its gender from the end part of the word. In German, however, it's completely random and you have to learn the gender with the word.
I don't know what you're on about. It's "die Waschmaschine" (washing machine, female), "das Waschmittel" (laundry detergent, neutral) and "der Trockner" (dryer, male).
Pretty self explanatory /s
I feel violated in 3 languages
And after going on Die Toilette (female toilet), you use Das Spulbecken (neutral washbasin) and stand in front of Der Spiegel (male mirror).
Despite accepting this all as perfectly normal, conservatives still manage to make a stink when someone writes or speaks in a way that addresses two different genders :-S
And then there's also the fabolous gender swap in the kitchen:
You walk into Die Küche(female kitchen) and after that you come out of Der Küche(male kitchen).
TIL In french, we have un amour, single form masculin that turn feminin in the plural form.
Das Mädchen (girl, neutral)
That's because of the so called "Dimitutiv". What it does is basically, it say that the object in queue is smaller version of it. Some examples:
Der Baum - Das Bäumchen
Der Junge - Das Jüngchen
It's always neutral. The original word is "Die Magd" and the Dimitutiv is Mädchen.
I know that, but that doesn't do much to un-confuse beginner speakers.
Also, das Mädchen is just a cute/small Made (maggot).
To be fair most French words are like what you're describing in Italian. Why does German even have gendered nouns?
Damit andere Länder nichts verstehen können.
Länder:innen
Well that clears that up, thanks!
Portuguese and Spanish also have that, to a certain degree, but there are some "trap words", like mapa (map), which is masculine, and a number of words that don't end with a/o to easily guess.
And words that are feminine but are still used with 'el' and 'un' because they start with a stressed a
intentionally misreading as wholesome - the idea is to subvert the concept of gender.
"You'll never be a real woman!"
"Neither will the chair I'm sitting in but you keep calling it 'her' so maybe stfu."
Die Waschmaschine die
So it's a girl?
Die Maschine. So yes all machines are girls /s
We also don't have 13 different words for I (glances at Japan)
Not the worst example for Japanese. The verb kakeru 掛ける is very common and has ~25 different meanings. This is before you count the other verbs also pronounced as kakeru such as 翔ける、賭ける etc
How many definitions does the English word "set" have?
And “get”!
Yeah but we win, we Can Say "putain" in any situation. It will Always work.
C'est une putain de bonne idée pour apprendre ce putain de langage, putain
It can be argued that most of the different meanings arise from different contexts and how the speakers associate that particular word to different uses. When an English speaker uses the word save, it can mean either "save a person from danger", "save a computer file", and many others, which can have different meaning-translations to other languages.
Non-neutral nouns have always struck me as odd. They provide no info gain whatsoever outside of actually providing a gender if you're referring to a person or animal (for example, in Spanish, gato -> male cat, gata -> female cat). And in those situations, a short sentence can provide instant clarification if needed in a non-gendered language like English.
It's a language feature built to be helpful in one use case, whilst simultaneously being worse in about a bazillion others. It's a very odd choice.
There's an argument to be made that it might help clarifying when speaking to someone. Consider these two German sentences:
"Der rote Apfel" – the red apple
"Die rote Ampel" – the red traffic light
Imagine a noisy environment, a quiet speaker or some other problem and you only understand
"Die rote A***el" – the red x***xx
In a language like English, you don't have enough information to understand the meaning. The German gender system helps to direct your possible matching words (Ampel or Apfel) to the correct one, as "Die rote Apfel" is grammatically incorrect.
Another point I want to make is that it isn't "being worse in about a bazillion other" use cases. Native speakers don't really have an issue with noun class systems. It's just very unintuitive and tedious for non-native language learners to memorize all the genders of nouns.
I'd like to interject for a bit, if I may.
While german has cases, somewhat more complex verbs and gendered nouns, english also has its peculiarities that make it hard for non-natives to learn. Things like spelling and using the same word in a bazillion contests and methaphor-based idioms come to mind first. There are also simple-to-understand pecularities like its/it's and paid/payed which not even natives get right sometimes.
The point being, for all the "hard" and "useless" parts of one language the other language (as it's always comomparing apoles to oranges) has similarily "hard" and "useless" features itself, so in my opinion it more or less evens out.
What makes a language "easier" or "harder" to learn is how much of it you already know. In other words that's usually how similar it is to the languages you know already.
That doesn't mean that a language can't have more pointlessly convoluted things than another language. For example, counting in French.
I mostly agree. Sorry if it came out that way, but my comment was not meant to be stating that English is way easier than German.
Just wanted to point out that this "hard" and "useless" feature is not that useless and only hard for language learners.
And then there's the different ways to connect verbs in English.
I want to go to the movies. ("I want going" is wrong.)
I like going to the movies. / I like to go to the movies. (Both ways work.)
I despise going to the movies. ("I despise to go" is wrong.)
There aren't rules for that, as far as I know. Just very fuzzy guidelines at best. And word stress is pretty random too. Both of those things can be tricky for non-native speakers.
And why did we in school made listening comprehensions for English where you would need to understand people speaking in the middle of a construction side next to a heavy used road?
I mean even in German I wouldn't have understood them but I got an bad grade because I didn't understand it in English.
Of course! Hitler proved all right wing Germans are pussies with dicks.
Only three genders? They need to get with the times.
Technically so does did English, we just stopped using the male gendered pronoun sometime in the Renaissance, Early Modern Period, or Victorian Period, I don't know when. a ton of freaking words that I got mixed up back in Old English
Back in Shakespeare's day, woman = female, man = gender neutral, (kinda like the word "Dude" it can be used for both women and wifmen,) and finally wifman = male.
Still not sure why the male gendered pronoun fell out of common parlance.
Haven't read Shakespeare in 2 decades, sorry.
Shakespeare was known to use archaic language for his plays but by his time this was largely codified into what we would recognize as modern usage. You are thinking of old English. It also goes beyond just man (used more or less like we would use the word human) , other gendered words originally had specific meaning independent of gender. You also got it a bit backwards. Wifman is female, wereman is male. Others include.
Boy : knave or troublemaker
Girl : Neutral word for young child. Basically like "kid"
Thanks! No wonder his plays were so hard to read. I haven't read Shakespeare in a good 20 years so it's no surprise that I've mixed up the words and usages.
He is an interesting literary figure. And in personal opinion quite frankly kind of a hack. You got to appreciate the audacity of someone who tries to use "Dost" nearly two centuries out of date and then just out of the blue makes up wholesale complete words from scratch to fit iambic pentameter.
I love his stuff don't get me wrong but he wasn't exactly highbrow entertainment of his day. Still his early modern English is easily legible. Chaucer's middle english is distinctly more garbled and if you go back to your Old English where these terms originate it's like trying to read another language entirely. Like this is technically English :
Hwæt. We Gardena in geardagum,
þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.
Oft Scyld Scefing sceaþena þreatum,
monegum mægþum, meodosetla ofteah,
egsode eorlas. Syððan ærest wearð
feasceaft funden, he þæs frofre gebad,
weox under wolcnum, weorðmyndum þah,
oðþæt him æghwylc þara ymbsittendra
ofer hronrade hyran scolde,
gomban gyldan. þæt wæs god cyning.
wifman = male
are you sure you're not thinking of wǣpnedmann? everything I can find about wifman tells me that it means "woman" and the root derivation is "wife person".
Someone else corrected me, I was thinking of wereman. Haven't read Shakespeare in a couple decades
wer and wife
TIL the etymology of how we talk about shapeshifters in folk myth. Dope, thank you!
"Working late one night in the lab, Guy Fellows was bitten by a radioactive human being. Now he seems like an ordinary person, but under the full moon he undergoes a transformation and become a wereman! All the powers of an adult male human, trapped inside the frail shell of an adult male human, he is Wereman!"
Technically so does English, we just stopped using the male gendered pronoun sometime in the Renaissance, Early Modern Period, or Victorian Period, I don’t know when.
I call bullshit on this, e.g. "de aanrecht" sounds just plain wrong. I know that people in the Netherlands are often using the wrong gender, which always sounds weird to me.
Words that change meaning with different genders (e.g. "de aas" and "het aas") are kinda cool tho.
Most gendered languages I know about have three genders. Oh, wait. I got it. Ha!
is that like how you have to memorize every single articels (der, die, das) for every word in german?
Exactly, gendered langage. But French has only two genders, no neutral like German.
And the washing machine is a Lady, any machine btw :)
But at least pronunciation is mostly consistent.
In English two words can be written almost exactly the same but sound wildly different.
Looking at you, words with "ough"
And then there's the wars about der/die/das Nutella :>
I don't know about French, but in Spanish is feminine.
Also feminine in French: "la machine à laver"
La Lavadora
El Lavarropas
Depende la expresión mi buen hispanohablante, y de la zona.
