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Lack of Noun Gender in English | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| 1e4e6 Octoglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4290 days ago 1013 posts - 1588 votes  Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Norwegian, Dutch, Swedish, Italian Studies: German, Danish, Russian, Catalan | Message 1 of 126 05 December 2013 at 10:34pm | IP Logged |
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I think that there have been various discussions about how to memorise, conceptualise,
or compartmentalise noun genders, along with its corresponding indefinite and definite articles for both singular and plural, but I was wondering how non-native English speakes whose languages have noun genders, either two or three, find the difficulty (or lack thereof) when using English, which only has "the" for all definite articles and "a/an" for indefinite, with no noun gender, and how they switch from noun genders to no noun genders in English. I was thinking that trying to work retroactively and determine how a language speaker that has noun genders feels any difficulty or facility in switching to English, then trying to determine if perhaps any techniques can be used for English speakers for languages wherefore noun genders cause considerable challenges for learning the language, i.e. German, Icelandic, French, etc. In other words, I was thinking of "working backwards" as sometimes they say in mathematics and engineering, in some fashion, to find a different method for non-gender noun language speakers to learn the genders of nouns of other languages. An English speaker, when wanting to use a definite article for either singular or plural, automatically says, "the", simply because no other choice exists. The only article declension is in the indefinite "a" into "an", which does not require any memorisation, but simply seeing if a vowel follows or not. So no memorisation for articles is generally required in English. There might be discrepancies with the "an" before some words beginning with "h", but even these are not always agreed between native English speakers, but that is as extensive as article complications become in English. When I started learning my first languages, Spanish and French, at around 13, having to use different articles, in combination with noun declensions, was new to me, because in English, I could automatically use "a/an" and "the", but then this was not possible. I am not sure how a Spanish, French, German, Dutch, etc. speaker thinks of the English articles when first learning them though. I think that at some point in history, English had three genders for nouns, but I am not sure if any English speaker then documented how they felt about learning English when it stopped using genders. I remember when trying to acclimatise to the concept of noun genders at 13, before every article in Spanish and French (and shortly thereafter, Portuguese after I started that), I thought, "Hell, what is the article here", so every noun caused me stress, until I finally accustomed myself. My mother also learnt Spanish and French in secondary school, and said that the noun gender concept was extremely bizarre, because in English this phenomenom did not exist. Edited by 1e4e6 on 05 December 2013 at 11:07pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| daegga Tetraglot Senior Member Austria lang-8.com/553301 Joined 4521 days ago 1076 posts - 1792 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Swedish, Norwegian Studies: Danish, French, Finnish, Icelandic | Message 2 of 126 05 December 2013 at 10:42pm | IP Logged |
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Lack of gender doesn't impose any difficulty. Languages that arbitrarily assign a
different gender to the noun than your native language are a different kind of beast (because of interference). 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Josquin Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4844 days ago 2266 posts - 3992 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Latin, Italian, Russian, Swedish Studies: Japanese, Irish, Portuguese, Persian | Message 3 of 126 05 December 2013 at 11:21pm | IP Logged |
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Sorry, there are no such techniques. Noun genders (or their rules) simply have to be learnt.
Learners of English are in the favourable position that they don't have to think about genders at all. That's all about it. There is no switching between gender and non-gender languages. As bizarre as foreign grammatical concepts might seem to us, we simply have to wrap our heads around them and internalize them by practice. There is no other way. By the way, I don't think there was a point in history when the Anglo-Saxons decided genders were stupid and hence abolished them. English lost its gender system gradually due to general linguistic change caused by the Norman conquest in 1066. Edited by Josquin on 05 December 2013 at 11:28pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6597 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 4 of 126 05 December 2013 at 11:28pm | IP Logged |
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Well, many non-natives use the words he or she instead of it (and then there's the separate issue of the animate/inanimate categories).
But it's still very common to consider a lack of gender something that makes a language easier (even Finnish ♥). BTW, Finnish doesn't even have separate words for he and she. I have to admit I sometimes forget that I'm literally conveying zero information about the person's gender. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| 1e4e6 Octoglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4290 days ago 1013 posts - 1588 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Norwegian, Dutch, Swedish, Italian Studies: German, Danish, Russian, Catalan | Message 5 of 126 05 December 2013 at 11:53pm | IP Logged |
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True there is that he/she pronoun like in Mandarin with ta1. I learnt Mandarin as well,
and the lack of he/she and noun gender was easier since there was no confusion with articles, but then the problem was learning characters.. I suppose, though, that he/she is slightly different because if one knows the person, then one can say he/she and figure it out. However, I suppose for English speakers, it is unintuitive to look at a car and say the car is he (Spanish: el coche) or a she (French: la voiture). I mean that one can look at, for example, François Hollande and Mariano Rajoy, and say, respectively, "He is the President of France", or, "He is the President of Spain." Likewise, one knows Erna Solberg or Michelle Bachelet, and say ,"She is the Prime Minister of Norway", or, "She is likely to be President of Chile", but as a native English speaker, to look at my car and think "He is in the garage today" or "She needs snow tyres, and her muffler needs fixing" would be very unintuitive. Edited by 1e4e6 on 06 December 2013 at 12:01am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Марк Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 5056 days ago 2096 posts - 2972 votes Speaks: Russian* | Message 6 of 126 06 December 2013 at 10:17am | IP Logged |
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English has sex-based gender because there is a distinction between he, she and it. It
creates problems for speakers of languages without this distinction especially with words like his and her. "but as a native English speaker, to look at my car and think "He is in the garage today" or "She needs snow tyres, and her muffler needs fixing" would be very unintuitive". But native English speakers often refer to ships or countries as "she", while it can be strange to other people. It surprized me when I heard a translation of the Soviet anthem and there were words "will honour HER name". Why "her"? In Russian Советский Союз (The Soviet Union) is masculine! Or The Holy Spirit is probably He in English, while it is It in greek and She in Hebrew. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Speakeasy Senior Member Canada Joined 4052 days ago 507 posts - 1098 votes Studies: German | Message 7 of 126 06 December 2013 at 7:22pm | IP Logged |
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Mapk,
The so-called "correct" use, by some English speakers, of "she" when referring to ships, is far from universal and it is widely disputed. To me, its use is more an example of "personification" than one of "noun or pronoun" gender. When growing up in Vancouver, B.C., a port city, I recall that our elementary school teachers would occasionally remind us that ships should be referred to as "she". However, I very rarely, if ever, came across anyone in the local population who actually did this. We all referred to ships as "it" rather than "she". However, as an example of "personification" and not gender, we would all refer to our cats and dogs as "he" and "she". To continue, I served 10 years as an officer in the Royal Canadian Navy and again, only very occasionally, someone would refer to the ship as "she" and remind the rest of us of our own apparent misuse, as the rest of us consistently referred to the ship as "it". In every port city that I visited, the local English-speaking (civilian) population consistently referred to ships as "it". My reading is that, if you cannot get regular naval personnel to refer to their ship as "she" without frequent reminders, then there is something quite unnatural about its use. Given that most native English-speakers must be reminded of this apparent example of gender, I suspect that the usage of "she" for ships is nothing more than an a quaint maritime tradition foisted upon the general population by some 19th century authors, most of whom never set to sea, or an example of jargon, or dialectal variant, and that it has no genuine place in Standard Modern English ... meiner Meinung nach, bien entendu! 8 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6597 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 8 of 126 06 December 2013 at 8:04pm | IP Logged |
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Maybe that's mostly a British thing nowadays?
1 person has voted this message useful |
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