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iguanamon
Pentaglot
Senior Member
Virgin Islands
Speaks: Ladino
Joined 5264 days ago
2241 posts - 6731 votes 
Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French)
| Message 201 of 211 28 August 2014 at 4:52am | IP Logged |
Language is imperfect and often imprecise. Of course it is. It's a human construct. Still, as humans, it seems to be in our nature to want to measure what cannot be measured. We seem not to be able to accept that some things are just not able to be known with certainty.
I've seen experiments done with people in passing a story along to those in front of them and the original story often is altered so radically in the telling that by the time it reaches the last person it bears little relation to the original version.
Books have been written about men and women who speak the same language but understand the meanings of the words differently. The same religious book can be interpreted in so many ways by different groups of people.
In the US, a Supreme Court exists to interpret the words of the Constitution and apply the law based upon that interpretation- of what the authors meant. Rarely is there a unanimous decision.
Then there's the famous quote from former President Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal testimony in front of a federal grand jury.
President Bill Clinton wrote:
| It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is. |
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If all this happens in one language, the same language, what hope do any of us have in quantifying comprehension in another language, even if we can define every word- if we can't even agree amongst ourselves about what we say to each other in our own language?
I'm reading a book in Spanish right now- Dispara, ya yo estoy muerto by Julia Navarro. It's a very good book. I'm really enjoying it. I probably look up a word every two or three pages. I would venture to say I understand most of it. I would also venture to say that other readers probably understand it in a different way than I do. So what. What matters is that I enjoy reading it. I can describe what I have read to someone else. I believe I understand it, even if that someone else may disagree with my interpretation. I couldn't put a number on my comprehension that would hold up in a court of law. Fortunately, HTLAL isn't a court and none of us are on trial. An estimate is good enough for me.
Edited by iguanamon on 28 August 2014 at 1:37pm
4 persons have voted this message useful
| s_allard
Triglot
Senior Member
Canada
Joined 5432 days ago
2704 posts - 5425 votes
Speaks: French*, English, Spanish
Studies: Polish
| Message 202 of 211 28 August 2014 at 5:29am | IP Logged |
emk wrote:
...
s_allard wrote:
Why does even a relatively advanced speaker of French, after reading and understanding these
two phrases
among many others, still make mistakes like *Cet beau café a été detruite pendant le guerre? |
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I'm not sure that a learner who regularly made mistake mistakes like this could be described as a "relatively
advanced speaker." Generally speaking, students taking the DELF B2 are expected to make occasional errors, but
to make very few consistent errors. And that sentence has consistently awful gender. The errors are
"unnatural", by which I mean that a student with any mastery whatsoever of gender would be unlikely to make
them.
Here are some mistakes that would be more "forgivable" at a B2 level, assuming they happened relatively rarely:
Quote:
1. *cette-F bel-M homme-M "that(/this) handsome man"
In French, cet-M and cette-F sound identical. You say cet-M homme-M "that man", because
homme starts with a vowel. But if you insert an adjective that starts with a consonant, you need to say ce-
M bel-M homme-M. This is an easy mistake, both because bel-M sounds like belle-F, and because
cet would be used if the adjective were missing.
2. *Cette-F belle-F maison-F a été detruit-M pendant le guerre. "That beautiful house was destroyed during
the war."
In this example, the short range agreements in Cette-F belle-F maison-F are correct, but the long-range
agreement with detruit-M is wrong. The further you get from the referent, the easier it is to lose track of the
gender.
3. *les photos-F que j'ai pris-M "the photos that I took"
Here, the verb should be prises, strictly speaking. But even native speakers get this wrong surprisingly often.
Apparently these rules are very "late acquired", and they're not consistently followed in some dialects of spoken
French.
4. *Le-M pont-M sur la-F route-F est détruite-F "the bridge on the road is destroyed"
This one is taken from one of the papers I linked
to above, where it was given as an example of a typical native-speaker gender error. Here, the word
route appears to be interfering with the gender of the word pont. English speakers sometimes make
similar errors with singular/plural agreement in complex sentences.