Uh? I'm Portuguese and it works in the same in my language. I don't know what the big deal is. You get the gender by the arti...
Oh...
crying in German
Disclaimer: this is terrible advice if you are trying to actually learn the proper grammar, don’t follow it.
That being said, you can get by in everyday situations perfectly fine using "De" for anything, especially if you have a foreign accent people will forgive you.
De junge, de Mädchen, de Baby, de Tisch, de Stuhl, de Feuerzeuggas-Nachfüllkartusche.
People will understand.
That's so true. Or just guess. Like, for real, no one cares. Besides your Goethe Institute examiner. Das Tisch, die Mädchen, der Banane. Doesn't matter. My father has awful, awful German, despite living here for 35ish years, and his whole job is communicating with people and he made a huge career despite having no clue of grammar and buying sweet red Erdbeben in the supermarket.
I also adore foreigners from different countries speaking in completely broken German to one another and somehow being able to figure out what the other one was saying and having a blast. Admittedly, with the rise of English, this has become much rarer. But it just shows you that language is so much more than just grammar and vocabulary.
I love me some sweet red earthquakes
Female, and I am sure there hides a boomer joke here
I'm countering with a lave-linge which is masculine, now where's the boomer joke?
Say what you will, exam nightmares are real
I'm trying to figure out why I keep having dreams where I find out I somehow accidentally didn't finish high school and have to go back to finish it to validate my college degree, but I didn't go to class all year and I'm trying to figure out how I can pass.
It's been a while, but I used to have a dream where I was in high school like I didn't finish, but I would realize I had already graduated and gone to college. I was extra confused until my mind said I could just fuck with those high school classes and do whatever.
English is incredibly easy. My mother tongue is Russian and I'm learning German, both have genders... which are quite often different. That makes things even harder :D
oh, that's so easy! It's both, depending how you translate it: une machine à laver or un lave-linge.
What exactly does gender achieve in a language? Is English missing out on any nuance? Is it literally thinking about nouns as male or female, or is it just a weird name for the concept? Who decides gender when a new noun is made? What about borrowed words from other languages? Do you sound stupid if you speak French without using it, or are you just a language hipster?
Language, dude...
I'm not an expert. But I believe it is something to do with information redundancy.
If you mishear a word but surrounding words must match gender and number, you may reconstruct the misheard word.
As a native spanish speaker, I don't think of the actual sexuality of objects, it's just a characteristic of the word that should match other words in the sentence. For example the word screen (pantalla) is femenine, and the word monitor (monitor) is masculine. So when I see my monitor I don't think of an actual female or male object. But the nouns should match adjectives gender, so if someone says "broken monitor" (monitor roto) or "broken screen" (pantalla rota) I have this kind of redundancy if I misheard a word.
But I'm not an expert of linguistics. Don't quote me.
This sounds right. I think it’s just a hint for listeners for what the noun might be, and it happens to align to the male/female genders.
What exactly does gender achieve in a language? Is English missing out on any nuance?
Sort of. Grammatical gender and the interplay with grammatical case (the "role" of a noun in a sentence) allows some extra meaning to be packed in. For example, German has 3 genders and 4 cases leading to 12 different contexts for nouns to be in. Many of those have their own conjugation patterns, and separate words for the articles "a/the".
That can, theoretically, allow meaning of the type "whose what did what to whom" to be obvious or pieced together in a sentence, whereas translating it into English you might need to spell it out, lose it, or rely on context.
In practice, a lot of that sort of information is often redundant or clear from context anyway, and only matters if you're being clever or succinct. My German is shit, so I will not try to provide examples.
It's also worth pointing out that it's a naturally occurring feature, likely arisen by accident.
Is it literally thinking about nouns as male or female, or is it just a weird name for the concept?
It is mostly just a weird name. Some of it makes sense along (social) gender lines, much of it makes no sense at all. This thread is full of good examples of counterintuitive noun genders in all kinds of languages.
Who decides gender when a new noun is made? What about borrowed words from other languages?
The speakers of the language, collectively, usually with some disagreement, trial and error. Borrowing depends: a gendered noun borrowed into a non-gendered language would just slip in there. In the reverse case, people would just arrive at some gender for it arbitrarily or based on similar words, what gender any "parts" of the term might be if translated, or whatever other method. There's no correct answer.
Do you sound stupid if you speak French without using it, or are you just a language hipster?
Quite likely. There's no "without it" in gendered languages, it is a more or less fundamental part of the noun and the language, like how certain nouns and verbs are just different in English. Dropping random grammar and syntax from English would just be "doing it wrong", ranging from cute foreign accent quirks to Ralph Wiggum's cave-dwelling ancestor.
Of course, fucking up is unavoidable when learning languages, and most people will give you a lot of leeway due to being foreign. Maybe not everywhere in France, though...
Gender from french genre, latin genus, means category and that's all it is, a category system, with confusing category names and no real rules for which word belongs to which category. There's nothing masculine, feminine or neuter about words, nothing "sexual" or whatever, otherwise every person would be a woman because the word for person (from latin persona) is feminine in a lot of european languages, or French and German people would have to think really different about stuff like tables because in French it's "feminine" and in German it's "masculine". Btw, looking at English adjectives with French origin they almost always are the feminine version, like feminine or masculine. Some people think there is a hidden sexual meaning though and they come up with lots of different systems for gender neutral language, stuff like latinx.
Speaking as a gendered language user (Italian) it is sometimes weird.
For example, car is feminine but our name for an off-road vehicle is masculine, as is the word for truck. Since you have to apply the gender of the noun to verbs, articles and adjectives, which one do you use when talking about your SUV? Feminine because it's a car or masculine because it's an offroader?
For borrowed words there's usually a consensus on gender that forms over time. Sometimes a borrowed word inherits its gender from the translation of that word that fell out of use. One example of this could be the word computer. An equivalent term exists in Italian (calcolatore) which fell out of use but gave it a definite gender, masculine.
For example, car is feminine
Thet's why fuck cars. In Russian bus is "musculine". It fucks cars too.
Russian speakers might say the same thing about things that exist in English but not Russian like articles (the words "a"/"an" and "the"), Afrikaans speakers may say the same thing about verb conjugation at all, Chinese speakers may say the same thing about tense, Japanese speakers may say the same thing about having a separate present & future tense. There is a good explanation here or two already, but language features that seem "useless" or "complex" to us are important in other languages and are there for a purpose. Every language has features that would make others question it.
You sound odd, like a child or someone not fluent if you don't use our misuse the genders of words.
That being said, as native Spanish that lived in the UK for a while, I noticed that genders and verb forms are useful for providing more context when talking.
Cannot think of specific examples now, but in general in a phrase if you don't hear a word or don't know the meaning, it is easier to guess it because the rest of the phrase is constructed around the gender and more complex verbal forms.
on borrowing we can look at nouns borrowed into Spanish. They take the word change any sounds in native language to match Spanish sounds. Then they just slap on a gender ending. Yes it just what ever catches on. Which means we could have lived in world with potata.
Civilization if the Spanish used 'potata':
As a native speaker of a language with grammatical gender (Croatian; I've also learned Russian and a bit of German)...
What exactly does gender achieve in a language?
In Slavic languages it serves as an additional syntactic "connector" between words. Masculine nouns are accompanied by masculine forms of adjectives, feminine by feminine, etc. (Other than adjectives, this also applies to pronouns, some numbers and verbs.) This isn't necessary for successful communication, but it can somewhat reduce ambiguity and, along with other trickier parts of grammar such as cases, allows for quite a bit of freedom in how a sentence can be organised. English can be limited in that regard, with its stricter rules on word order, although its lack of grammatical gender is not the most significant factor.
Is it literally thinking about nouns as male or female, or is it just a weird name for the concept?
It's more of a name, true. There are prototypical words and situations where grammatical gender really is the same as biological sex (e.g. when referring to specific real people - just as you'd call a woman 'she' in English, so do you have to use feminine adjectives when referring to her), and that relationship is, for the sake of simplicity, projected onto the entirety of nouns in the language.
Who decides gender when a new noun is made?
In Slavic languages, it's really simple because the noun endings usually correspond to gender. There are exceptions and, so to say, "subsystems" within the general system, and there can be changes in how that system works, but the point is that it's based on a set of rules that speakers do know intuitively.
German doesn't have such a clear system of genders that is visible within each word (the endings usually don't tell you anything useful; if the noun ends on 'e' it's relatively likely it's feminine, but that's about it, as far as I know). Yet, interestingly enough, there was an experiment where native Germans were provided with made-up words, and were asked to determine their gender. The majority of people agreed on their choices. So, clearly German does have some rules and procedures to determine gender, even if they're opaque.
What about borrowed words from other languages?
Same as above. I can provide some illustrative examples if you want?
