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Purpose of gender and conjugations | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| Darobat Diglot Senior Member Joined 7188 days ago 754 posts - 770 votes  Speaks: English*, Russian Studies: Latin | Message 1 of 24 24 March 2005 at 4:22pm | IP Logged | ||
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I have two questions about languages in general
1) What is the purposes/origin of word gender. I mean, why does the Russian word for dog, sobaka, need to be feminine while the word for light, svet, need to be masculine. Is there any purpose to that? 2) Same thing for verb conjugation. I don't see why a word should need to change depending on who does it, yet you still need to specify a pronoun/who's doing it. Why? Thanks Edited for typo and bad first line by Administrator Edited by administrator on 27 March 2005 at 2:35pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| heartburn Senior Member United States Joined 7207 days ago 355 posts - 350 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 2 of 24 24 March 2005 at 9:19pm | IP Logged | ||
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There are really two kinds of gender, grammatical and natural. Both can effect how you form a sentence. Natural gender is physically related to what you're talking about: Waiter/Waitress, Actor/Actress. Grammatical gender may or may not have a physical relationship. In some languages grammatical gender is not even expressed in terms of sex. It might be expressed instead as animate and inanimate, or something else entirely.
I think that grammatical gender exists to emphasize the relationship between words within a sentence. When an adjective is required to match the noun that it modifies in both number and gender, it is clear that the adjective is modifying the matching noun. This may be redundant in some languages because word order may perform the same function. In some languages pronouns are not required at all. They are entirely optional. Spanish is like this. The verb conjugation makes the subject clear. So the conjugation is actually more important than the pronoun. Also, conjugations demonstrate not only who is performing an action, but when. That is something that pronouns can't do. Edited by heartburn on 24 March 2005 at 9:29pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ujoe Diglot Newbie Malaysia Joined 7208 days ago 14 posts - 14 votes Speaks: Malay, English* | Message 3 of 24 27 March 2005 at 1:54pm | IP Logged | ||
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The purposes of word gender and verb conjugation probably evolved from a "need" to arrange sentences in a particular order or pattern.
Despite that, it is not compulsory for a language to have these characteristics which some may consider to be unneccessarily complicating. For example, many Asian languages of non-Indo-European origin - Cantonese, Mandarin, Malay, Tagalog and Vietnamese do not have grammatical gender for nouns. Verbs in these languages do not have conjugation regardless of (1st, 2nd, 3rd) person or (past, present, future) tense. In fact, Malay does not have tense in the sense of Western languages - it only has words for emphasizing whether it was done. Tense in this language is inferred by "common sense" based on context. Cantonese, Mandarin and Vietnamese use the addition of indicator words to indicate whether the action has been done, is being done or will be done. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Alijsh Tetraglot Senior Member Iran jahanshiri.ir/ Joined 6622 days ago 149 posts - 167 votes 1 sounds Speaks: Persian*, Spanish, French, English Studies: German, Italian | Message 4 of 24 12 October 2006 at 2:10am | IP Logged | ||
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Since Middle Persian (ca. 2200 years ago), we don't have any grammatical gender. We even have one personal pronoun for both he and she. yet, we have no problem.
Pronoun is used to replace noun or noun phrase. So it's already clear in the sentence that we are talking about a feminine or masculine. That's why we don't have any problem in Persian. If we ever want to say he or she to indicate sex, we simply say: that man, that woman, that girl etc. No matter which language it is, we don't always use he or she to indicate sex. Just like English, if we want to mention the sex of an animal we simply attribute male or female (e.g. fe/male dog). So Persian gets along without grammatical gender, gender-based article & adjective or pronoun of any kind (e.g. personal, demonstrative, possessive) & direct object etc. *** Concerning your second question: In Persian, we don't normally use personal pronouns because the conjugated verb contains person. That's why we call the verbal endings shenâse (ID). For example, it's always -am for 1st person and -at for 2nd. Therefore, since in Persian the personal pronoun drops, we need to conjugate verb to show person as well as tense. In contrast, in Esperanto, that's an artificial (constructed) language, the personal pronoun is always present and instead verb isn't conjugated for persons. In Esperanto, only an ending is added to the verb root to denote tense (past, present, future etc.); -is for past, -as for present, -os for future. drinki (to drink, -i is infinitive ending): mi drinkis (I drank), shi drinkis (she drank) etc. mi drinkas (I drink), shi drinkas (she drinks) etc. mi drinkos (I'll drink), shi drinkos (she'll drink) etc. So, we at least need conjugation for tense. (In parentheses: Conjugating verbs is very very easy in Persian. I don't say it because I'm a native but because the only irregular thing you need to conjugate a verb in any tense of Persian is a present stem. And all past tenses are conjugated completely regularly.) Edited by Alijsh on 12 October 2006 at 2:53am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| neo Diglot Groupie IndiaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6806 days ago 81 posts - 83 votes Speaks: Hindi*, English Studies: German, Italian | Message 5 of 24 12 October 2006 at 7:54am | IP Logged | ||
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your question reminded me about my first week in German class !
(my teacher refused to explain...saying that's the way they are and must be learned...) In languages,logic is out of question. no amount of time-travel or theorizing can explain why "put" and "but" are pronounced differently or why a German girl must remain "neuter" until she becomes a woman. :) And by no means referring to you, people who just can't digest that languages are illogical or get "angry" at these points may succeed better with IALs such as esperanto. (Apparently this illogicality of German language (and associated hard work in learning) led some to drop the course in my class...) ------ neo Edited by neo on 12 October 2006 at 8:04am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Captain Haddock Diglot Senior Member Japan kanjicabinet.tumblr. Joined 6768 days ago 2282 posts - 2814 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, Korean, Ancient Greek | Message 6 of 24 12 October 2006 at 8:29am | IP Logged | ||
That's because people look for overcomplicated explanations. Gender isn't biological, it's merely grammatical. Anything ending in -chen (like mädchen) is neuter. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| SamD Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6659 days ago 823 posts - 987 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French Studies: Portuguese, Norwegian | Message 7 of 24 12 October 2006 at 8:38am | IP Logged | ||
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When you think about it, most features in language are pretty arbitrary. We put endings on verbs to indicate person and number, but tense as well. We could just as easily use words such as "yesterday" or "three hours ago" to indicate the past tense, but we still use endings such as "-ed" or an irregular verb form such as "went" to indicate the past.
We could probably also manage without making nouns plural. If I say "two house," you don't need the "-s" at the end to know it's plural. Why do we need the past "I saw" and the present perfect "I have seen" and the past perfect "I had seen" when they're all in the past? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Alijsh Tetraglot Senior Member Iran jahanshiri.ir/ Joined 6622 days ago 149 posts - 167 votes 1 sounds Speaks: Persian*, Spanish, French, English Studies: German, Italian | Message 8 of 24 12 October 2006 at 9:27am | IP Logged | ||
We say like that in Persian :D one/two/three/... house 1 person has voted this message useful |
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