Is there a point in nouns having a gender? I was always told it removes confusion, ironically the opposite is true for me anyway.
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Anonymous2010-02-28 7:11
There's really no point.
Nouns in languages such as Japanese, English, Finnish, Turkish, Mandarin Chinese, Malay and Korean do just fine without being gendered and without being mistaken for any other part of speech.
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Anonymous2010-02-28 16:04
No. It only helps to know the gender of a person, but who cares.
Like if someone says "my friend" don't know the friends gender, but with "mi amigo" you know the gender of the friend. But it isn't too important. It's no really that big of a deal.
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Anonymous2010-02-28 18:32
It's really just another way to make things more complicated, like mandatory tenses for verbs or nouns that must be singular or plural. Mark of an unrefined language.
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Anonymous2010-02-28 18:53
I think to some extent the point is disambiguation while allowing for a greater flexibility in word order. At least in Latin, a lot of the poetry (especially by that fucker Catullus) has the most insane word order that without matched genders and cases of adjectives+nouns simply wouldn't make any sense. Or at least couldn't guarantee it's going to make the sense the author had intended. Having said that, as >>2 said, languages do just fine without it at the cost of more strict rules determining word order. This is especially true of Chinese, much moreso than Finnish; Finnish still maintains a complex albeit logical case structure which allows adj+noun matching. This is also why Chinese poetry is a bitch to translate, it gets very ambiguous and unclear very quickly.
I personally think gendering nouns is generally silly and only workable when words comply and without fail to a series of clear rules. Latin didn't manage to do this properly though, with a bunch of genders and then declensions and then the exceptions thrown on top of that. Even Esperanto, a completely constructed language couldn't figure out a comprehensive and foolproof way of doing it - whether that demonstrates a failure in the concept of gendering nouns or just the execution is up to you though.
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Anonymous2010-03-01 3:38
>>5
Esperanto didn't attempt to gender nouns in gen[d]eral, did it? Just pronouns and a feminine suffix on some job names, right?
Esperanto kind of attempted to avoid gendering but in the most half-arsed apathetic way possible and still hence ended up with genders. If that makes sense. My understanding of it, and I don't speak Esperanto so I could be very wrong here, is that all nouns were assumed male (at least historically) and the suffix is added to transform it into feminine.
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>>7
That seems correct, based on what I know. Esperanto didn't choose to gender nouns, although Zamenhof still created an underclass of nouns to refer to females holding jobs because lolpatriarchy. But I would say that this is different from a language having noun genders—it's not like lilacs are male, as in some languages I could mention. It's purely a waiter/waitress kind of thing, and doesn't even apply to animals (although there is a word for hen, its tail also appears in anti-freeze, so I don't think it's gender-specific...). Esperanto only genders in cases where it is a meaningful (if discriminatory) concept, so I wouldn't say it did end up with genders, although its success at avoiding them isn't as as great as that of, say, lojban.
The root of the problem is that gender is a nonsensical concept for things which are neither sentient nor representation thereof. Any gender system is doomed to fail if it applies genders to things which don't have them.
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Anonymous2010-03-01 18:47
I think arguing whether a grammatical feature X "makes sense" is moot, because all natural languages will always have something that non-native learners might consider superfluous. Keep in mind that these funny little quirks often make for great jokes because they are so nuanced.
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Anonymous2010-03-01 18:59
>doesn't even apply to animals
actually does, even cockroaches have a female form believe it or not.
>Any gender system is doomed to fail if it applies genders to things which don't have them.
Going to have to disagree with that part. Yes, it makes more sense if you apply genders to things that can actually have genders, but it's not absolutely necessary. If you think of it as just another arbitrary language rule as a way of disambiguating elements in a sentence and making pronouns, adjectives, etc. clearer in what they are intended to be associated with: it actually makes a lot of sense. The mistake I believe that has been made is associating this essentially arbitrary rule (lilacs having a gender, for example) with genders in the first place. Replace the name with something else and you have a perfectly viable ruleset.
