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Gender articles for nouns - why? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| translator2 Senior Member United States Joined 6920 days ago 848 posts - 1862 votes  Speaks: English* | Message 34 of 55 26 February 2011 at 4:14pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Phonology of German Gender
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| 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 36 of 55 26 February 2011 at 5:35pm | IP Logged | |||||
Edited by Cainntear on 26 February 2011 at 5:35pm 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 37 of 55 26 February 2011 at 5:42pm | IP Logged | |||||
As I understand it Death is "he" when personified in terms of the riders of the apocalypse (from the Book of Revelation in the New Testament). I've never seen "love" described as "he", but the most commonly used mythological figure tied to love is Cupid, who was "he". The distiction is that when we personify an abstract idea (ie when we treat it as though it is a human person, body and soul), the gender depends on that personification. If all we do is anthopomorphise either an idea or a concrete object (ie treat it as though it has human motivation, but don't imply it is physically human), we use "she". 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Raчraч Ŋuɲa Triglot Senior Member New Zealand Joined 5819 days ago 154 posts - 233 votes Speaks: Bikol languages*, Tagalog, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, Russian, Japanese | Message 39 of 55 27 February 2011 at 3:17am | IP Logged | |||||
I think you just have to accept this as a feature of these languages. If your criteria is that one language can go along without it, then tense (past, present, future) would count as a useless feature of English. Other languages are fine without tense affixes, like Mandarin and even Tagalog. Its also confusing since you can use the different tenses for what they are not supposed to be used, like present tense to talk about the future, or use of past tense for future.. According to this, there are 6 tenses to talk about the past. How is that for muddying English waters? 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Kartof Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5067 days ago 391 posts - 550 votes Speaks: English*, Bulgarian*, Spanish Studies: Danish | Message 40 of 55 27 February 2011 at 6:31am | IP Logged | |||||
Yes, that's a really good point that you make in which the link to gender may be because of the category the word that denotes the sex is in. However, why is it then that in most languages the article is based on gender and not on some other arbitrary category like its color or its shape? It'd be interesting if languages were reorganized in such way. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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