What are the point of masculine, feminine and neutral in languages?

Dots1982

Thankfully in English we don’t waste time with it but the amount of languages that use Genders and I can’t see any point or help having them and the amount of complication it causes is ridiculous.

Anyone agree or disagree?

The Tetrarch

You won't pass your exam with that attitude.

Fr_Dougal

I wish people would feck off with all this gender bullshit.

Charmeleon

We do, just less formal in use. You wouldn’t say ‘he’s a beautiful boat’.

Dots1982

Dots1982 wrote: »

Thankfully in English we don’t waste time with it but the amount of languages that use Genders and I can’t see any point or help having them and the amount of complication it causes is ridiculous.

Anyone agree or disagree?

It was clearly orchestrated to rile you up.

endacl

I identify as grammatical.

Charmeleon

Charmeleon wrote: »

We do, just less formal in use. You wouldn’t say ‘he’s a beautiful boat’.

Every single noun in German has a gender. It's really not the same.

Charmeleon

Luna Wooden Nitpicker wrote: »

Every single noun in German has a gender. It's really not the same.

The original post says we don’t bother with it in English which isn’t correct.

LeinsterDub

Dots1982 wrote: »

Thankfully in English we don’t waste time with it but the amount of languages that use Genders and I can’t see any point or help having them and the amount of complication it causes is ridiculous.

Anyone agree or disagree?

English used to have genders but they fell out of use. Genders in language are pretty pointless alright.

Charmeleon

Charmeleon wrote: »

The original post says we don’t bother with it in English which isn’t correct.

What is the gendered version of 'a' or 'the' in English?

Dots1982

The Tetrarch wrote: »

You won't pass your exam with that attitude.

No exams just learning to speak a language but telling the teacher to ignore the grammar because all I want to do is communicate and be understood.

Grayson

we stick "an" in front of a word that starts with a vowel. An Apple, An orange, a banana. Isn't that similar?

Dots1982

Dots1982 wrote: »

No exams just learning to speak a language but telling the teacher to ignore the grammar because all I want to do is communicate and be understood.

Which is the whole point of grammar

Dots1982

Dots1982 wrote: »

No exams just learning to speak a language but telling the teacher to ignore the grammar because all I want to do is communicate and be understood.

Grammar is the structural foundation of language.

Charmeleon

Luna Wooden Nitpicker wrote: »

What is the gendered version of 'a' or 'the' in English?

See my previous post. We still retain gendered and neutral aspects of language in English. To say it is absent is not correct. We wouldn’t say ‘she is a wonderful pizza’ but we would say ‘she sure is a fine AK-47’.

Charmeleon

Deleted User wrote: »

Grammar is the structural foundation of language.

What they are trying to say is that having to learn and understand the grammatical rules explicitly is not required to speak the language as that is an innate human faculty.

Charmeleon

Charmeleon wrote: »

What they are trying to say is that having to learn and understand the grammatical rules explicitly is not required to speak the language as that is an innate human faculty.

Perhaps, if you are a native speaker. Without the building blocks of grammar, I would find it considerably more difficult to learn French or Italian.

I was in a language class once and one of the lads was complaining about learning grammar. "we don't have grammar in our language! We just say what sounds right"
Oh dear

Franz Von Peppercorn

Grayson wrote: »

we stick "an" in front of a word that starts with a vowel. An Apple, An orange, a banana. Isn't that similar?

I’ll go with not similar at all.

Dots1982

I’m learning polish and the grammar is impossible. It helps no understanding and is completely pointless and all polish people say don’t bother trying to learn it as they never bothered to learn it, they just kind of learnt automatically.

But more widely I never got the point of it with German either.

Franz Von Peppercorn

Charmeleon wrote: »

See my previous post. We still retain gendered and neutral aspects of language in English. To say it is absent is not correct. We wouldn’t say ‘she is a wonderful pizza’ but we would say ‘she sure is a fine AK-47’.

That’s all very informal and can be replaced with neutral terms. It.

Clearly any existing gender terms in English are residual.