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Anonymous2010-03-01 22:38
>>11 actually does, even cockroaches have a female form believe it or not.
Are you sure? I can't find it in any dictionaries.
Replace the name with something else and you have a perfectly viable ruleset.
Do you like Klingon? Nouns are declined according to whether they are capable of speech, are a body part, or neither.
I'm not convinced of the value of arbitrarily declining nouns though. You clutter the available phonetic space and make words harder to memorize, just to get a syntactic distinction that could be made perfectly clear otherwise? Not to mention the difficulty of selecting a wise set of categories.
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Anonymous2010-03-02 0:05
>>10
>moot
look what i can do ðððððÐÐÐС¿¿¿çßðßðåééñ
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Anonymous2010-03-06 14:55
>>1
The exactly same point to mark genitive with 's (like English),
Have phonemic tones (like Mandarin),
or conjugate verbs+substantives (like Russian).
There's no point in no one of them. And yet, they exist.
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Anonymous2010-03-06 15:53
>>14 There's no point in no one of them The exactly same point to mark genitive with 's (like English)
The point: Since of-constructions tend to be very cumbersome, the 's genitive is needed to make sentences sound smoother. "John's mom's boyfriend" is easier and less formal than "The boyfriend of the mom of John". If you've studied other Germanic languages (e.g. Swedish), you can even see that the 's genitives (-s in Swedish) and of-constructions (av in Swedish) have different nuances and are not interchangeable (as they aren't even in English, come to think of it).
Have phonemic tones (like Mandarin)
The point: It disambiguates the vocabulary of a whole language. If Chinese didn't have tones you would quite literally be unable to tell a horse from a toilet brush. And that would make for many an embarrassing situation.
conjugate verbs+substantives (like Russian).
The point: Unlike gendered nouns, verb and noun conjugations contain plenty of relevant information in them. Knowing that a table is a she is not as nearly as important as knowing that this person did that to those. In the case of Russian, noun cases determine the meaning of the individual words in a sentence, and so it is vital to the entire structure of the language.
If we start to point out that this and that grammatical construction doesn't make any sense or "has no point", then we might as well throw even relatively simple grammar out the window, since some languages could do just fine without a lot of the things that are vital to other languages: Japanese and Korean, for example, lack plural markers for inanimate nouns. "What's the use of the plural then? What a stupid construction. Languages work even without it."
Also, none of the grammatical constructions you listed there are hardly comparable to gendered nouns, whose existence really doesn't make a difference, no matter how you look at it. They don't affect the meaning of the words in the language in any way, unlike tones and conjugations and 's genitives.
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Anonymous2010-03-06 18:31
>>15 "What's the use of the plural then? What a stupid construction. Languages work even without it."
Agreed. What kind of stupid language requires every noun to be marked singular or plural and every verb to have a tense?
Why are you even arguing the point of stuff that occurs in languages naturally?
There could be a way to rationalize everything that occurs in a given language, sure, but in the end, for an aspect of a language that's deeply and inextricably ingrained in the grammar of that language and has actual basis in that language's natural evolution, no one person ever thought to themselves "oh, let's add gender to our nouns for this reason" and forced everyone else to do so.
OK. Try this text:
"I took an egg and a spoon. They where both very clean. Then I hit the table with it."
With what did I hit the table? Without gender you can't say, you have to use former/latter.
In languages with noun genders it is much easier like:
"I took [it] egg and [she] spoon. They where both very clean. Then I hit [he] table with HER." (the spoon).
This can be done with other grammatical feature that some languages have, not only genders... proximative pronouns.
Faking it in English:
"I took an egg and a spoon. They where both very clean. Then I hit the table with it1."
"It1" refers to the first of both, the egg. So you hit with the egg.
"I took an egg and a spoon. They where both very clean. Then I hit the table with it2."
"It2" refers to the second term, the spoon. So you hit with the spoon.
