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English & Afrikaans = More Advanced? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| RogueRook Diglot Senior Member Germany N/A Joined 6843 days ago 174 posts - 177 votes  6 sounds Speaks: German*, English Studies: Hungarian, Turkish | Message 17 of 39 27 November 2006 at 4:22pm | IP Logged | ||
They don't goof them up all the time. Apart from exotic and rarely used words or recent loans from English on which consensus about gender hasn't been reached yet we usally don't get this gender business wrong. For instance Web browser is male in German, e-mail is female and please don't ask me why, okay :) I agree it is hilarious that we assign gender classes to English loans but there is no way around. You just feel what sounds right or not. P.S. Ideally we wouldn't need to use English words for aforementioned items of the IT world, but Germans have given up what I'd call language loyalty long ago, readily jumping at any English word without trying to come up with a native equivalent. (They even make up invalid new ones, that aren't even proper English). I think in the long run this process might indeed destroy the gender system, since more and more people would be unsure which gender they need to assign to a new loan word. But this would mean the destruction of the case system and the death of the language as a whole. Luckily I won't live to see this indeed quite "advanced" state of the language. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6593 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 18 of 39 27 November 2006 at 5:06pm | IP Logged | ||
Language loyalty is overrated. There are a lot of people here in Sweden (I used to be one of them) who oppose the great influx of English terms and words into the language. Somehow they think it'll destroy Swedish. But they forget the huge corpus of French words in the 17th to 19th centuries. That didn't destroy Swedish. Or, to take a better example, the gigantomongous amount of French loanwords in English. A study concluded that only 25% of modern English actually has Germanic roots (and I've heard numbers of down to 10% mentioned, but they're probably exagerrated). So English has loaned a massive amount of words, but to the casual observer, it seems it's not quite dead yet. Over time, the English words that have seeped into Swedish and German will be swedish- and Germanized, and people will forget that they were ever foreign. Once upon a time, people used the Greek word "kirkia" in Sweden when talking about a church. Nowadays it's become "kyrka" and nobody thinks of it as anything but Swedish. (OK, this was an unneccessary and off-topic post, but I needed to get it off my chest. Apologies.) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| RogueRook Diglot Senior Member Germany N/A Joined 6843 days ago 174 posts - 177 votes 6 sounds Speaks: German*, English Studies: Hungarian, Turkish | Message 19 of 39 27 November 2006 at 5:33pm | IP Logged | ||
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No apologies necessary whatsoever. A speakers feel for what is right and what endangers a language as perceived by him is always subjective. A humans lifetime marks only an eyeblink in the history of any natural language during which it doesn't tend to change much. If change occurs though most speakers, me included, feel uneasy about it. We subconcsiously try to preserve this frozen snapshot, the version of our native tongues we learned as children, considering it the only valid one.
I am aware this sentiment is meaningless to the linguistic process as a whole, yet I am a human an thus I am entitled to the occasional fit of irrationality that makes me human. Cherishing my native language is one of them. P.S. I am pretty sure if a speaker of Old English were to be resurrected and given a glimpse of modern English and what it has turned into since his times he surely would be appalled. You and I in turn couldn't disagree more with him. :) 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| That_Guy Diglot Groupie United States Joined 7109 days ago 74 posts - 87 votes Studies: Hindi, English*, Spanish | Message 20 of 39 27 November 2006 at 8:27pm | IP Logged | ||
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I think that the genders a language assigns to particular nouns is pretty interesting, for example, almost every Romance language (Spanish/French) gives a masculine gender to the word "sun" and a feminine gender to the word "moon" (el sol, la luna/le soleil, la lune). On the other hand, I've noticed that Germanic languages (German/Old English) gave a feminine gender to "sun" and a masculine gender to "moon" (die Sonne, der Mond/seo sunne, se mona). I've always wondered why this was so, it seems to me that common, inanimate objects probably got their gender just from grammatical necessity (lol, or I could be totally wrong). And I thought that words for larger, more important things (like the sun and moon) got their gender by how the culture of the language viewed them (sun-masculine, moon-feminine). My question is, how did these two language families develop totally opposite views (at least grammatically) of the same object?
-Ryan 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| MeshGearFox Senior Member United States Joined 6706 days ago 316 posts - 344 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian | Message 21 of 39 27 November 2006 at 9:25pm | IP Logged | ||
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Stab in the dark here, but for some reason I recall hearing that Germanic paganism associated with the sun with a goddess. Let me steal something from Wikipedia here:
"In Norse mythology, both the gods Odin and Tyr have attributes of a sky father, and they are doomed to be devoured by wolves (Fenrir and Garm, respectively) at Ragnarok. Sol, the Norse sun goddess, will be devoured by the wolf Skoll." 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| That_Guy Diglot Groupie United States Joined 7109 days ago 74 posts - 87 votes Studies: Hindi, English*, Spanish | Message 22 of 39 28 November 2006 at 6:18pm | IP Logged | ||
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Interesting! That's what I'd thought, but I wasn't entirely sure. So does that mean there was a male moon god? I'll be sure to check that out on Wikipedia, thanks!
-Ryan 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| lady_skywalker Triglot Senior Member Netherlands aspiringpolyglotblog Joined 6901 days ago 909 posts - 942 votes Speaks: Spanish, English*, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, French, Dutch, Italian | Message 23 of 39 28 November 2006 at 6:52pm | IP Logged | ||
I believe there are also male moon gods in Egyptian and Aztec mythology and a few other cultures around the world but, on the whole, it certainly does seem like female moon gods outnumber males ones! Back on topic... I have no idea why grammatical genders exist (if someone knows, please feel free to tell us!) but I don't think that the eradication of genders makes a language any more 'advanced'. There are many languages which don't use genders or even articles but they often have other features that would boggle a native English speaker's mind (eg. agglutination in the Turkic languages, measure words in Chinese and Japanese). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| autodidactic Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United States tinyurl.com/cunningl Joined 6634 days ago 100 posts - 110 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish*, French Studies: Russian, Japanese, Kazakh | Message 24 of 39 29 November 2006 at 7:16am | IP Logged | ||
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la mort = death
la famine la tempête = storm la peur = fear la peste = plague If it's awful, it's feminine :p 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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