5. *mon-M chien-M est mignonne-F "my dog is cute"
This should be mignon. But for an English speaker, this error is probably a pronunciation error, and not a
grammatical error, because English speakers find it far easier to pronounce -onne (like the English "bone")
than the nasal vowel in -on. This error can persist for a long time, especially when tired. |
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Any of these errors, in isolation, would be perfectly normal for a B2 student, as would a certain amount of
guessing the gender of rare words. A student whose typical errors fall into one of these categories has at least
partially acquired the rules of French gender, even if they have trouble getting everything correct in fast speech.
But a student who constantly says things like *mon voiture or *cet beau café a été detruite would have
to have remarkably good skills elsewhere to do well on production sections a C1 exam.
Personally, I could easily believe that a student who consistently makes these blatant errors has excellent
comprehension of French, because you could erase the gender from a French text completely with little loss of
meaning. But this is one of several reasons that I don't believe in a strict version of the input hypothesis.
s_allard wrote:
Without going into much depth, I think that we can say that native speakers store, in some
manner, the
grammatical gender links that run horizontally through the phrase. The non-native speakers don't. And this is
the real problem of gender. It's not about getting the right gender of the noun; after all you have at least a 50%
chance and many nouns have predictable gender. The real problem is getting all the horizontal links right.
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This is an excellent point. I would go so far as to say that a student who has thoroughly mastered the gender of
everything except nouns is actually in pretty good shape—at the very least, they should be able to learn the
gender of individual nouns quickly.
...
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Before I get to more substantial issues, I want to take particular exception with the last line above "... student
who has thoroughly mastered the gender of everything except nouns is actually in pretty good shape—at the
very least, they should be able to learn the gender of individual nouns quickly." I don't see how someone could
master gender without nouns since the noun is the hub of the gender system. Gender radiates backwards and
forwards from the noun. The noun and its gender is the given on which the system is based.
Rather than trying to determine what are logical or illogical gender mistakes, I think it's best to look at examples
of what people actually say. We know that certain mistakes stem from the influence of the first language. How
this relates to gender is not easy to determine. What we do see is that certain mistakes becomes fossilized or
crystallized in the user's speech and remain despite the exposure to perfectly correct forms. Here are examples
from the speech of an English-speaking protestant minister from Montreal speaking a very fluent and otherwise
excellent French:
le visite, cet monsieur, son spiritualité, le chaire. son visite, son présence.
Note the presence of "cet monsieur". What we see is a tendency to use a masculine modifier with the feminine
noun. Is this an influence of English? Could be. These examples are not very different from the other example
that I presented earlier. When mistakes become ingrained they become part of the individuals system and rarely
go away without specific attention.
I think for example of a French-speaking student of English who is persistently having problems with -s at the
end of words. She puts them in the wrong place and omits them when necessary. What I find interesting is that
this person reads extensively in English, has studied at the university level in the United States and has worked in
English.
Edited by s_allard on 28 August 2014 at 5:35am
1 person has voted this message useful
| Chung
Diglot
Senior Member
Joined 7158 days ago
4228 posts - 8259 votes
20 sounds
Speaks: English*, French
Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish
| Message 203 of 211 28 August 2014 at 6:31am | IP Logged |
Stolan wrote:
Can you name a single non-Indo European or IE influenced language that inflects adjectives inconsistently for case
number and gender, has derivational morphology in place of inflectional, and is filled with broken syntactical
redundancy? French conjugation only adds irregularity, it just sits there as a feature to brag about. |
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What's the point of this challenge? And why the flying ғц¢ќ have you tried to turn a thread about quantifying comprehension to an outlet for your pet theories and stomping your feet over certain features from a grab-bag of languages?