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Anonymous2010-03-12 8:27
protip: don't assume that genders are retarded if you learned them from german
german has them in the most uneasy way where gender never can be guessed from word's appearance which leaves you no way but memorizing them separately.
russian has genders logically, they depend on how the word ends, and if you change the ending then gender changes too. exceptions are rare, and are colloquially ignored (e.g. кофе is correctly masculine, but since it sounds like it's neuter most people conjugate it like neuter, i think recent reform has made it official).
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Anonymous2010-03-12 8:28
>>21 "I took an egg and a spoon. They where both very clean. Then I hit the table with it."
It's ambiguous, you're right, and that's why no one would ever say it that way in languages without gender nouns. Instead, in natural English for example, you'd say "I took an egg and a spoon. They where both very clean. Then I hit the table with the egg."
Also, what if you had a turnip [she] and spoon [she] instead?
"I took [she] turnip and [she] spoon. They where both very clean. Then I hit [he] table with HER."
The ambiguity would be back.
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Anonymous2010-03-12 8:54
>>24
We need more noun classes then, like Bantu languages have. Maybe even have them together with genders, so that a noun can have a gender and a class (even though gender is a class too, I'm just being gender-centric).
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Anonymous2010-03-12 9:36
>>25
Or then, instead of complicating things unnecessarily, you could just mention the noun again.
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Anonymous2010-03-12 13:57
>>26
Just repeat? It's easy with short words, but... think in this example:
"I took an Low Orbit Ion Cannon and an Auto-Refresh HTML Page. They were both to attack AnT. Them I hit AnT with it."
Just repeat. You will NOT do this because both names are long. So, you use a pronoun instead.
Using noun classes would change dramatically English structure, but proximative pronouns would just add two or three words. I suggest:
it - last name (in this case, AnT)
ille /ajl/ - second-to-last.
illo /ajlow/ - third to last.
Now, look:
"I took an Low Orbit Ion Cannon and an Auto-Refresh HTML Page. They were both to attack AnT. Them I hit AnT with ille."
Because "ille" refers to second-to-last term, which is Auto-Refresh HTML Page, the ambiguity goes out :D
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Anonymous2010-03-12 14:12
>>27
One can say:
"I took an Low Orbit Ion Cannon and an Auto-Refresh HTML Page. They were both to attack AnT. Them I hit AnT with the latter."
Every language works in a perfect way once you use it properly...
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Anonymous2010-03-12 15:56
Here is >21.
For me genders in nouns add some special cultural and emotional twist to common words. My native is Polish so we have genders for everything and sometimes to word with different gender for the same thing. The gender in nouns gives described objects also some property. It is quite often that masculine objects are less harder, more dangerous or just uglier than feminine ones. It separates the whole word in two categories plus who neutral objects. We got feminine hen and masculine rooster plus neutral egg because it can become either. We got feminine birch and feminine willow but masculine oak, because of it hard wood as opposed to former two. We got even feminine mouse and masculine rat. It really is much more than practical use. It is the whole concept of universe. It gives something like a soul to every object and a lot more.
For me English sound a little sexist. It is because in its structure seems to be coded a vision of the world in which everything which is of male, hard, strong and active is good and worthy of praise, as opposed to female.
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Anonymous2010-03-12 16:52
>>27
Now that is very... unnatural, to say the least. Also, English doesn't work that way (so seconding >>28's sentiments).
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Anonymous2010-03-12 17:58
>>29 For me English sound a little sexist. It is because in its structure seems to be coded a vision of the world in which everything which is of male, hard, strong and active is good and worthy of praise, as opposed to female.
But English nouns don't have gender.
>>32
I am a heterosexual male so your detections are kind of stupid. >>31
But it has a man which means male and also human kind. And wo-man which is like a word built around a word man. It seems like in English woman is kind of like someone who failed at becoming a man, so it is only addition to man.
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Anonymous2010-03-13 9:31
Backing up >>29. While English doesn't have gendered nouns, the language is more geared towards a 'masculine is good, feminine is bad' attitude. It's hard to explain to some who hasn't studied it, but there's a tonne of research on it.