Do you sound stupid if you speak French without using it
I tried to imagine some sentences of that sort in Croatian, with incorrect genders, and it doesn't sound outright stupid, just odd. Some situations allow for some leeway in choice of gender too, and natives can make mistakes if they don't think too clearly which word they intend to use, and none of that is especially bothersome to a native's ear.
English weirdly use feminine for ships, so think of it like that. But no it doesn't achieve much.
I don't think it change the way we think about objects much, but probably unconsciously yes. For example, France itself is feminine and seeing some caricature personifying as a dude always feels weird.
Usage dictates the gender. And some recent words are more or less controversial: gameboy, wifi, COVID, Nutella...
When I think about the gender of a word I will usually derive it from a broader category. But that's not always obvious, for example Gameboy is a game console (feminine) but the words game and boy are masculine. COVID is a disease (feminine) but also a virus (masculine). And in the meme a washing machine is a machine (feminine).
You can't not use gender since french doesn't have neutral pronouns. But I don't think it's frowned upon for a non native speaker to make this kind of mistakes.
Old English used gender, and there are a few vestiges of it left in modern English. A couple adjectives can still use it (blond man, blonde woman), and a few nouns are still in use (actor vs actress). Some of those nouns have basically fallen out of use in the last few decades, like how pretty much no one uses comedienne anymore.
The only way to know for sure is to ask the washing machine how it identifies
This shit again...
Why are you so hung up on "gender"? Just replace it with "group" and you'll find the exact same situation in almost all languages.
In Swedish words are not gendered. But to specify the singular we use one of two groups. En or ett. It can be a word before what you want to specify. Or a suffix.
En banan, (a banana)
Banan-en, (the banana)
Or perhaps.
Ett körsbär, (a cherry)
Körsbär-et, (the cherry)
It's just one if two groups. Has nothing to do with gender. But if you really want to, we can pretend it's gendered because it doesn't matter. It's gonna be one or the other regardless.
Now tell me. How is this different from "gendered" languages? And as a bonus. There is NO rule regarding which to use when. You just have to know.
The question remains, why does there need to be two groups? Why can't everything just be "en" or "ett"? What does having both get you in Swedish that having only one does not?
What does "a" or "an" give you in English? It's mostly historical and because it flows better.
Because äpplet means "the apple" while äpplen means "apples".
Because it's how the language works. Why do we have many, lots, large ammonts of words that all mean the same thing? Me myself and I don't really care because they are ways to express ourselves in different ways depending on what we want to convey, and how we choose to do so.
Gender often comes along with cases, which basically show you what role a noun is playing in a sentence. For example, is someone doing something, or is something being done to them. That lets you change the word order and keep the same meaning. You can emphasize different parts of the sentence, or just be more flexible with how you say things.
Here's an example from German:
Der Hund (subject) hat den Mann (object) gebissen. / The dog bit the man.
Den Mann (object) hat der Hund (subject) gebissen. / The dog bit the man. (Implied: That guy, and not someone else.)
In English, the meaning changes when you change the word order.
The dog bit the man.
The man bit the dog.
Languages do fine with genders and without. They're just different systems that happened to evolve over time. And languages can even change. English used to have 3 genders, but they disappeared hundreds of years ago. Instead of having like 12 different ways to say "the," we just have one, thanks to the Vikings and the Norman invaders.
I think the point is that it's annoying to memorize regardless of language and it's not like genders always make sense in other languages either. It is funnier with genders though.
Das Mädchen (the girl) is neutral in German. lol
It's like this in almost every language. You don't have to memorize it. You have to learn it. You will learn it by speaking the language.
I think it's mostly native English speakers that complain because everything is just "the" and the rule to a and an is very simple.
You can tell me a word in Swedish I've never heard before. But i will instinctively know if it's an "en" or "ett" word. How? I don't even know. One just feels more right than the other.
I think it's the fact that those groups are the gender groups that is causing the frustration. If it's arbitrary, why did it have to be the same system we use to classify organisms and personal identities?
It's not completely arbitrary, and the overwhelming majority of nouns are "en", so it's not too complicated to remember the "ett" words, but yeah...
For some reason I always think the "-en" suffix sounds very cute
The baguette, croissant, and beret are killing me.
I'll help you.
The word "machine" in French is... "machine", yeah it's spelled exactly the same. Just pronounce it a lot more like French (stress falls on the 1st syllable instead of the 2nd). Oh, and it's feminine, which gives you "une machine".
Washing in French is "laver". In French, there's this thing called "complément de nom", where you add a noun to another noun to make a compound noun. However, there must be a preposition in between, and each compound noun has its own preposition, which means, you gotta learn them by heart (like the phrasal verbs in English except the meaning is actually related to the word).
In the case of this word, you'd use the preposition "à". You will end up with "une machine à laver", which translates literally to "a machine to wash".
Yeah, languages are complicated.
Someone once told me everything is feminine unless it has something to do with power or industry.
So, what I am hearing is:
La washing machine = washing machine
Le washing machine = industrial washing machine
"machine (à laver)" is feminine and it seems to have something to do with power or industry
I think in that context it's a tool to be used so it doesn't qualify.
Spanish enters the room: words have gender, but there are special cases where the definite article switches gender.
"El hacha roja/Las hachas rojas", "El agua fría/Las aguas frías"
Also, some words may have both genders:
"El computador/La computadora"
If it ends with an 'e' it's probably feminine. Moustache is feminine. There's a handful of exceptions that are easy to remember
exceptions
I can think of arbre, casque, peintre, socle, téléphone, meuble... There is no rule at all.
Un membre, un cadre, un sabre, un coffre, un sceptre, un mètre...
So moustaches are feminine?
And vaginas are masculine, just how Lemmy likes it.
Interesting. In Spanish, I believe moustache is masculine and beards are feminine.
It's neuter in greek, even though "machine" is feminine, cause the greek word is like "washer" instead of "washing machine". Although I think you have better things to ponder about when writing greek.
Namely, when the hell did I learn Greek?
We put it in your brain while you were sleeping last night.
Don't worry, we'll take it out later. We just needed someplace to store it for a bit.
Is it female?
It depend.
"Machine à laver" (washing machine) = female
"Lave linge" (laundry washer) = male
Yes.
Me as a German wondering if it's the same or different than in my language.
I'd argue though that it's ultimately similar levels of complexity. Because sure in romance languages you need to know (and probably just "get" what gender objects are. But in English you need to remember/just "get" which words have "i before e" (because the "rule" is utter trash), and all the inconsistent pronunciation of similarly spelt words.
Most European languages with accented vowels (and some with accented other letters too) have a pretty consistent pronunciation (when the accented letters are used).
English speakers have to just memorize that spelling bullshit and we get it wrong constantly.
But the real kicker is the Order of Adjectives. This doesn't help with understanding and the meaning in unchanged but no one actually knows the time without being told it exists. But we all follow it and know when it's broken. It makes sentences just feel wrong.
The order of adjectives are really not set rules. It is merely convention.
A much better example is the use of propositions. For example look up, look on, look out, and look into all mean completely different things.
maybe the problem is the concept of a language exam
German wants a word.
Swahili with its eighteen noun classes strides above it all like an eldritch god
Romance fans will tell you the French language is the adoration of beauty.
The British will tell you that the french taste for beauty is the same as their taste for cheese: it stinks.
do you trust the British though?
Considering their world renowned taste in cuisine, not really.
Just wait until you look into French numbers.
How different languages say 97:
🇬🇧: 90+7 (ok, there is some jank in English numbers - 13-19 are in line with the Germanic pronunciation, i.e. pronounced "right to left", as a weird hold-over from the more Germanic Old English)
🇪🇸: 90+7
🇩🇪: 7+90
🇫🇷: 4x20+10+7
And if you think that's bad, the Danes actually make the French look sane...
🇩🇰: 7+(-½+5)x20
Even Danes generally don't really know why their numbers are like that, they just remember and go along with it.
You know everytime your mention French number, there is always belgian or Swiss who will tell you :
🇧🇪🇨🇭: 90+7
☝️🤓
please... french swiss....
what the actual fuck is wrong with you, denmark?
...whats not?
Cope hagen?
Aebleskiver.
While learning Danish I figured out that's just the arcane incantation for the number. It's language juju, and you just have to know that it be like it do. Yes, it's syv og halvfems, but the reason behind it doesn't matter anymore. The rest of the double digit numbers are a mess as well; 30 is tredive (three tens in old norse) but starting with 50 it's this weird score (20) and half-to-score system.
When I first started learning my brain was desperately trying to make heads or tails of it and rationalize it somehow. And then I realized that was stupid, abandoned reason, and now I just utter these backwards ass numbers and we all nod and everyone is happy lol. Language is weird.
https://youtu.be/s-mOy8VUEBk?si=1dudvGSjUd9VI11D
🇩🇰🫡
It’s not easy running an isenkramstornunung when nobody remembers what anything is called
An absolute classic that I watch every single time. Kamelåså!
