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Lack of Noun Gender in English | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Papashaw1 Newbie Australia Joined 3835 days ago 30 posts - 35 votes | Message 113 of 126 06 January 2014 at 6:13pm | IP Logged | |||||
It's just that English lost gender but these languages never had them, It is features of many languages to have some sort of class system in their earlier stages whether counting words, gender, or animacy etc. but as far back as can be seen in recorded history, I can't see them in the ancestors of many agglutinating Turkic or Uralic languages. (Or Altaic if you believe in it) I am not calling them uncultured, but I think some sort of association method existed for many languages in one way or the other. Or classing was a fluke that happened recently somehow for select few. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| daegga Tetraglot Senior Member Austria lang-8.com/553301 Joined 4325 days ago 1076 posts - 1792 votes  Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Swedish, Norwegian Studies: Danish, French, Finnish, Icelandic | Message 114 of 126 06 January 2014 at 11:49pm | IP Logged | |||||
One word: disambiguation. A guess you couldn't appreciate scaldic poems. Or Latin literature. Not agreeing for gender and cases would make at least the former (almost) impossible to read. Edited by daegga on 06 January 2014 at 11:50pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5234 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 115 of 126 07 January 2014 at 2:35am | IP Logged | |||||
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I can't really comment on the origins or even the development of grammatical gender, but there seems to be
quite a bit of literature on the subject. What many observers have also pointed out is how useless grammatical gender agreement is in terms of adding information to the phrase. As much as *La beau voiture instead of La belle voiture may hurt the ear of a native speaker of French, there is really no difference in meaning. I tend to think that the systemization of gender agreement rules was probably the result of the development of standardized grammars for schooling and literature. When you look at non-standard speech or dialects, you see that the grammatical gender agreement is much looser. And when you look at all the French creoles, grammatical gender agreement disappears completely. Even in English where grammatical agreement centers on number and subject / object pronouns, there is quite a bit of variability in actual usage. In addition to all the exceptions and special cases that learners of standard English have to study, non-standard or dialectal English is full of examples of simplifications of grammatical agreement. I'm thinking of things like: I is, you is, he is, I see she, I see he, I done go, I be gone, etc. I wonder if there are similar things in those languages with those very complicated gender and case systems. I would think that there must be some trends or forms of simplification in the spoken language. This makes me think that in reality grammatical gender agreement systems are not as complex as they seem. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| 1e4e6 Octoglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4094 days ago 1013 posts - 1588 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Norwegian, Dutch, Swedish, Italian Studies: German, Danish, Russian, Catalan | Message 116 of 126 07 January 2014 at 2:54am | IP Logged | |||||
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It is true that in non-standard English, dialetical English, and creole-style English,
especially in the British West Indies, one can say, "Me goesd done them dinner cook already" instead of "I have already cooked dinner", "I yes now goes picks them ting in store" instead of, "I shall now go to the store to buy some produce", but these colloquialisms can never be used in standard English, especially written English--i.e. I highly doubt anyone would write a dissertation, thesis, legal report, accounting file, etc. with "Them files here yes for you read", but gender is used in both colloquial and formal written discourse for genders languages such as the Romance family, the Germanic family, etc. Also one can construct their own colloquialisms like "I does goes" or whatever, and I know this because my grandparents who were born in the British West Indies speak like this, and I have heard it since I was born, but one cannot deliberately mess up gender in nouns, adjectives, etc. in French or Spanish for it to be considered correct standard speech. I doubt that any colloquialism exists in French where one can say, «J'ai acheté un voiture» as a dialect either because it is done deliberately to sound alarming or the speaker somehow never learnt basic noun gender despite being a native speaker. In some parts of Hispanoamerica, Andalucía, and Las Canarias, often the speakers there leave out the plural <s> in Spanish, i.e. in Chile I often hear things such as, «Ello trabajaban todo lo día», but this is not ignoring proper conjugations or noun agreement, it simply is just that they leave off the <s> quite often in general. Edited by 1e4e6 on 07 January 2014 at 3:05am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5234 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 117 of 126 07 January 2014 at 3:24am | IP Logged | |||||
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As I myself pointed out, the variations from rules of standard grammar are to be found in popular, uneducated and
dialectal speech. I have certainly not suggested that one can or should spontaneously use non-standard items in situations that call for standard speech. After a bit of poking around on the Net I did find a number of articles that looked at the loss or change of grammatical gender agreement in languages in contact with other languages. Two well-studied examples are Spanish and Russian in America. The case of American Russian, the language of second-generation immigrants, is quite interesting because the case and gender system has nearly completely broken down. (Sorry, I haven't gotten the link to work properly yet) http://clo.canadatoyou.com/32/Pereltsvaig(2004)CLO32_87-107. pdf Edited by s_allard on 07 January 2014 at 3:31am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4337 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 118 of 126 07 January 2014 at 8:52am | IP Logged | |||||
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John McWhorter, who is an expert in creole and contact languages, makes the argument in his book Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue that much of the simplification in English grammar came about due contact with Norse settlers in the North and East England.