Dots1982

Dots1982 wrote: »

I’m learning polish and the grammar is impossible. It helps no understanding and is completely pointless and all polish people say don’t bother trying to learn it as they never bothered to learn it, they just kind of learnt automatically.

But more widely I never got the point of it with German either.

As they spoke Polish from the cradle, which is advantageous.

Charmeleon

Deleted User wrote: »

Perhaps, if you are a native speaker. Without the building blocks of grammar, I would find it considerably more difficult to learn French or Italian.

Absolutely, the short window of opportunity during early childhood when you acquire language and adopt the grammatical rules means you usually have to translate explicitly in thought any grammatical differences, as well as when you learn to write for an anonymous audience whose knowledge and perspective you can’t know in advance.

All the same, we’ve had native languages for tens of thousands of years without learning any explicit grammatical rules.

Dj Stiggie

Dots1982 wrote: »

No exams just learning to speak a language but telling the teacher to ignore the grammar because all I want to do is communicate and be understood.

Good luck with that. The second you walk into the airport terminal and try to communicate with someone, they'll look at you like you have ten heads.

Your classmates will be forgiving of your mistakes because you're all learning at the same level, but try talking to a native speaker who's rarely heard a foreigner making a lot of mistakes trying to get by and they'll probably apologise and walk off or switch to English.

Day Lewin

They are nothing to do with "genders" in the sexual sense: they're just groups of words that behave a certain way.
Such as, how a plural is formed, etc. and how that affects other words such as descriptors.
You might just as well call them reds, blues, yellows. Or Bobbly, Bumbum and Brill.

Learning a language, it would be very hard work to learn each word and all its associations in isolation, one by one: that's why some wise grammarian has grouped the like together for your convenience.

There's not much gender left in English, but there's a ton of auxiliary verbs.

Charmeleon

Franz Von Peppercorn wrote: »

That’s all very informal and can be replaced with neutral terms. It.

Clearly any existing gender terms in English are residual.

I don’t think it’s quite that arbitrary and flippant though, we also use gendered language to imply closeness or appreciation and particularly when the subject has an emotional connection. A patriot would say something like “Ireland will only be free when she is emancipated from foreign rule”, poets often seem to use gendered language for the same effect.

Franz Von Peppercorn

Charmeleon wrote: »

I don’t think it’s quite that arbitrary and flippant though, we also use gendered language to imply closeness or appreciation and particularly when the subject has an emotional connection. A patriot would say something like “Ireland will only be free when she is emancipated from foreign rule”, poets often seem to use gendered language for the same effect.

Someone learning the language doesn’t need that though. You can get away with gender neutral in all these cases. It for the car, boat and country.

(Unless they aspire to be poets I suppose.)

Spelling is hard in English though. Totally inconsistent.

You said earlier than native speakers don’t learn grammar when young. Sure it’s not deliberately taught but the brain has a inate grammatical understanding. As children pick up language they pick up grammar and tenses based on other words that they have heard. No child has ever heard goed as the past tense of go, but they instinctively add that ‘ed because they heard it used elsewhere.

Ficheall

bluewolf wrote: »

Which is the whole point of grammar

I've been racking my brains trying to think of an example where replacing le with la in French could possibly lead to any actual confusion, and I'm coming up short. Perhaps it avoids some confusion if there are ambiguous pronouns in a sentence, but such examples could still be contrived even with the different genders.



In German, I'm not convinced that, say, "die" for plural the and feminine singular the avoids much confusion either. ("sie" just seems obtusely bad.) I guess "der See" and "das See" for "the sea" and "the lake" could affect your fishing prospects...


I don't know much about other languages. My Irish is good enough that I could get by in any spoken non-specialised discussion, but I have zero idea which nouns are feminine and which are masculine.


I guess maybe it could be viewed as a handy way to "remember" which grammatical rules apply to which words; eg. we do X with this group in the accusative case and Y with this other group in the accusative case, so here are the two rules to remember, and let's say group X are "male" and Y are "female" to help you remember.... But I certainly couldn't fault the OP for feeling that the genders create an awful lot of extra work for little reward.

