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Lack of Noun Gender in English | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4707 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes  Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 81 of 126 20 December 2013 at 3:57pm | IP Logged | |||||
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It partially marks them along with noun
suffixes 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| ScottScheule Diglot Senior Member United States scheule.blogspot.com Joined 5228 days ago 645 posts - 1176 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Latin, Hungarian, Biblical Hebrew, Old English, Russian, Swedish, German, Italian, French | Message 82 of 126 20 December 2013 at 5:25pm | IP Logged | |||||
Second declension nouns ending in -er are masculine. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Марк Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 5056 days ago 2096 posts - 2972 votes Speaks: Russian* | Message 83 of 126 20 December 2013 at 5:31pm | IP Logged | |||||
I don't think this can be called a case. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| ScottScheule Diglot Senior Member United States scheule.blogspot.com Joined 5228 days ago 645 posts - 1176 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Latin, Hungarian, Biblical Hebrew, Old English, Russian, Swedish, German, Italian, French | Message 84 of 126 20 December 2013 at 5:36pm | IP Logged | |||||
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English has remnants of cases in its pronouns. Whether or not you call that possessing a case is up to you--what is clear is that this is vastly different than the vibrant and wide-ranging case systems of Russian and German. Edited by ScottScheule on 20 December 2013 at 5:36pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7156 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 85 of 126 20 December 2013 at 6:03pm | IP Logged | |||||
There is a difference between nominative masculine der and dative masculine dem with the -m of the latter related to masculine/neuter adjective endings *-mmai (singular) and *-imaz (plural) of Proto-Germanic. I'm pretty sure that's morphological marking. If there were some hypothetical German variant for which it'd be grammatical to utter *Das Mann ist alt. / *Das Frau ist alt (instead of Der Mann ist alt / Die Frau ist alt) or *Das Bleistift steht neben das Buch / *Das Bleistift steht neben das Uhr (instead of Der Bleistift steht neben dem Buch / Der Bleistift steht neben der Uhr) then one would be hard pressed to conclude that the sentences with the asterisk imply grammatical gender based on the articles. However, the articles' actual alternation depening on the following noun suggest otherwise (obviously grammatical gender can align with semantic gender but in many cases it doesn't). I'm starting to think like s_allard on this in that it'd help a hell of a lot if we consider these distinctions to be part of noun classes (especially considering that gender in the modern IE languages that we're familiar with most likely arose from a distinction between animacy and inanimacy in Proto-IE anyway) because of the divergence between natural/semantic gender and grammatical gender. The problem seems now with the term 'gender' is that it seems even more loaded with the development of modern feminism thus merging a dry linguistic phenomenon with what's related to what's between someone's legs, to put it crudely. It also seems to be a bit of a non-sequitur to equate one's position on English's lack grammatical gender with the take on English lacking cases. Why insist that the distinction still observed in some pronouns (e.g. "me" vs. "I") and the "Saxon genitive" (e.g. "Chung's" vs. "Chung") to be something other than case marking, limited as it is? 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Stolan Senior Member United States Joined 4032 days ago 274 posts - 368 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Thai, Lowland Scots Studies: Arabic (classical), Cantonese | Message 86 of 126 20 December 2013 at 6:47pm | IP Logged | |||||
read this: http://www.sfs.uni-tuebingen.de/~gjaeger/lehre/ws0910/langua gesOfTheWorld/morphologicalTypology.pdf The only thing I will give you is gender and having to modify adjectives and nouns for gender and remembering each and every gender, but a case system is neither folly nor superior to the alternatives, a language without a case system needs other methods. Lack of morphology is not a lack of ability. The difficulty of such is perceived. Most conjugating languages are pro drop so I see it as adding the person at the end of the verb and when combined with another tense, another small bit is added. The problem can be irregularities but all languages have them in each's area. Hearing this over and over makes it harder for me to learn Cantonese further since it always brings back memories of stuff I read like the above. English has grammaticalized aspect to a larger degree, which is very common for uninflecting languages (Thai has no tenses, plurals, or conjugations but more than a dozen aspect helping words). I could go into detail on the possibilities of English syntax, gerunds, and ACI sentences not found as often in relatives of English. http://www.thai-language.com/id/590262 I would dare say a genderless French or Russian would be in the same area as English in difficulty. It is precisely the gender than I can narrow it down to. I do agree with how you identify gender in English though. English lacks a gender system in the same way other Indo-Euro languages have. I would like to question whether English is fine without gender FOR the native speaker's culture (like Finnish or Hungarian) or would best admit it as a deficiency. Analytic languages tend to have counting words, is that a possibility or future of English? Edited by Stolan on 20 December 2013 at 7:36pm 2 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 87 of 126 20 December 2013 at 8:21pm | IP Logged | |||||
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You're not learning Russian though?
I'd say the concept of an article is as hard to internalize as the one of gender. And of course in Russian there are also the aspects, which semantically correspond to the English simple/perfect distinction. Both Russian and English are probably a bit easier for native speakers of Romance languages than for each other's. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Stolan Senior Member United States Joined 4032 days ago 274 posts - 368 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Thai, Lowland Scots Studies: Arabic (classical), Cantonese | Message 88 of 126 21 December 2013 at 3:58pm | IP Logged | |||||
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The problem is that English is a bit too different compared to her surrounding relatives. I imagine English would do
better originating in Asia, that way, counting words would be picked up through sino influence. I have a hard time believing people who claim they found English easier than a closely related language, they usually give the closely related language the same standard of fluency as their own but have no way to mete such with English. Gender is the main non-feature I can only give English, and I don't know what this may do to the future of the anglophone culture in the eyes of others. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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