He makes it clear in his book that his is a minority view, but it's an interesting read. Edited by patrickwilken on 07 January 2014 at 8:52am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Stolan Senior Member United States Joined 3836 days ago 274 posts - 368 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Thai, Lowland Scots Studies: Arabic (classical), Cantonese | Message 119 of 126 07 January 2014 at 10:20pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I find some doubt in John Mcwhorter's words but I agree with some. He equates inflectional morphology too often,
and yes, allophones occurs, but aren't there other areas in any language? He seems to believe the drift towards analyticalicy in Europe is not part of some cycle, they may be simplifying, but they may become inflecting simpler languages in millennia! Stream of conscious time: English is simplifying along with Mandarin (shaved of classifiers and particles) and Persian and Indonesian had it bad, maybe worse in my opinion. Spanish still conjugates, but it has only 5 vowels, 18 consonants, and is syllable timed, and it is still very straightforward. But he reasons it isn't to far fetched to assume Spanish is more complex than English, but..... well, they are both watered down in different areas. Spanish got it in pronunciation mostly. I think what happened to English isn't unique when a language need become something simple enough for L2 learners. I think the bias towards inflection is still too strong and gets in the way of actually comparing the possible complexities there are. To S-Allard, again you equate cases and conjugations with grammatical complexity, ach, how often must I say it! It is possible for a language to be highly inflection, regular, and genderless. And Analytical language can invest their strengths elsewhere, English never got that chance since it didn't have time to get back on its feet. But I agree, features can be pressed by prescriptivism. I really suspect the word order of verbal clusters in German is prescribed since something like Swiss German has 1-2-3, 3-2-1, 1-3-2, 2-1-3, 1-2, 2-1, as variations, but the prescribed order is only 3-2-1, and 1-3-2 for ersatz infinitives. Older German texts had instances of 1-2 like Dutch. Which reminds me, English word order is not being used to its fullest, there are many cases where we can play around with it but we choose not to. This whole thing should he get finished (OSV with v2.) I, to Africa, leave. (SOV with location, same as in Cantonese, and they drop the preposition) In Cantonese, it can be "I Africa go" and they don't conjugate yet they still say it even if it is a bit ambiguous. Nothing said he (V2.) We could use auxiliaries to create other orders too. (Hit the man, the man did) (understandable) But we don't so much. Native English speakers just are going with the flow a bit, I don't know how new features come or how to implement them, and it can't be done. John Mcwhorter does mention what English has lost and I'll add some too. "be perfect, inalienable possession, gender, v2, become passive, hither and hence, yonder, indefinite man, pronominal adverbs, prefixes, thou, inherent reflexives, simplified plurals, lack of umlauting in comparatives, and modal particles, dear lord, modal particles are in Dutch too" But Mcwhorter always mentions how English is so easy. He mentions Russian a lot, 3 gender (ok), word order(huh?) how it is hard to pronounce (but are other languages hard for Russian to pronounce hmm?), verbs of motion (Don't we have phrasal verbs?), cases and adjective inflection (the gender really multiplies the factors), conjugation (hear it is pretty bad, I guess it is the stress, consonant shifts? Does he consider there might be pronunciation shifts in English too that just aren't reflected in the orthography? Yes, I know it may be more irregular in Russian by miles) Yes Russian is harder than English because it hasn't been smoothed over, but you cannot act as if these other features are just different for you. Could English have the potential of becoming a complex analytical language with even more vowels in the future if native speakers "breed" it in that direction? (I entertain this though) Reading his articles make me cringe. He joked about how non-natives speak better Engish (so original), Mandarin is so complex to pronounce so it cannot be a lingua franca, I would just stop at the writing system, but even then, it is no longer the same as was before, you don't need