You know what? Ask a professional linguist about that piece of trivia using that exact wording. I'd like to see that.
8 persons have voted this message useful
| Chung
Diglot
Senior Member
Joined 7158 days ago
4228 posts - 8259 votes
20 sounds
Speaks: English*, French
Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish
| Message 204 of 211 28 August 2014 at 7:14pm | IP Logged |
s_allard wrote:
luke wrote:
...
s_allard wrote:
For example, grammatical gender is a big problem for English-speakers in French and many
other languages. But gender is omnipresent in French. You can't hear or read French without seeing it
constantly. Why then do English-speaking learners make so many mistakes? |
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French gender is much harder to predict than in, say, Spanish. |
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French grammatical gender is not harder to predict than in any other language with gender. The very cause of
the problem is precisely this trying to predict gender from the form of the noun instead of learning the gender in
the first place. |
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This seems odd to me because the technique of learning the gender with every noun is not prediction. It's brute-force memorization. From there one can say that French grammatical gender is indeed harder to predict since there's no reliable way to know the gender a randomly-sampled noun just by looking at it without some demonstrative pronoun or article. There's nothing to predict about gender if you learn "book" as "le livre" rather than "livre" or "house" as "la maison" rather than "maison"
As an alternative, one can say that trying to predict French grammatical gender is often a fruitless exercise as your explanation below leads us to conclude. Therefore prediction of French grammatical gender at best is a restricted concept because except for classes of words ending with certain derivational suffixes (e.g. nouns ending in "-tion" are feminine), you can't reliably determine the gender of a noun just by considering its form.
s_allard wrote:
One of the most harmful myths of many learners of French is that nouns ending in -e are feminine. Many words
ending in -e, if not most, are probably feminine, but if you follow this rule you are guaranteed to make many
mistakes because a) certain words ending in -e are not feminine and b) many words that do not end in -e are
also feminine.
Why do native speakers of French hardly ever make gender mistakes? There are some dual gender words and
dialectal differences, e.g. une job vs un job, une ascenseur vs un ascenseur but these are quite rare.
The key to mastering the gender system in French, and probably in all gender languages, is to do what natives do
and that is to learn gender as an integral part of the word. This applies to the article that often accompanies the
noun also to all the words that must agree with the noun. In other words, gender is very much part of the native
comprehension of a noun or sentence. In the following sentence:
La maison est belle
a native speaker links La maison and belle into sort of unit that we would call agreement. Maison does not exist
without la, and belle goes with maison where necessary. There is no question of trying to predict whether maison
is feminine or masculine. |
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s_allard, may I introduce you to grammatical gender in some Slavonic languages. To keep it brief, I'll just bring up Russian, although the principles described below are similar to those followed in other Slavonic languages. The suggestion that learning gender as an integral part of the word is questionable given how reliably one can determine grammatical gender just by looking at the noun's ending. I certainly didn't learn the gender of nouns in BCMS/SC, Czech, Polish, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian and Ukrainian by attaching demonstrative pronouns in front of each of them as I encountered them.
Gender and the Russian Case System. Russian Language Lesson 6 wrote:
[...]Gender of nouns.
In Russian, as with many other languages, each noun is assigned a gender. Russian has three genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter (neutral). In the cases of words like “father” these relate to physical gender. In the case of other objects like “pen”, “cup”, “house”, there is no physical meaning attached to the gender. However you will still need to know the gender because it affects how words are formed. Luckily, unlike many languages, in Russian it is almost always possible to tell what the gender of a noun by its spelling. This is not true in some other languages where you just have to memorise them.
When you use a noun as the subject of a sentence, it will be in its dictionary form. In this form you can easily work out it’s gender. If the noun is in another part of the sentence the ending is changed to suit the case. From the dictionary form of a noun, here is how you can tell what the gender is:
1. Look at the last letter of the word:
2. If it is a consonant, or “й”, the word is masculine.
3. If it is “а” or “я” it is feminine.
4. If it is “о” or “е” it is neuter.
5. If it is a soft sign “ь” then it could be either masculine or feminine.
There are very few exceptions to these rules. But there are five notable exceptions, this occurs mainly because of physical gender.