Sonics2k

bluewolf wrote: »

I was in a language class once and one of the lads was complaining about learning grammar. "we don't have grammar in our language! We just say what sounds right"
Oh dear

"Let's eat grandpa."
"Let's eat, grandpa."

Charmeleon

Charmeleon wrote: »

See my previous post. We still retain gendered and neutral aspects of language in English. To say it is absent is not correct. We wouldn’t say ‘she is a wonderful pizza’ but we would say ‘she sure is a fine AK-47’.

So there's none. Good stuff.

Charmeleon

Luna Wooden Nitpicker wrote: »

So there's none. Good stuff.

Who claimed there were?

jester77

Dots1982 wrote: »

But more widely I never got the point of it with German either.

There are some homophones in German that have a different meaning depending on gender selected. So it can be important, e.g.
der See - lake
die See - ocean

Ficheall

jester77 wrote: »

There are some homophones in German that have a different meaning depending on gender selected. So it can be important, e.g.
der See - lake
die See - ocean

Examples like that aren't terribly common though, right? And (although I know it's not esperanto, and this is just how the language evolved) der See for "the sea" and "der imaginativelynamedlake" for "the lake" seems like an easy fix...

jester77

Ficheall wrote: »

Examples like that aren't terribly common though, right? And (although I know it's not esperanto, and this is just how the language evolved) der See for "the sea" and "der imaginativelynamedlake" for "the lake" seems like an easy fix...

Not too common, but can be important, e.g.

Vita nova

Dots1982 wrote: »

Thankfully in English we don’t waste time with it but the amount of languages that use Genders and I can’t see any point or help having them and the amount of complication it causes is ridiculous.

Anyone agree or disagree?

I used to think exactly like that but it's pointless and a waste of energy because that's the way the language is and it's not going to change anytime soon.

The only advice I can give is to listen to lots of audio or watch lots of video in the target language and it will help you to pick up word gender and inflection naturally.

Princess Consuela Bananahammock

Luna Wooden Nitpicker wrote: »

What is the gendered version of 'a' or 'the' in English?

Definite/indefinite articles are not nouns.

Grayson wrote: »

we stick "an" in front of a word that starts with a vowel. An Apple, An orange, a banana. Isn't that similar?

That's a pronunciation aid to separate the vowels. Similar to t in French.

Peregrinus

Grammatical gender serves a couple of functions.

The main one is disambiguation. Consider the English phrase "a flowerbed in the garden which I maintain". Do I maintain the whole garden, or just the flowerbed? There is no way of telling. But in a gendered lanaguage there is a good chance that the adjectival phrase "which I maintain" will agree with "flowerbed" but not "garden", or the other way around, and this will eliminate ambiguity.

It can also eliminate ambiguity in speech. In spoken English the words "air" and "heir" are indistinguishable; likewise "rows", "rose" and "roes". These are called homophones, English has a great many of them, and they cause confusion, or confusion can only be avoided by adding extra words to indicate which word is meant. But this happens much less in gendered languages, because gendered articles, pronouns, adjective and adverbs are voiced differently, and clarify which word is meant.

This probably explains why grammatical gender survives; it's useful to speakers of the language. But, I agree, it's a pain to students of the language, especially if the student's native language is one from which gender has largely disappeared, like English.

The more interesting question is why gender has largely disappeared from English. We don't really know. We do know that this happened between the 11th and 14th centuries, and started in the North of England, moving slowly southwards. One hypothesis is that when the orginally Saxon-derived gender system of Middle English encountered the quite different Norse gender system following Viking settlement in England, it all got too complicated and people stopped using gender altogether.

Finally, we call it grammatical "gender" because in Indo-European languages the noun classes do tend to map onto the pronouns used for males and females respectively. But there's no fundamental reason why this should be so, and in other language groups there need be no such connection. For example, in the Djirbal language in Australia there are four noun classes - men and animate objects, women and fluid or abstract objects (fire, water, warfare, danger ); inanimate things you can eat; everything else. Enindhilyagwa has five classes- human males; males of other species; females; things that reflect light; everything else. Several languages have noun classes which depend not on gender but on relationship - one noun class for your parents, both male and female, but a different noun-class for your grandparents, for example.

pickarooney

Ficheall wrote: »

I've been racking my brains trying to think of an example where replacing le with la in French could possibly lead to any actual confusion, and I'm coming up short. Perhaps it avoids some confusion if there are ambiguous pronouns in a sentence, but such examples could still be contrived even with the different genders.