to memorize brushstrokes now. (few vowels and no consonant clusters are a decent trade off for 4 tones) and he doesn't take into account a speaker of a tonal language may find Mandarin pronunciation easier than western ones. He says English is easy to pronounce unlike Czech with has a strange r sound (oh, so our 12 vowels and 8 diphthongs don't mean anything?) etc. He mentioned how algonquin languages are still polsynthetic like proto-algonquin, so he suspects that the change in European languages is unusual now. He claimed languages mostly stayed the same for the most 150,000 years they have existed (how could he know?), but now they loose inflection. And that asian languages that are uninflecting are naturally tonal and filled with classifier as a counter balance (Chinese didn't have them in full use during the Bronze age, and tones did not come around until a few centuries later), that they remain uninflected and are not really changing or gaining inflections for a while. (new Mandarin plural marker -men doesn't count as a suffix?) As Strange as it seems, I feel like English articles could number more. We only have 3, German has 12, Spanish 8. Instead of agreeing for gender, each articles could define a different definiteness, that would be cooler, why am I thinking this hmmm? I think they do something like that in some Islander languages. Edited by Stolan on 07 January 2014 at 10:59pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| 1e4e6 Octoglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4094 days ago 1013 posts - 1588 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Norwegian, Dutch, Swedish, Italian Studies: German, Danish, Russian, Catalan | Message 120 of 126 07 January 2014 at 11:14pm | IP Logged | |||||
I do not imply that you meant that non-standard colloquialisms could be used in standard speech, especially formal standard written language, what you said is true. But what I meant was that gendered languages need their speakers to internalise gender in nouns and branch this into adjectivial, adverbial, case, etc. agreements in grammar, regardless of register. However, the non-standard English colloquialisms only rest within their sphere of informal or dialectal speech, never entering the realm of standard English, especially formal and/or written English. This is not the case with French or Spanish--in formal speech, one obviously says "la belle voiture", but also in dialetical or informal speech. There is no dialect or informal language in French whereby one can completely ignore noun gender, or use only one article, or deliberately or accidentally use the wrong gender for a noun and have the speech be acceptable. Same for Spanish, Portuguese, the Germanic languages, etc. Should there exist such a dialect whereby a gendered language can ignore gender, then stand I corrected. But I have never encountered such a phenomenon that can be juxtaposed with non-standard English colloquialisms. There are some forms of English whereby the speaker uses incorrect grammar, sometimes alarmingly and elementarily incorrect, in order to sound stylish. I have heard some acquaintances deliberately use object pronouns in place of possessive pronouns, e.g., "I forgot me books in me house" or even creating new possessive pronouns, e.g., "Where is yous car?" in place of, "Where is your car?", but I have never seen any dialect or informal speech in a gendered language where they deliberately try to make mistakes with regards to gender. Old English had five cases, three genders, a dual form, and three word orders (SOV, SVO, OVS), but Modern English seems to have simplified so greatly compared to other languages, especially with regards to gender. Losing not only all three genders, but the concept of noun gender completely. The only other language that I know that somewhat lost genders is Dutch, which essentially, at least in cuotidane language, lost its distinction between masculine and feminine from its original three genders of masculine feminine, and neuter. Then it has "gendered", which is a combination of masculine and feminine but with most speakers using a masculine article, and neuter, which uses the neuter article. Probably Old English speakers, if the language existed now, would have less trouble with learning gendered languages (and probably cased languages as well). Edited by 1e4e6 on 07 January 2014 at 11:26pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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