I don’t know what he gave me, but it was wrong 🤷🏻♂️
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I can't stop giggling about the Danish way of saying that. Like, I don't even understand how that's 90? LMAO.
That's not real. I refuse to believe that.
It is, but we just say seven and half fives these days. Everybody knows the twenty are implied...
This guy doesn't like the French way.
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I think Finnish would be
🇫🇮: 9•10+7
Nine-tens seven
Where do you think nine-ty in English comes from?
I think it comes from nine-tens. But if you check, that commenter didn't write it so.
Same for Japanese
🇯🇵: 9•10+7
九(kyuu) 十(juu) 七(nana)
Also, similar to English, 20 does not follow the pattern but instead has its own word. (Still written as 2•10 though)
Me speaking to a French guy last week -
"We've just been the the musée de l'automobile in Mulhouse"
"Sorry, where?"
"Mulhouse"
"Where?"
"Mulhouse"
"Aaaaaah I see! It's pronounced [pronounces Mulhouse *exactly the same FUCKING way I just pronounced it]
😂 Happens very regularly
Just because your ears can't hear a difference doesn't mean that there is none. I deal with this a lot when Japanese ask me for help and can't differentiate between certain sounds
Yeah in Japanese a few consonant sounds like 'r' and 'l' sounds or 'h'/'f' or 's'/'th' or 'z'/'ð' are basically heard as the same (an American 'r' might even sound like a weird 'w' to Japanese), and English has around 17 to 24 distinctive vowel sounds generally (based on quality) while Japanese has 5 plus vowel length and tones (pitch accent). As a result of the phonetic differences between the languages, it can be hard to hear or recreate the differences in sound quality (especially when it's Japanese on the speaking/listening end, but Americans also sure have a terrible time trying to make Japanese sounds like the "n" or "r" or "ch"/"j" or "sh"/"zh" or "f" or "u". they just perceive it as the same as the closest sounds in English)
In my experience, only God can hear the difference between Polish "dż" and "dź" / "cz" and "ć" (and the others)...
English also doesn't have gemination (small tsu) which does make a difference in Japanese as well. Hearing that in very quick Japanese for words I don't know can still be different. Same with vowel length. Once you know the word, it doesn't matter as much how someone says it, but when it's new vocab and the speaker is very quick, it can be tough.
I didn't know the technical term gemination for っ, appreciate it. Can't it manifest somewhat similarly to stops/plosives though? English doesn't generally use those followed by the same consonant within the same word, but the phrase "port ten" is almost like the t consonant in itte, but with less of a pause in the middle. Contrast it with the word "portend" and you can see that we have a little bit more of a pause in "port ten".
When I say "port ten" and ポッテン (with or without the long 'o') it seems I'm doing something different. Maybe a glottal stop and hard attack? I'm not actually a linguist though, so I could be very wrong.
Wait, how does ch/j or sh differ from the English sounds? And what words use zh? I don't think I've seen that romaji
They are all palatal sibilants in Japanese, while in English they're palato-alveolar sibilants. Very hard difference for English speakers to hear, but the distinction is common enough to exist in many languages. And the "ch"/"j"/"sh"/"zh" sounds I speak of are just common variations of "t"/"d"/"s"/"z" that occur before "i" (they are spelled si -> shi, zi -> zhi/ji, ti -> chi, di -> ji).
Usually "zhi" isn't spelled out in Rōmaji though, actually it's often spelled "ji" even when they're sometimes pronounced differently (so "zi" and "di" end up being spelled the same, perhaps confusingly, but most people pronounce them the same so it doesn't really matter). But I think pronouncing them differently is more of an archaic, obsolete, ot dialectal thing anyways.
The "h" in "hi" also sounds different.
The spelling also changes in the same way before a syllable that starts with a "y" sound, e.g. syu -> shu or dyo -> jo.
Before "u" some consonants also change (hu -> fu, tu -> tsu, du -> dzu).
These sound changes don't occur for all speakers/dialects, some don't have a "shi" and just say "si" for example, but they are the most common and standard I believe.
No offense intended since I'm fully incapable of pronouncing tons of English words properly (fuck "squirrel" specifically), but as a Frenchman who has lived near Mulhouse for a few years and interacted with a lot of foreign students, what you said probably wasn't close to being the exact same as that guy
For all languages I have learned so far 'squirrel' is really hard to pronounce for non-native speakers.
English: squirrel
French: écureuil
And the germans kill it with: Eichhörnchen
American English - SKWOOOOOORL
Ignore the letters in English, it helps just as much as ignoring the letters in French.
Squirrel is pronounced like skwir-rel.
He he he ... No. It's closer to skwurl.
NO IT FUCKING ISN'T 😂 Only if you pronounce mirror as MEEEEEER
I pronounce mirror like speegle 😄
To add to what that other person said, when you grow up your brain gets used to hearing the sounds common to your accent and you can even stop hearing the difference between certain sounds when someone speaks your language with a different accent!
In Quebec french there's a big difference between the sound of "pré" and "prè" that doesn't exist with some of the french accents in France and they're unable to recreate that difference and might even be unable to hear it!
Yep. I took a language psych class in college, and we saw some examples of this that were crazy, especially being one of the people that can’t hear the difference.
I can’t remember the example, but just imagine somebody saying the same word to you twice and then a third party telling you the first person just said two different words.
"Pré" and "prè" consistently sound distinctly different in most, dare I say almost all, accents in mainland France. The difference is the same with basically all words spelled with those vowels. "Ê" also sounds like a long "è" in most words for most people. "e" also sounds like "é" when before silent letters except for "t", and sounds like "è" when before multiple letters or before "x" or before silent "t" or if it's the last sound except for open monosyllabic words, and it sounds special or is silent elsewhere. "-ent" is always silent too. Obviously doesn't apply to "en/em", also special exception for "-er/-es".
https://youtu.be/W9c38ck4AuE
This video wouldn't exist with the Quebecois accent because the three words wouldn't be considered homonyms.
Maybe not in proper Quebecois, but I feel like most people here use the é/è sounds interchangably. Take “Il prétend” for example. It feels like that accent could be either é or è and people would still pronounce it the same.
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The vowel sounds in "près" and "pré" are very clearly different, and the sound in "prêt" changes from "è" to "é" when in liaison because it always sounds like "è" at the end of words (and separately, in closed syllables) and always sounds like "é" in open syllables otherwise (liaison triggers a change in the syllable structure which changes the vowel here). This does not contradict what I said. You said "(pr)é" and "(pr)è" sound the same, nothing about "(pr)ê".
Enter German and Gendering: You can not say Programmer to address all Programmers in the room. You have to call them Programmerin und Programmer or Programmer:in or Programmende. And yes, most of these words aren't even German but if you don't use them you are a Grammar Nazi.
And btw, the fact that we address females with "die" does not mean we want them dead, thank you and have a good day.
It's a little bit worse than that in fact. "Programmiererinnen und Programmierer" or "Programmierer:innen" or "Programmierende". And if you get it wrong you are not a grammar nazi but more of a regular nazi.
/s just in case
Was ? L'écriture inclusive ist schwerer in deutsch als in französisch und es ist schwer genug in französisch (T_T)
Are you for real?
It is real. People have gotten mad at me for saying the 1 general (in my opinion in that case not-gendered) word instead of the slight pause and adding *innen. It's quite difficult for non-native speakers to get used to it.
Meanwhile, in Dutch language, many female doctors, bosses, directors etc all prefer to be spoken to with the general "male" word, because they prefer to be spoken to on an equal term as their male colleagues and for the difference not to be made. Witnessing Germanic languages growing apart a tad further I guess.
In English we have a few gendered professions (waiter/waitress, actor/actress) and I feel like most people.lean towards the "male" term as the general term as well. In general it's fine to call anyone an actor or a waiter but it would be weird to call a male actor an actress.
Actress seems to have fallen out of fashion, at least in personal experience.
Ngram only somewhat confirms:
"actrice" is one the few in dutch where it does still seem to matter to use the female version! Calling a female actress the male "acteur" would weird out a room i think. But if it's a group of both male and female people, and you use the general "acteurs" it would be fine i think and "actrices en acteurs" would be fine too. While in german, only the "schauspielerinnen und schauspieler" of "schauspieler*innen" would be okay and just saying "schauspieler" to a mixed group would be very frowned upon.
I get the idea, i hate the implementation. I think it would be easier for everyone to just cancel one word and call everyone the same, instead of doubling down on everything, it's doable in writing, but it's a real hassle in talking.
Have you watched Drag Race? Many actresses on this show.
It is also quite difficult for native speakers. I have nothing against the general idea, but the ":" solution is just shit. Destroys the whole flow of the language. Takes me out of a conversation/speech/whatever every time somebody uses it.
Language is a tool and is shaped and molded to be used by its bearers. You'll get used to it and it'll come natural to you. If it's important to you, you'll get there.
