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Gender articles for nouns - why? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| zecchino1991 Senior Member United States facebook.com/amyybur Joined 5259 days ago 778 posts - 885 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, Modern Hebrew, Russian, Arabic (Written), Romanian, Icelandic, Georgian | Message 25 of 55 26 February 2011 at 1:45am | IP Logged | |||||
How does gender free up word order? Just curious. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| kmart Senior Member Australia Joined 6125 days ago 194 posts - 400 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian | Message 26 of 55 26 February 2011 at 7:21am | IP Logged | |||||
Sheesh, way to take all the romance out of a language. You might as well say get rid of all idioms and proverbs too. Language can be beautiful to look at as well as to speak. For example, my daughter's name "Shelagh" to me appears beautiful with it's complex Irish spelling, but plain with the more phonetic "Sheila" (and we don't actually pronounce it the traditional way, but that's another story). Fully phoneticized English looks ugly to me and would reduce the pleasure of reading. I always prefer classical books written with the spelling of the period, rather than modified to reflect modern spelling. Vive la difference! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7157 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 27 of 55 26 February 2011 at 7:44am | IP Logged | |||||
Now that you ask, I too wonder. Hungarian has no grammatical gender (and even less marking for natural gender than English) and very flexible word order. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6012 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 28 of 55 26 February 2011 at 9:41am | IP Logged | |||||
You've got that the wrong way round. Traditionally, category was synonymous with gender. In Modern English, the word "gender" has lost its meaning in everyday use, and has now become synonymous with only one type of categorisation -- classification by biological sex. But the term "gender" in grammar predates that change in meaning. It's a shame we didn't stop using it, because it has caused a lot of confusion to a lot of people. So we have "categories" in language, not "sexes". It just so happens that we often reuse these categories to denote sex, and the obvious label for these categories then becomes sex -- hence we call a French beer feminine, not because it is feminine, but because it is in the same category as women are. 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6012 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 29 of 55 26 February 2011 at 10:07am | IP Logged | |||||
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Gender helps by giving you more pronouns to play with. If we had a strict one-gender system, "he told me to give it to her" would be "it told me to give it to it".
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| Marc Frisch Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6666 days ago 1001 posts - 1169 votes Speaks: German*, French, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Persian, Tamil | Message 31 of 55 26 February 2011 at 3:39pm | IP Logged | |||||
I was thinking of examples where adjectives and nouns are separated for emphasis. Take the following example: Filius meus parvam casam non amat. Subject: filius meus - my son Object: parvam casam - the small house Verb: non amat - does not love To emphasize the small size of the house one might also say: Parvam filius meus casam non amat. In this case, the different endings signal that "parvam" belongs to "casam". But actually, I just realized that you only need unique case endings to have that effect... 1 person has voted this message useful |
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