In German, I'm not convinced that, say, "die" for plural the and feminine singular the avoids much confusion either. ("sie" just seems obtusely bad.) I guess "der See" and "das See" for "the sea" and "the lake" could affect your fishing prospects...


I don't know much about other languages. My Irish is good enough that I could get by in any spoken non-specialised discussion, but I have zero idea which nouns are feminine and which are masculine.


I guess maybe it could be viewed as a handy way to "remember" which grammatical rules apply to which words; eg. we do X with this group in the accusative case and Y with this other group in the accusative case, so here are the two rules to remember, and let's say group X are "male" and Y are "female" to help you remember.... But I certainly couldn't fault the OP for feeling that the genders create an awful lot of extra work for little reward.

Je vais faire un tour (en ville)
Je vais faire une tour (de briques)

At the end of cooking class when your partner hasn't scraped all the cake mix out of her mould, you might want to say

'Je peux lécher ton moule?'
You might want to avoid saying
'Je peux lécher ta moule?'

Ficheall

pickarooney wrote: »

At the end of cooking class when your partner hasn't scraped all the cake mix out of her mould, you might want to say

'Je peux lécher ton moule?'
You might want to avoid saying
'Je peux lécher ta moule?'

You clearly haven't tasted my partner's baking.

Princess Consuela Bananahammock

Princess Consuela Bananahammock wrote: »

Definite/indefinite articles are not nouns.

Yes, how do you think Germans attach gender to a noun?

Der Zug
Die Bahn

Shenshen

Ficheall wrote: »

Examples like that aren't terribly common though, right? And (although I know it's not esperanto, and this is just how the language evolved) der See for "the sea" and "der imaginativelynamedlake" for "the lake" seems like an easy fix...

It's similar in French.

La mere - the mother
Le maire - the mayor

Learning a European language without the genders of the nouns is a bit like learning Chinese without the inflections. Why bother at all, if you don't actually want to be able to speak it?

topper75

Charmeleon wrote: »

The original post says we don’t bother with it in English which isn’t correct.

Damn right good Sir.

Banging a blond and banging a blonde are different experiences.

super_furry

Reminds me of the scariest Halloween story I ever heard.

The Modh Coinníollach

topper75

Dj Stiggie wrote: »

Good luck with that. The second you walk into the airport terminal and try to communicate with someone, they'll look at you like you have ten heads.

Your classmates will be forgiving of your mistakes because you're all learning at the same level, but try talking to a native speaker who's rarely heard a foreigner making a lot of mistakes trying to get by and they'll probably apologise and walk off or switch to English.

True. I once dealt with a Spaniard who came to work here without speaking any English (ha ha we had some economy there for a brief while!). We conversed in Spanish. As the weeks went by he gave the English a shot. He translated directly from his mother tongue to begin with "She say I..." and I stopped him to explain that every single word he said was wrong and that what he wanted to say (I understood from the context) was "He told me...". Now maybe you could argue that he was 'communicating'. But you cannot argue that he didn't sound absolutely ridiculous.
Grammar matters.

take everything

Peregrinus wrote: »

Grammatical gender serves a couple of functions.

The main one is disambiguation. Consider the English phrase "a flowerbed in the garden which I maintain". Do I maintain the whole garden, or just the flowerbed? There is no way of telling. But in a gendered lanaguage there is a good chance that the adjectival phrase "which I maintain" will agree with "flowerbed" but not "garden", or the other way around, and this will eliminate ambiguity.