Btw: the slight pause you insert between the main noun and the gendered suffix is called a glottal stop. You do it without thinking about it for a bunch of words already. Consider "Spiegelei". Notice the pause between "Spiegel" and "Ei"? Apply this same principle whenever you want to gender appropriately and you're golden.
No one says Spiegel...Ei. if I say Kund:innen like that everyone will just hear Kundinnen.
And I also don't think people will get used to it. When something new gets introduced into a language, the first natural thing is to adjust it to the speaking pattern. Which is not possible here as it is an explicit and intentional break of the speaking pattern. It will stay alien as it pretty much intents to stay alien.
Maybe children that are just learning to speak atm will, but current adults? Only those who want to really really convince themselves for ideological reasons.
As a German, I'm pretty sure they're right. Look into glottal stop, it's not really a long pause or anything. Think of the difference of the connection of "Spiegel" and "ei" in Spiegelei, and "Schreiner" and "ei" in Schreinerei. It's this short contraction that stops airflow and then releases it again, and it's present at the beginning of the "ei" in Spiegelei, but not in Schreinerei.
Here's also the IPA pronunciations from Wiktionary:
Spiegelei: [ˈʃpiːɡl̩ˌʔaɪ̯]
Schreinerei: [ʃʁaɪ̯nəˈʁaɪ̯]
ʔ is the symbol for the glottal stop: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glottal_stop
❤️
As I said, it's barely noticeable but you do make a stop in between. You're just used to using the word in your daily vocabulary that you don't notice it. And as mentioned before, if you care enough, you'll do it - if you don't, you won't. A little close-minded if you ask me but that's just my two cents. :)
Yeah, and as I said the whole point of the ":" is to make a explipcitly noticable stop. Thus breaking the flow of the language. Otherwise it will just sund like the female version. This is not comparable.
Sorry to hear that. For me it's the other way round. While I nearly always use the generic masculine form when speaking directly to others that never happened to me. Then again at work it's forbidden for me to gender in official postings since I did that once.
What I totally get is that online it's a totally different experience and no matter whether you gender or don't you may as well drop yourself into a vet of acid.
it was in real life and the person calling me out was a hardcore feminist. So yeah, the construction is being used to call out non-native speakers on their so-called ideological bias against feminists, or so it felt :s It weirded me out and continues to do so. To me it feels more inclusive to call everyone, male, female or non-binary, by one and the same word, instead of focussing on ones reproductive organs while talking about their profession or hobby or whatever.
Same in Spanish. We can say programadores (male gender plural form) to refer to a group of programmers, regardless of gender, as the standard says. However, in recent years it's become common to say programadores y programadoras (male plural and female plural) or programadoras y programadores (female plural and male plural). Using only the male gender causes many people to complain, or so I've heard.
Is "dokter" even a male word? What's the female version "dokterin","dokteres"?
The female version is Doktorin.
I'm dutch and didn't even know this was a thing, is it something that is common in Belgium?
Dokteres enkel in dialect hier, maar in lokaal dialect maken we de lidwoorden ook mannelijk/vrouwelijk.
Groot verschil tussen "de die" (vrouwelijk) en "den die" (mannelijk) om iemand aan te wijzen bijvoorbeeld.
Dokteres.
https://nl.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/dokteres
Directrice. Bazin.
Bedankt ik kende de term niet, maar blijkbaar ben ik (in Nederland) in de meerderheid
In onderzoek van het Centrum voor Leesonderzoek uit 2013 werd "dokteres" herkend door: 42 % van de Nederlanders; 85 % van de Vlamingen.[1]
Due to the increased acceptance of non-conforming identities, it's become more prevalent to either ask for pronouns, tell them to a person you meet, or have them somewhere visible in things like gameshows.
That's quite as silly to me as this whole "what gender is this washing machine" nonsense is to English-speaking people.
Here in Finland, we don't have gendered language. Even with third person pronouns, we usually default to "it" instead of "him/her/they". Except for pets. They always get the proper pronoun "hän". It's just respectful.
So yeah, just like the English wonder why they have to learn different words for something needlessly gendered in France, I too, as a Finn, wonder why I have to learn different words for something needlessly gendered in English.
Right or wrong, calling a person "it" in English is incredibly disrespectful
We could do with something though. 'Them' doesn't really cut it as it's not clear if it's plural or singular. 'It' is insulting.
If there was a good one, I'd just use it all the time for everyone. Why should gender be so important to identity? Isn't it a regression to be so hungup on gender?
Singular "They" is literally almost as old as the word "They" itself.
People have gotten by using it for almost 700 years.
Beyond the other reply about the history of the singular “they,” we also have another prominent plural pronoun we use in the singular all the time. So often we don’t even think about it as being plural anymore. So much so that we’ve created new plural versions of this already plural pronoun.
“You.”
“You” was originally the objective case plural 2nd person pronoun in English, with “ye” being the nominative.
But “thou” was considered informal, like the German “du” or the Spanish “tú,” and the plural 2nd person was used as the formal. And this eventually supplanted “thou” completely.
And now we think of “you” as singular to the point where we make slang words like “y’all” and “yous” to have a plural.
I think they maybe meant the gender neutral they/them, which we turn to "it" for the inanimate?
Edit: on second read I'm not sure
I do mean that we Finns use "se" very often in everyday speech to refer yo other human beings, and "se" would translate as "it."
Ofc I'm aware how horrible using "it" when referring yo people would be in English.
But if someone asked me to translate a sentence like "mihin se [a person] meni", I would ofc not use a direct translation because of how offensive and wrong it would be.
I respect the distinctions languages have for genders, but I'm happy I grew up with one which didn't have them. Language shapes thought. We don't think of people as "it", it's just the colloquial form of the language.
In Finnish, if you had to give a formal speech or something, most people realise to default to "hän", the 3rd person singular.
And if you're doing customer service or addressing someone with the sort of respect you'd use titles with in English. Then you'd address the person in the second person plural instead of the second person singular.
Just like English did hundreds of years ago, and it worked so well that in the end, English left the second person singular out of the language altogether. It still exists, but isn't really used unless thou wants to pretend being from Elizabethan Britain.
Which is why I never do, obviously.
This is one of those things that, if translated directly, would be really, really bad.
Now I've spoken English for more than a quarter century, so my mouths used to it already, but I remember when learning the language, it was rather hard for the brain to keep switching between "he" and "she", as it was not a distinction my brain had to make before using English.
I mean obviously I could differentiate women and men, but having to use different pronouns for both?
Quite needless.
Yeah I don't see anyone accepting being called "it" in English; that's how you refer to farm animals bound for slaughter or undesirable ethnicities you're going to exterminate.
Why would anyone ever want to try using "it" for people in English unless they're purposefully trying to demean someone.. ?
Sorry, I wasn't trying to say that's what English should do. I was describing what Finnish does.
I'm pointing out that lots of languages have less gender distinctions than English, so English calling French out on gendered nouns is rather silly.
My point is that despite Finland having a perfectly good third person singular for people, we usually use the even more general one, which is just for anything. Except when talking to and about pets, because then somehow everyone uses less colloquial language.
While English has a perfectly good second person singular, but doesn't even use it anymore.
You can't have more third person singulars before you finish your second person singulars, that's the rule. Now open up!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thou
The reason for that is because “se” as strictly a “thing” pronoun is artificial “book language”. When standard literary Finnish was being developed in the 19th century, its inventors wanted to have a person/thing distinction in pronouns like the “civilized” languages had, so they arbitrarily assigned “hän” as a person pronoun and “se” as a thing pronoun. That distinction is artificial, and has never stuck in spoken Finnish.
Originally there was a difference between “hän” and “se”, but it was grammatical: se was the general third person pronoun, hän referred back to the speaker (logophoric pronoun). Compare:
Tfw the washing machine is gender fluid
I believe women sometimes use them to aid in the release of gender fluid.
I tried this it doesn't work :(
Gotta use the dryer apparently
Why did my ex know this
You can use gender powder too
I use gender pods.
I hear that you can eat those.
Polish speaker here. We not only have gendered nouns but also verbs and adjectives.
Spanish speaker here. For as chaotic and wild as English is, I've always appreciated that it has no gendered nouns. Why are chairs female? Makes no sense
Dick in French is, you guessed it, female.
As are mustache and balls. Meanwhile, bra, vagina and boobs are male.
Don't tell Republicans
Maybe you are interested in Finnish. We do not have gendered pronouns either. Everyone is just "hän".
So you're saying Hän is Solo?
Hän man is Speedy
Hold my Duolingo owl, I'm gonna look up Finnish that sounds awesome
Can I keep it after that? I always wanted a pet.
Clearly, because chairs are obviously male (German). Anything else is just silly.
I'm sorry, French here, but a chair can be both. It depends of the type : Une chaise is obviously feminine while un siège or un fauteuil are definitely masculin. Also Germanic language like English and German mixing these two meaning are silly languages.