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Anonymous2010-03-13 10:03
>>34 the language is more geared towards a 'masculine is good, feminine is bad' attitude
How so?
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Anonymous2010-03-13 11:12
Someone whose native language is English can't even see it as it is hard for people speaking other Germanic languages as native languages. It is just that when you learn English then you start to wonder why there is this title "The Descent of Man" and not "The Descent of Human" which is also a little sexist as it is hu-man. I can't for example understand feminism because it is based on English culture. For example problem of work in womens live. In my country there was no division between working men and houseworking women until XX-tieth century. In past it was just that poor people worked and rich just did things they liked no matter what gender. I see the same pattern in Japanese where words describing family relations are biased in favor of men and sons and it is like women where just some king of utility to help men. I watch a lot of Japanese movies and tv dramas and it sometimes makes me sick to see how it is natural for Japanese to think that men should work for their own interest and women should back them up in their pursuits. In my culture it was more like women and children are inside of interest and men are to work from outside and make sure that they are safe. I know it is not perfect arrangement and it is largely gone by now but it seems that is one of the causes why feminism is so weak in Poland and it is mostly stated against Roman Catholic Church as a this institution which promotes the more western vision of man-woman relation, but not even as radical as Protestant-Germanic male-centered vision.
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Anonymous2010-03-13 15:03
>>28
This works, too. You're using "the latter" as a pronoun, BTW.
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Anonymous2010-03-13 18:50
>>36 In my culture it was more like women and children are inside of interest and men are to work from outside and make sure that they are safe.
So your culture exhibits the same patriarchal tendencies you're objecting to in English. I notice you also mention traditional gender roles being embedded in your language itself: It is quite often that masculine objects are less harder, more dangerous or just uglier than feminine ones. It separates the whole word in two categories plus who neutral objects. We got feminine hen and masculine rooster plus neutral egg because it can become either. We got feminine birch and feminine willow but masculine oak, because of it hard wood as opposed to former two. We got even feminine mouse and masculine rat. It really is much more than practical use. It is the whole concept of universe. It gives something like a soul to every object and a lot more.
I'm the first to agree that gender-neutral language is a good thing. It's true that English is a little sexist, but so are most languages. Certainly I would say English is less sexist as a whole than a language that encodes gender identities in its nouns. The language is less sexist than its average speaker.
It is just that when you learn English then you start to wonder why there is this title "The Descent of Man" and not "The Descent of Human" which is also a little sexist as it is hu-man.
You're confusing Latin borrowings through Old French with the word “man”. English is not a philosophical language, and not every word with the syllable “man” in it involves the same concept. Uses of man to mean mankind are older than its use to mean a male human. It's unfortunate that it got co-opted to refer to males (which speaks volumes about the medieval mindset).
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Anonymous2010-03-13 21:39
>>38
>You're confusing Latin borrowings through Old French with the word “man”. English is not a philosophical language, and not every word with the syllable “man” in it involves the same concept. Uses of man to mean mankind are older than its use to mean a male human. It's unfortunate that it got co-opted to refer to males (which speaks volumes about the medieval mindset).
In Latin this occured too. Homo/hominem in Latin means "human", but in all Romance langs the term now means "man". The word uir/uirum (man, male) become unused and was lost.
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Anonymous2010-03-14 6:37
Maybe it is a coincidence but voting rights for women where first passed in Finland (non-indoeuropean linguistically) in 1906 and then in 1918 in USSR and Poland and in other slavic countries shortly after that, while in USA it was 1920 and in Western Europe much later with Switzerland in 1971 and Lichtenstein in 1984 (!!!!!!). And those countries where pretending they where first class democracies. It is as if Germanic and Roman speaking countries men though about of universal men rights and not women rights, as a separate thing.
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Anonymous2010-03-14 7:10
>>40 Maybe it is a coincidence but voting rights for women where first passed in Finland
Actually the first one was the English-speaking New Zealand, but you are right in that Finland was the first country to allow all women to vote, regardless of social class.