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When TL IRKS you and how to deal with it

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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion Post Reply
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Bao
Diglot
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Germany
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 Message 9 of 26
19 August 2013 at 3:23pm | IP Logged 
^The distribution of definite, indefinite and zero article.
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Henkkles
Triglot
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Finland
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 Message 10 of 26
19 August 2013 at 3:38pm | IP Logged 
Bao wrote:
^The distribution of definite, indefinite and zero article.

Ah, nevermind then. Exposure and paying attention to them work well for me, the opposite of "not caring", but hey, we're all different.
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Jeffers
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 Message 12 of 26
19 August 2013 at 4:40pm | IP Logged 
Henkkles wrote:
Jeffers wrote:
Historically, languages with gender simply had two (or three) classes of verbs. It was convenient for grammarians to label one set feminine, another set masculine, and in the case of languages with three classes, they labelled the third set neuter. There was nothing inherently gender-specific about most of the words, but presumably the grammarians picked the set with the most female words (girl, woman, etc), and labelled it "feminine", and so on.

This is just a matter of convenience for a grammarian. They could have labelled them positive and negative, hot and cold, plurb and blurb. But somebody thought it would be convenient to use gender, and it has stuck ever since. But whatever they picked, we would stick be stuck with the situation that there are two or three classes of nouns that we have to keep straight.

This obviously applies to adjectives, etc, simply because adjectives have to agree with the noun they modify, verbs have to agree with their subject, etc.

I think I wasn't clear enough because everyone seems to misunderstand me. The problem isn't that, but I just don't like the idea of having to acknowledge someone's gender every time I mention they did something and small things like that. You're forgetting the fact that most gendered languages use the same pronouns about objects and people, where the genders of objects come from. Like this;
Have you seen my wallet?
He's here.
So it's not purely semantics or "a choice of words" but the objects themselves are apparently seen as pertaining to a gender.


Nobody is forgetting "the fact that most gendered languages use the same pronouns about objects and people". This is evidence that grammatical gender has nothing to do with sex: masculine and feminine do not equal male and female.

Tarvos and I both mentioned that grammatical gender refers to verb classes because you said
Henkkles wrote:
I can't for the life of me understand how did it occurr to proto-indoeuropeans that a rock would have a gender, gender being just the pair or assortment of chromosomes you get at birth.


You are making the mistake of equivocation: using a word which has two different meanings as though the word means both in the same case. Grammatical gender does not mean that the object is necessarily of that sex. A "bus" in German is masculine; that doesn't mean the bus is male.

As a German comedian (who's name I can't remember) said, "Warum ist es der Bus, hat es einen Schwanz?"

EDIT: to take it back to the point of your original post, one way to stop something in your target language from IRKING you is to understand it. Understand why it is the way it is, put it in its linguistic and historical context, and it will be less bothersome.

Edited by Jeffers on 19 August 2013 at 4:46pm

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tarvos
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 Message 13 of 26
19 August 2013 at 5:14pm | IP Logged 
it didn't, it was just a useful way to describe the declination of the word "rock" in
their language

that's just what gender endings do and adjectives agree with them. the fact they neatly
coincide with many male/female concepts is a nice addition which makes it a generally
accurate description, but the gender of a chair is a pointless thing; it's just of a
certain grammatical gender because it's useful to decline it that way.

same way contractions are used to make pronunciation and writing easier
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Henkkles
Triglot
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Finland
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 Message 14 of 26
19 August 2013 at 5:51pm | IP Logged 
I'm pretty sure that whenever I type a post people read only one single paragraph of it and get stuck on it and ignore everything else that I say. The genders of nouns are the smallest thing and the cause of least aggravation to me out of all things I've mentioned but I don't see anyone posting about anything else, heh. Just accepting they're just names for declensional patterns brings us to the point where the aggravation is caused by the need to have multiple different declensional patterns. I digress, it's no use complaining about the feats of languages and like I said (and many conveniently missed); they don't usually cause aggravation, but when they do, I need something to think to make the aggravation go away. To explain it away. I'm thankful of the solutions some people have posted and so on, because that's what I wanted it to be. Discussion about the irk-points and how do you cope with them.
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tarvos
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 Message 15 of 26
19 August 2013 at 5:54pm | IP Logged 
i just say "it's like that".

the target language is always right, even when it is wrong.
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emk
Diglot
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 Message 16 of 26
19 August 2013 at 5:59pm | IP Logged 
Henkkles wrote:
So it's not purely semantics or "a choice of words" but the objects themselves are apparently seen as pertaining to a gender.

At least in French, it's really the words that have gender, not the objects. For example, in Quebec my car is either ma voiture or mon char, depending on the level of formality. If somebody says that une personne is at the door, I've seen French speakers use the pronoun elle until a man walks through the door. And I saw a great example in a bande dessinée where a men's hockey team was named Les Flèches noires and the players were referred to as elles in the next sentence, because une flèche is feminine. And of course, if you refer to a feminine object as ça, which is really common in spoken French, any adjectives which follow will be masculine, because they agree with the pronoun, not the physical object's notional gender.

Edited by emk on 19 August 2013 at 6:00pm



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