Why. Just why? It's just you French and your obsession for...
la silla vs el asiento (Spanish)
Fuck.
I think we just spotted a cultural fracture btw people of Romance language and the one of Germanic language.
Chairman, chairwoman, or chairperson?
Somone has to come up with the word chairdude. And some corporate bean counter will invent the word chairhuman to show how diverse they are.
Grammatical genders are just that. Grammatical. It's a classification scheme. Latin had neutral nouns and plenty of languages make grammatical differences between animate and inanimate nouns. That current romance languages make a deliberate division between "male" and "female" nouns does not mean they have to correspond to actual features of human beings.
That being said. It's ridiculous that agua is femenine but with the definite article it has to be el agua in singular but las aguas in plural. All the explanations by RAE simply amounts to "we like it this way, lolol".
polish speaker too, polish is weird smh
How does that work out? I mean in french you'd gender it by what it is defining. A yellow car, the "A" is gendered the same as the cars gender.
Oh.
I think I get it. That must be confusing for foreigners!
Cheers Polish brothers and sisters!
Nah. Having pronouns would be too easy. We are changing the end of the word. Yellow would be "żółty" if male, "żółta" if female and "żółte" if genderless or plural. Unless male plural, then it would be "żółci".
So a bit like French maybe, faché, fachée, fachés or fachées for example depending on gender and numbers.
While gendered nouns are stupid, I at least appreciate Italian because you can just learn the word and get its gender from the end part of the word. In German, however, it's completely random and you have to learn the gender with the word.
I don't know what you're on about. It's "die Waschmaschine" (washing machine, female), "das Waschmittel" (laundry detergent, neutral) and "der Trockner" (dryer, male).
Pretty self explanatory /s
I feel violated in 3 languages
And after going on Die Toilette (female toilet), you use Das Spulbecken (neutral washbasin) and stand in front of Der Spiegel (male mirror).
Despite accepting this all as perfectly normal, conservatives still manage to make a stink when someone writes or speaks in a way that addresses two different genders :-S
And then there's also the fabolous gender swap in the kitchen:
You walk into Die Küche(female kitchen) and after that you come out of Der Küche(male kitchen).
TIL In french, we have un amour, single form masculin that turn feminin in the plural form.
Das Mädchen (girl, neutral)
That's because of the so called "Dimitutiv". What it does is basically, it say that the object in queue is smaller version of it. Some examples:
Der Baum - Das Bäumchen
Der Junge - Das Jüngchen
It's always neutral. The original word is "Die Magd" and the Dimitutiv is Mädchen.
I know that, but that doesn't do much to un-confuse beginner speakers.
Also, das Mädchen is just a cute/small Made (maggot).
It's exactly the same in french, I wonder how closely the genders of random things align between the two languages.
To be fair most French words are like what you're describing in Italian. Why does German even have gendered nouns?
Damit andere Länder nichts verstehen können.
Länder:innen
Well that clears that up, thanks!
Portuguese and Spanish also have that, to a certain degree, but there are some "trap words", like mapa (map), which is masculine, and a number of words that don't end with a/o to easily guess.
And words that are feminine but are still used with 'el' and 'un' because they start with a stressed a
A washing machine is obviously female because doing laundry is a thing for women.
And now I will sit back and watch how many people get mad at me because they don't understand sarcasm.
Really getting worked up over that imaginary person you created huh? Lol
To be fair if he hadn't invented the imaginary person to be offended for, someone else would have
No. It's feminine because you put dirty things in it.
EDIT: I'm going to get lynched by the hyper vigilant with you. We're in this together now.
Not knowing anything about French, this was my assumption and reasoning.
Is sarcasm male, female, neutral, or other?
male: Der Sarkasmus
You already stated sarcasm and this is Lemmy, so whatever popcorn you expect must come from the floor
intentionally misreading as wholesome - the idea is to subvert the concept of gender.
"You'll never be a real woman!"
"Neither will the chair I'm sitting in but you keep calling it 'her' so maybe stfu."
Die Waschmaschine die
So it's a girl?
Die Maschine. So yes all machines are girls /s
We also don't have 13 different words for I (glances at Japan)
Not the worst example for Japanese. The verb kakeru 掛ける is very common and has ~25 different meanings. This is before you count the other verbs also pronounced as kakeru such as 翔ける、賭ける etc
How many definitions does the English word "set" have?
And “get”!
Yeah but we win, we Can Say "putain" in any situation. It will Always work.
C'est une putain de bonne idée pour apprendre ce putain de langage, putain
It can be argued that most of the different meanings arise from different contexts and how the speakers associate that particular word to different uses. When an English speaker uses the word save, it can mean either "save a person from danger", "save a computer file", and many others, which can have different meaning-translations to other languages.
Cough, Though, Through (+ Threw), Thorough, Rough, Thought, Ought, Tough.
Don't forget trough!
die das der
Silencio
Nein
wer wie was 🎶
den dem des
Non-neutral nouns have always struck me as odd. They provide no info gain whatsoever outside of actually providing a gender if you're referring to a person or animal (for example, in Spanish, gato -> male cat, gata -> female cat). And in those situations, a short sentence can provide instant clarification if needed in a non-gendered language like English.
It's a language feature built to be helpful in one use case, whilst simultaneously being worse in about a bazillion others. It's a very odd choice.
There's an argument to be made that it might help clarifying when speaking to someone. Consider these two German sentences:
Imagine a noisy environment, a quiet speaker or some other problem and you only understand
In a language like English, you don't have enough information to understand the meaning. The German gender system helps to direct your possible matching words (Ampel or Apfel) to the correct one, as "Die rote Apfel" is grammatically incorrect.
Another point I want to make is that it isn't "being worse in about a bazillion other" use cases. Native speakers don't really have an issue with noun class systems. It's just very unintuitive and tedious for non-native language learners to memorize all the genders of nouns.
I'd like to interject for a bit, if I may.
While german has cases, somewhat more complex verbs and gendered nouns, english also has its peculiarities that make it hard for non-natives to learn. Things like spelling and using the same word in a bazillion contests and methaphor-based idioms come to mind first. There are also simple-to-understand pecularities like its/it's and paid/payed which not even natives get right sometimes.
The point being, for all the "hard" and "useless" parts of one language the other language (as it's always comomparing apoles to oranges) has similarily "hard" and "useless" features itself, so in my opinion it more or less evens out.
What makes a language "easier" or "harder" to learn is how much of it you already know. In other words that's usually how similar it is to the languages you know already.
That doesn't mean that a language can't have more pointlessly convoluted things than another language. For example, counting in French.
I mostly agree. Sorry if it came out that way, but my comment was not meant to be stating that English is way easier than German. Just wanted to point out that this "hard" and "useless" feature is not that useless and only hard for language learners.
And then there's the different ways to connect verbs in English.
There aren't rules for that, as far as I know. Just very fuzzy guidelines at best. And word stress is pretty random too. Both of those things can be tricky for non-native speakers.
And why did we in school made listening comprehensions for English where you would need to understand people speaking in the middle of a construction side next to a heavy used road?
I mean even in German I wouldn't have understood them but I got an bad grade because I didn't understand it in English.
Wait until you hear that sometimes we can use both pronoums with some words but not others.
We can say "el mar" the(male) sea, or "la mar" the(female) sea. But you would never say "la oceano" it's only "el oceano" the(male) ocean.
Germany has three genders lmao
Of course! Hitler proved all right wing Germans are pussies with dicks.
Only three genders? They need to get with the times.
Technically so
doesdid English, we just stopped usingthe male gendered pronoun sometime in the Renaissance, Early Modern Period, or Victorian Period, I don't know when.a ton of freaking words that I got mixed up back in Old EnglishBack in Shakespeare's day, woman = female, man = gender neutral, (kinda like the word "Dude" it can be used for both women and wifmen,) and finally wifman = male.Still not sure why the male gendered pronoun fell out of common parlance.Haven't read Shakespeare in 2 decades, sorry.
Shakespeare was known to use archaic language for his plays but by his time this was largely codified into what we would recognize as modern usage. You are thinking of old English. It also goes beyond just man (used more or less like we would use the word human) , other gendered words originally had specific meaning independent of gender. You also got it a bit backwards. Wifman is female, wereman is male. Others include.
Boy : knave or troublemaker
Girl : Neutral word for young child. Basically like "kid"
Thanks! No wonder his plays were so hard to read. I haven't read Shakespeare in a good 20 years so it's no surprise that I've mixed up the words and usages.
He is an interesting literary figure. And in personal opinion quite frankly kind of a hack. You got to appreciate the audacity of someone who tries to use "Dost" nearly two centuries out of date and then just out of the blue makes up wholesale complete words from scratch to fit iambic pentameter.