Папа - (Daddy, Papa) - Is Masculine
Дядя - (Uncle) - Is Masculine
Дедушка - (Grandfather) - Is Masculine
Мужчина - (Man) - Is Masculine
Кофе - (Coffee) - Is Masculine (however neuter is now acceptable)
Some examples:
Masculine : паспорт (passport), документ (document), брат (brother), Хлеб (bread).
Feminine : газета (newspaper), Россия (Russia), Дочь (daughter)
Neuter : здание (building), радио (radio), письмо (letter) (Source) |
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(bolding is by me)
2 persons have voted this message useful
| s_allard
Triglot
Senior Member
Canada
Joined 5432 days ago
2704 posts - 5425 votes
Speaks: French*, English, Spanish
Studies: Polish
| Message 205 of 211 28 August 2014 at 7:56pm | IP Logged |
I certainly agree that in certain languages, like Russian, grammatical gender is more predictable than in French. And
I would now amend my original statement and say that in French gender is indeed harder to predict by just the form
of the word. What I intended to say was more to the effect that speakers of French do not rely solely on the form of
the noun to determine the gender, as many learners attempt to do. On other hand, learners of Russian can safely go
by the noun ending.
1 person has voted this message useful
| Stolan
Senior Member
United States
Joined 4034 days ago
274 posts - 368 votes
Speaks: English*
Studies: Thai, Lowland Scots
Studies: Arabic (classical), Cantonese
| Message 206 of 211 29 August 2014 at 2:35am | IP Logged |
Chung wrote:
What's the point of this challenge? And why the flying ғц¢ќ have you tried to turn a thread about quantifying
comprehension to an outlet for your pet theories and stomping your feet over certain features from a grab-bag of
languages?
You know what? Ask a professional linguist about that piece of trivia using that exact wording. I'd like to see that.
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Why has this thread started discussing gender in French instead of comprehension?
2 persons have voted this message useful
| s_allard
Triglot
Senior Member
Canada
Joined 5432 days ago
2704 posts - 5425 votes
Speaks: French*, English, Spanish
Studies: Polish
| Message 207 of 211 29 August 2014 at 4:50am | IP Logged |
If I can intervene here is this heated debate, I think the reason we got on to gender is that we were, and still are,
looking at how learners and native speakers understand grammatical features as part of the larger process of
comprehension.
We notice that learners, despite being exposed to the correct forms continuously, make gender agreement
mistakes that native speakers would never make. Even though we are more interested in comprehension than
speaking here, I suggest that this phenomenon can be explained by the fact that these learners do not initially
understand the gender agreement system when they read or listen to French. But this does not prevent the learner
from understanding the overall meaning of the text.
1 person has voted this message useful
| tarvos
Super Polyglot
Winner TAC 2012
Senior Member
China
likeapolyglot.wordpr
Joined 4709 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 208 of 211 29 August 2014 at 10:47am | IP Logged |
Chung wrote:
s_allard wrote:
luke wrote:
...
s_allard wrote:
For example, grammatical gender is a big problem for English-speakers
in French and many
other languages. But gender is omnipresent in French. You can't hear or read French
without seeing it
constantly. Why then do English-speaking learners make so many mistakes? |
|
|
French gender is much harder to predict than in, say, Spanish. |
|
|
French grammatical gender is not harder to predict than in any other language with
gender. The very cause of
the problem is precisely this trying to predict gender from the form of the noun
instead of learning the gender in
the first place. |
|
|
This seems odd to me because the technique of learning the gender with every noun is
not prediction. It's brute-force memorization. From there one can say that French
grammatical gender is indeed harder to predict since there's no reliable way to know
the gender a randomly-sampled noun just by looking at it without some demonstrative
pronoun or article. There's nothing to predict about gender if you learn "book" as "le
livre" rather than "livre" or "house" as "la maison" rather than "maison"
As an alternative, one can say that trying to predict French grammatical gender is
often a fruitless exercise as your explanation below leads us to conclude. Therefore
prediction of French grammatical gender at best is a restricted concept because except
for classes of words ending with certain derivational suffixes (e.g. nouns ending in "-
tion" are feminine), you can't reliably determine the gender of a noun just by
considering its form.