It can also eliminate ambiguity in speech. In spoken English the words "air" and "heir" are indistinguishable; likewise "rows", "rose" and "roes". These are called homophones, English has a great many of them, and they cause confusion, or confusion can only be avoided by adding extra words to indicate which word is meant. But this happens much less in gendered languages, because gendered articles, pronouns, adjective and adverbs are voiced differently, and clarify which word is meant.

This probably explains why grammatical gender survives; it's useful to speakers of the language. But, I agree, it's a pain to students of the language, especially if the student's native language is one from which gender has largely disappeared, like English.

The more interesting question is why gender has largely disappeared from English. We don't really know. We do know that this happened between the 11th and 14th centuries, and started in the North of England, moving slowly southwards. One hypothesis is that when the orginally Saxon-derived gender system of Middle English encountered the quite different Norse gender system following Viking settlement in England, it all got too complicated and people stopped using gender altogether.

Finally, we call it grammatical "gender" because in Indo-European languages the noun classes do tend to map onto the pronouns used for males and females respectively. But there's no fundamental reason why this should be so, and in other language groups there need be no such connection. For example, in the Djirbal language in Australia there are four noun classes - men and animate objects, women and fluid or abstract objects (fire, water, warfare, danger ); inanimate things you can eat; everything else. Enindhilyagwa has five classes- human males; males of other species; females; things that reflect light; everything else. Several languages have noun classes which depend not on gender but on relationship - one noun class for your parents, both male and female, but a different noun-class for your grandparents, for example.

Good post.
You offer a good explanation which I never really considered before.
Unlike a lot of the other posts

Irish Guitarist

I love how electrical connectors are called male and female.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_of_connectors_and_fasteners

xi5yvm0owc1s2b

Charmeleon wrote: »

A patriot would say something like “Ireland will only be free when she is emancipated from foreign rule”, poets often seem to use gendered language for the same effect.

It's not necessarily used for patriotic or poetic effect -- in the English language, defined bodies of land are traditionally referred to as female (note how people talk about Mother Earth or refer to their country of origin as the Motherland). Here's another example from the book Routing Borders Between Territories, Discourses and Practices (ed. H.Van Houtum, Eiki Berg): "For example, 11 September 2001 created a dilemma for the United States; how to concurrently promote free trade and open borders, and protect her borders and territorial integrity."

professore

Dj Stiggie wrote: »

Good luck with that. The second you walk into the airport terminal and try to communicate with someone, they'll look at you like you have ten heads.

Your classmates will be forgiving of your mistakes because you're all learning at the same level, but try talking to a native speaker who's rarely heard a foreigner making a lot of mistakes trying to get by and they'll probably apologise and walk off or switch to English.

That's just the French (edit - Parisians) . Most other nationalities are delighted if you try to speak their language.

professore

topper75 wrote: »

True. I once dealt with a Spaniard who came to work here without speaking any English (ha ha we had some economy there for a brief while!). We conversed in Spanish. As the weeks went by he gave the English a shot. He translated directly from his mother tongue to begin with "She say I..." and I stopped him to explain that every single word he said was wrong and that what he wanted to say (I understood from the context) was "He told me...". Now maybe you could argue that he was 'communicating'. But you cannot argue that he didn't sound absolutely ridiculous.
Grammar matters.

It matters but you don't need to explicitly learn it. When he hears everyone else saying "He told me" he will get it. People here are terrible at languages because they are AFRAID TO MAKE GRAMMAR Mistakes. Better to make mistakes than to sit there like a dummy or force them to speak English.

If people are rude to you for not speaking their language correctly that just makes them assholes.

topper75

There is no excuse for rudeness on the part of listeners no. But the onus is always on the speaker to make themselves understood. Grammar learning may fall second after vocab but just because it isn't a joyful experience or doesn't provide instant gratification doesn't render it dismissable. This was proven for me in the above instance by the confused expressions on the faces of the people the Spaniard was trying to address.

pickarooney

Shenshen wrote: »

It's similar in French.

La mere - the mother
Le maire - the mayor

Learning a European language without the genders of the nouns is a bit like learning Chinese without the inflections. Why bother at all, if you don't actually want to be able to speak it?

And now the use of 'la maire' for female mayor's is a hot debate.