I love his stuff don't get me wrong but he wasn't exactly highbrow entertainment of his day. Still his early modern English is easily legible. Chaucer's middle english is distinctly more garbled and if you go back to your Old English where these terms originate it's like trying to read another language entirely. Like this is technically English :
Hwæt. We Gardena in geardagum, þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon, hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon. Oft Scyld Scefing sceaþena þreatum, monegum mægþum, meodosetla ofteah, egsode eorlas. Syððan ærest wearð feasceaft funden, he þæs frofre gebad, weox under wolcnum, weorðmyndum þah, oðþæt him æghwylc þara ymbsittendra ofer hronrade hyran scolde, gomban gyldan. þæt wæs god cyning.
are you sure you're not thinking of wǣpnedmann? everything I can find about wifman tells me that it means "woman" and the root derivation is "wife person".
Someone else corrected me, I was thinking of wereman. Haven't read Shakespeare in a couple decades
TIL the etymology of how we talk about shapeshifters in folk myth. Dope, thank you!
"Working late one night in the lab, Guy Fellows was bitten by a radioactive human being. Now he seems like an ordinary person, but under the full moon he undergoes a transformation and become a wereman! All the powers of an adult male human, trapped inside the frail shell of an adult male human, he is Wereman!"
around 900 ad.
Dutch even has non-binary words.
I call bullshit on this, e.g. "de aanrecht" sounds just plain wrong. I know that people in the Netherlands are often using the wrong gender, which always sounds weird to me.
Words that change meaning with different genders (e.g. "de aas" and "het aas") are kinda cool tho.
Most gendered languages I know about have three genders. Oh, wait. I got it. Ha!
is that like how you have to memorize every single articels (der, die, das) for every word in german?
Exactly, gendered langage. But French has only two genders, no neutral like German. And the washing machine is a Lady, any machine btw :)
But at least pronunciation is mostly consistent.
In English two words can be written almost exactly the same but sound wildly different.
Looking at you, words with "ough"
And then there's the wars about der/die/das Nutella :>
I don't know about French, but in Spanish is feminine.
Also feminine in French: "la machine à laver"
La Lavadora El Lavarropas
Depende la expresión mi buen hispanohablante, y de la zona.
Uh? I'm Portuguese and it works in the same in my language. I don't know what the big deal is. You get the gender by the arti...
Oh...
crying in German
Disclaimer: this is terrible advice if you are trying to actually learn the proper grammar, don’t follow it.
That being said, you can get by in everyday situations perfectly fine using "De" for anything, especially if you have a foreign accent people will forgive you.
De junge, de Mädchen, de Baby, de Tisch, de Stuhl, de Feuerzeuggas-Nachfüllkartusche. People will understand.
That's so true. Or just guess. Like, for real, no one cares. Besides your Goethe Institute examiner. Das Tisch, die Mädchen, der Banane. Doesn't matter. My father has awful, awful German, despite living here for 35ish years, and his whole job is communicating with people and he made a huge career despite having no clue of grammar and buying sweet red Erdbeben in the supermarket.
I also adore foreigners from different countries speaking in completely broken German to one another and somehow being able to figure out what the other one was saying and having a blast. Admittedly, with the rise of English, this has become much rarer. But it just shows you that language is so much more than just grammar and vocabulary.
I love me some sweet red earthquakes
Female, and I am sure there hides a boomer joke here
I'm countering with a lave-linge which is masculine, now where's the boomer joke?
Say what you will, exam nightmares are real
I'm trying to figure out why I keep having dreams where I find out I somehow accidentally didn't finish high school and have to go back to finish it to validate my college degree, but I didn't go to class all year and I'm trying to figure out how I can pass.
https://youtu.be/vGhS4QSVOck?si=7G3RM_tMzhvOpkZF
It's been a while, but I used to have a dream where I was in high school like I didn't finish, but I would realize I had already graduated and gone to college. I was extra confused until my mind said I could just fuck with those high school classes and do whatever.
"Spell 'colonel.' Remember to sound it out."
Cologneal
which in turn is kalogneil
English is incredibly easy. My mother tongue is Russian and I'm learning German, both have genders... which are quite often different. That makes things even harder :D
oh, that's so easy! It's both, depending how you translate it: une machine à laver or un lave-linge.
What exactly does gender achieve in a language? Is English missing out on any nuance? Is it literally thinking about nouns as male or female, or is it just a weird name for the concept? Who decides gender when a new noun is made? What about borrowed words from other languages? Do you sound stupid if you speak French without using it, or are you just a language hipster?
Language, dude...
I'm not an expert. But I believe it is something to do with information redundancy.
If you mishear a word but surrounding words must match gender and number, you may reconstruct the misheard word.
As a native spanish speaker, I don't think of the actual sexuality of objects, it's just a characteristic of the word that should match other words in the sentence. For example the word screen (pantalla) is femenine, and the word monitor (monitor) is masculine. So when I see my monitor I don't think of an actual female or male object. But the nouns should match adjectives gender, so if someone says "broken monitor" (monitor roto) or "broken screen" (pantalla rota) I have this kind of redundancy if I misheard a word.
But I'm not an expert of linguistics. Don't quote me.
This sounds right. I think it’s just a hint for listeners for what the noun might be, and it happens to align to the male/female genders.
Sort of. Grammatical gender and the interplay with grammatical case (the "role" of a noun in a sentence) allows some extra meaning to be packed in. For example, German has 3 genders and 4 cases leading to 12 different contexts for nouns to be in. Many of those have their own conjugation patterns, and separate words for the articles "a/the".
That can, theoretically, allow meaning of the type "whose what did what to whom" to be obvious or pieced together in a sentence, whereas translating it into English you might need to spell it out, lose it, or rely on context.
In practice, a lot of that sort of information is often redundant or clear from context anyway, and only matters if you're being clever or succinct. My German is shit, so I will not try to provide examples.
It's also worth pointing out that it's a naturally occurring feature, likely arisen by accident.
It is mostly just a weird name. Some of it makes sense along (social) gender lines, much of it makes no sense at all. This thread is full of good examples of counterintuitive noun genders in all kinds of languages.
The speakers of the language, collectively, usually with some disagreement, trial and error. Borrowing depends: a gendered noun borrowed into a non-gendered language would just slip in there. In the reverse case, people would just arrive at some gender for it arbitrarily or based on similar words, what gender any "parts" of the term might be if translated, or whatever other method. There's no correct answer.
Quite likely. There's no "without it" in gendered languages, it is a more or less fundamental part of the noun and the language, like how certain nouns and verbs are just different in English. Dropping random grammar and syntax from English would just be "doing it wrong", ranging from cute foreign accent quirks to Ralph Wiggum's cave-dwelling ancestor.
Of course, fucking up is unavoidable when learning languages, and most people will give you a lot of leeway due to being foreign. Maybe not everywhere in France, though...
Gender from french genre, latin genus, means category and that's all it is, a category system, with confusing category names and no real rules for which word belongs to which category. There's nothing masculine, feminine or neuter about words, nothing "sexual" or whatever, otherwise every person would be a woman because the word for person (from latin persona) is feminine in a lot of european languages, or French and German people would have to think really different about stuff like tables because in French it's "feminine" and in German it's "masculine". Btw, looking at English adjectives with French origin they almost always are the feminine version, like feminine or masculine. Some people think there is a hidden sexual meaning though and they come up with lots of different systems for gender neutral language, stuff like latinx.
Speaking as a gendered language user (Italian) it is sometimes weird.
For example, car is feminine but our name for an off-road vehicle is masculine, as is the word for truck. Since you have to apply the gender of the noun to verbs, articles and adjectives, which one do you use when talking about your SUV? Feminine because it's a car or masculine because it's an offroader?
For borrowed words there's usually a consensus on gender that forms over time. Sometimes a borrowed word inherits its gender from the translation of that word that fell out of use. One example of this could be the word computer. An equivalent term exists in Italian (calcolatore) which fell out of use but gave it a definite gender, masculine.
Thet's why fuck cars.
In Russian bus is "musculine". It fucks cars too.Russian speakers might say the same thing about things that exist in English but not Russian like articles (the words "a"/"an" and "the"), Afrikaans speakers may say the same thing about verb conjugation at all, Chinese speakers may say the same thing about tense, Japanese speakers may say the same thing about having a separate present & future tense. There is a good explanation here or two already, but language features that seem "useless" or "complex" to us are important in other languages and are there for a purpose. Every language has features that would make others question it.
You sound odd, like a child or someone not fluent if you don't use our misuse the genders of words.
That being said, as native Spanish that lived in the UK for a while, I noticed that genders and verb forms are useful for providing more context when talking.
Cannot think of specific examples now, but in general in a phrase if you don't hear a word or don't know the meaning, it is easier to guess it because the rest of the phrase is constructed around the gender and more complex verbal forms.
on borrowing we can look at nouns borrowed into Spanish. They take the word change any sounds in native language to match Spanish sounds. Then they just slap on a gender ending. Yes it just what ever catches on. Which means we could have lived in world with potata.