s_allard wrote:
One of the most harmful myths of many learners of French is that nouns
ending in -e are feminine. Many words
ending in -e, if not most, are probably feminine, but if you follow this rule you are
guaranteed to make many
mistakes because a) certain words ending in -e are not feminine and b) many words that
do not end in -e are
also feminine.
Why do native speakers of French hardly ever make gender mistakes? There are some dual
gender words and
dialectal differences, e.g. une job vs un job, une ascenseur vs un ascenseur but these
are quite rare.
The key to mastering the gender system in French, and probably in all gender languages,
is to do what natives do
and that is to learn gender as an integral part of the word. This applies to the
article that often accompanies the
noun also to all the words that must agree with the noun. In other words, gender is
very much part of the native
comprehension of a noun or sentence. In the following sentence:
La maison est belle
a native speaker links La maison and belle into sort of unit that we would call
agreement. Maison does not exist
without la, and belle goes with maison where necessary. There is no question of trying
to predict whether maison
is feminine or masculine. |
|
|
s_allard, may I introduce you to grammatical gender in some Slavonic languages. To keep
it brief, I'll just bring up Russian, although the principles described below are
similar to those followed in other Slavonic languages. The suggestion that learning
gender as an integral part of the word is questionable given how reliably one can
determine grammatical gender just by looking at the noun's ending. I certainly didn't
learn the gender of nouns in BCMS/SC, Czech, Polish, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian and
Ukrainian by attaching demonstrative pronouns in front of each of them as I encountered
them.
Gender and the Russian Case System. Russian Language Lesson 6 wrote:
[...]Gender of
nouns.
In Russian, as with many other languages, each noun is assigned a gender. Russian has
three genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter (neutral). In the cases of words like
“father” these relate to physical gender. In the case of other objects like “pen”,
“cup”, “house”, there is no physical meaning attached to the gender. However you will
still need to know the gender because it affects how words are formed. Luckily,
unlike many languages, in Russian it is almost always possible to tell what the gender
of a noun by its spelling. This is not true in some other languages where you just have
to memorise them.
When you use a noun as the subject of a sentence, it will be in its dictionary form. In
this form you can easily work out it’s gender. If the noun is in another part of the
sentence the ending is changed to suit the case. From the dictionary form of a noun,
here is how you can tell what the gender is:
1. Look at the last letter of the word:
2. If it is a consonant, or “й”, the word is masculine.
3. If it is “а” or “я” it is feminine.
4. If it is “о” or “е” it is neuter.
5. If it is a soft sign “ь” then it could be either masculine or feminine.
There are very few exceptions to these rules. But there are five notable exceptions,
this occurs mainly because of physical gender.
Папа - (Daddy, Papa) - Is Masculine
Дядя - (Uncle) - Is Masculine
Дедушка - (Grandfather) - Is Masculine
Мужчина - (Man) - Is Masculine
Кофе - (Coffee) - Is Masculine (however neuter is now acceptable)
Some examples:
Masculine : паспорт (passport), документ (document), брат (brother), Хлеб (bread).
Feminine : газета (newspaper), Россия (Russia), Дочь (daughter)
Neuter : здание (building), радио (radio), письмо (letter)
(Source) |
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(bolding is by me) |
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я is neuter in the ending -мя. There are some common words with this ending, such as
время, имя, пламя etc.
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