Civilization if the Spanish used 'potata':
As a native speaker of a language with grammatical gender (Croatian; I've also learned Russian and a bit of German)...
In Slavic languages it serves as an additional syntactic "connector" between words. Masculine nouns are accompanied by masculine forms of adjectives, feminine by feminine, etc. (Other than adjectives, this also applies to pronouns, some numbers and verbs.) This isn't necessary for successful communication, but it can somewhat reduce ambiguity and, along with other trickier parts of grammar such as cases, allows for quite a bit of freedom in how a sentence can be organised. English can be limited in that regard, with its stricter rules on word order, although its lack of grammatical gender is not the most significant factor.
It's more of a name, true. There are prototypical words and situations where grammatical gender really is the same as biological sex (e.g. when referring to specific real people - just as you'd call a woman 'she' in English, so do you have to use feminine adjectives when referring to her), and that relationship is, for the sake of simplicity, projected onto the entirety of nouns in the language.
In Slavic languages, it's really simple because the noun endings usually correspond to gender. There are exceptions and, so to say, "subsystems" within the general system, and there can be changes in how that system works, but the point is that it's based on a set of rules that speakers do know intuitively.
German doesn't have such a clear system of genders that is visible within each word (the endings usually don't tell you anything useful; if the noun ends on 'e' it's relatively likely it's feminine, but that's about it, as far as I know). Yet, interestingly enough, there was an experiment where native Germans were provided with made-up words, and were asked to determine their gender. The majority of people agreed on their choices. So, clearly German does have some rules and procedures to determine gender, even if they're opaque.
Same as above. I can provide some illustrative examples if you want?
I tried to imagine some sentences of that sort in Croatian, with incorrect genders, and it doesn't sound outright stupid, just odd. Some situations allow for some leeway in choice of gender too, and natives can make mistakes if they don't think too clearly which word they intend to use, and none of that is especially bothersome to a native's ear.
English weirdly use feminine for ships, so think of it like that. But no it doesn't achieve much.
I don't think it change the way we think about objects much, but probably unconsciously yes. For example, France itself is feminine and seeing some caricature personifying as a dude always feels weird.
Usage dictates the gender. And some recent words are more or less controversial: gameboy, wifi, COVID, Nutella...
When I think about the gender of a word I will usually derive it from a broader category. But that's not always obvious, for example Gameboy is a game console (feminine) but the words game and boy are masculine. COVID is a disease (feminine) but also a virus (masculine). And in the meme a washing machine is a machine (feminine).
You can't not use gender since french doesn't have neutral pronouns. But I don't think it's frowned upon for a non native speaker to make this kind of mistakes.
Old English used gender, and there are a few vestiges of it left in modern English. A couple adjectives can still use it (blond man, blonde woman), and a few nouns are still in use (actor vs actress). Some of those nouns have basically fallen out of use in the last few decades, like how pretty much no one uses comedienne anymore.
The only way to know for sure is to ask the washing machine how it identifies
This shit again...
Why are you so hung up on "gender"? Just replace it with "group" and you'll find the exact same situation in almost all languages.
In Swedish words are not gendered. But to specify the singular we use one of two groups. En or ett. It can be a word before what you want to specify. Or a suffix.
En banan, (a banana) Banan-en, (the banana)
Or perhaps.
Ett körsbär, (a cherry) Körsbär-et, (the cherry)
It's just one if two groups. Has nothing to do with gender. But if you really want to, we can pretend it's gendered because it doesn't matter. It's gonna be one or the other regardless.
Now tell me. How is this different from "gendered" languages? And as a bonus. There is NO rule regarding which to use when. You just have to know.
The question remains, why does there need to be two groups? Why can't everything just be "en" or "ett"? What does having both get you in Swedish that having only one does not?
What does "a" or "an" give you in English? It's mostly historical and because it flows better.
Because äpplet means "the apple" while äpplen means "apples".
Because it's how the language works. Why do we have many, lots, large ammonts of words that all mean the same thing? Me myself and I don't really care because they are ways to express ourselves in different ways depending on what we want to convey, and how we choose to do so.
Gender often comes along with cases, which basically show you what role a noun is playing in a sentence. For example, is someone doing something, or is something being done to them. That lets you change the word order and keep the same meaning. You can emphasize different parts of the sentence, or just be more flexible with how you say things.
Here's an example from German:
In English, the meaning changes when you change the word order.
Languages do fine with genders and without. They're just different systems that happened to evolve over time. And languages can even change. English used to have 3 genders, but they disappeared hundreds of years ago. Instead of having like 12 different ways to say "the," we just have one, thanks to the Vikings and the Norman invaders.
I think the point is that it's annoying to memorize regardless of language and it's not like genders always make sense in other languages either. It is funnier with genders though.
Das Mädchen (the girl) is neutral in German. lol
It's like this in almost every language. You don't have to memorize it. You have to learn it. You will learn it by speaking the language.
I think it's mostly native English speakers that complain because everything is just "the" and the rule to a and an is very simple.
You can tell me a word in Swedish I've never heard before. But i will instinctively know if it's an "en" or "ett" word. How? I don't even know. One just feels more right than the other.
I think it's the fact that those groups are the gender groups that is causing the frustration. If it's arbitrary, why did it have to be the same system we use to classify organisms and personal identities?
It's not completely arbitrary, and the overwhelming majority of nouns are "en", so it's not too complicated to remember the "ett" words, but yeah...
For some reason I always think the "-en" suffix sounds very cute
The baguette, croissant, and beret are killing me.
I'll help you.
The word "machine" in French is... "machine", yeah it's spelled exactly the same. Just pronounce it a lot more like French (stress falls on the 1st syllable instead of the 2nd). Oh, and it's feminine, which gives you "une machine".
Washing in French is "laver". In French, there's this thing called "complément de nom", where you add a noun to another noun to make a compound noun. However, there must be a preposition in between, and each compound noun has its own preposition, which means, you gotta learn them by heart (like the phrasal verbs in English except the meaning is actually related to the word).
In the case of this word, you'd use the preposition "à". You will end up with "une machine à laver", which translates literally to "a machine to wash".
Yeah, languages are complicated.
Someone once told me everything is feminine unless it has something to do with power or industry.
So, what I am hearing is:
La washing machine = washing machine
Le washing machine = industrial washing machine
"machine (à laver)" is feminine and it seems to have something to do with power or industry
I think in that context it's a tool to be used so it doesn't qualify.
Spanish enters the room: words have gender, but there are special cases where the definite article switches gender.
"El hacha roja/Las hachas rojas", "El agua fría/Las aguas frías"
Also, some words may have both genders:
"El computador/La computadora"
If it ends with an 'e' it's probably feminine. Moustache is feminine. There's a handful of exceptions that are easy to remember
I can think of arbre, casque, peintre, socle, téléphone, meuble... There is no rule at all.
Un membre, un cadre, un sabre, un coffre, un sceptre, un mètre...
So moustaches are feminine?
And vaginas are masculine, just how Lemmy likes it.
Interesting. In Spanish, I believe moustache is masculine and beards are feminine.
It's neuter in greek, even though "machine" is feminine, cause the greek word is like "washer" instead of "washing machine". Although I think you have better things to ponder about when writing greek.
Namely, when the hell did I learn Greek?
We put it in your brain while you were sleeping last night.
Don't worry, we'll take it out later. We just needed someplace to store it for a bit.
Is it female?
It depend.
"Machine à laver" (washing machine) = female
"Lave linge" (laundry washer) = male
Yes.
Me as a German wondering if it's the same or different than in my language.
What gender is it in German?
That's a glol for me.
I'd argue though that it's ultimately similar levels of complexity. Because sure in romance languages you need to know (and probably just "get" what gender objects are. But in English you need to remember/just "get" which words have "i before e" (because the "rule" is utter trash), and all the inconsistent pronunciation of similarly spelt words.
Most European languages with accented vowels (and some with accented other letters too) have a pretty consistent pronunciation (when the accented letters are used).
English speakers have to just memorize that spelling bullshit and we get it wrong constantly.
But the real kicker is the Order of Adjectives. This doesn't help with understanding and the meaning in unchanged but no one actually knows the time without being told it exists. But we all follow it and know when it's broken. It makes sentences just feel wrong.
The order of adjectives are really not set rules. It is merely convention.
A much better example is the use of propositions. For example look up, look on, look out, and look into all mean completely different things.
maybe the problem is the concept of a language exam
German wants a word.
Swahili with its eighteen noun classes strides above it all like an eldritch god
It can take as many as it pleases
Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz
Romance fans will tell you the French language is the adoration of beauty.
The British will tell you that the french taste for beauty is the same as their taste for cheese: it stinks.
do you trust the British though?
Considering their world renowned taste in cuisine, not really.