It’s a rare example of English being simpler than other languages, so I’m curious if it’s hard for a new speaker to keep the nouns straight without the extra clues.
not at all. it simplifies the learning experience by quite a bunch.
one of the more confusing is learning other gendered languages where the gender of some object is different to the one in your mother tongue
To make matters worse, some languages have the exact same word but with a different gender. Heat in Spanish is el calor but in Catalán is la calor
To make matters even worse, in some languages the exact same word with different gender has different meaning.
In German:
“der Band”, male, = a (book) volume
“das Band”, neutral, = ribbon
“die Band”, female = (music) bandBonus: “die Bande” can be a gang, a sports barrier, and (relationship) ties.
one of the more confusing is learning other gendered languages where the gender of some object is different to the one in your mother tongue
That’s something I hadn’t really considered. Interesting!
Non-gendered wording isn’t exclusive to English, it’s mostly other European languages that stick to doing that.
There are some languages that don’t even have different words for “he” and “she”.
Edit: made the wording less asshole-y
Non-gendered wording isn’t exclusive to English. Asia exists.
I wasn’t trying to imply otherwise.
Thanks for the insight!
Chinese is even cooler in that they don’t need different, often irregular versions of the same word for tense and plural either.
If you want to be more confused, you should know that some languages have gendered verbs.
I’m a Finnish speaker. Nouns aren’t gendered in Finnish either, so that’s not weird.
Things that do trip me up:
- Pronouns (lack of T/V distinction (i.e. just one “you”) and gendered third person)
- Articles (Finnish doesn’t have articles as such, so adding them sometimes takes some brainpower)
- so freaking many irregular verbs etc
- seriously what is this orthography even (Finnish grammar may be complex, but the same can’t be said of the pronunciation)
Actually, I’m learning French right now and gendered nouns aren’t even that much of a problem. I was dreading the numerals more.
We actually do have a second person singular, “thou.” We just transitioned out of using it because ‘politeness’. Thou could useth the second person singular, but thou would soundeth quite archaic. (Think I conjugated that correctly.) You can still see it used in some religious texts in reference to God.
I believe it’d be thou wouldst sound archaic or thou soundest [most] archaic, in early modern English depending on the tense, but that’s a great point.
I think you’re right. I didn’t think the “helper words” in the conditional should get conjugated, but I grabbed a Book of Common Prayer off the shelf and there’s a bunch of “thou shalt” + infinitive, so evidently the conditional does get conjugated (in addition to “thou didst” and “thou hast”.) Pretty sure I noticed some 2nd person weak verbs that looked like they had the same conjugation as the 3rd person (eg “Remember thou keep holy …”) I did note “he cometh”, so maybe that -eth ending is actually an older conjugation for the 3rd person that later morphed into an -s ending? Just noticed “he saith (says)”, and the confirmed -eth ending on a bunch of 3rd person congregations. Interestingly, I found a LOT of “thou shalt”, some “thou wilt”, but no “thou couldst” or “thou wouldst”. Probably because the BCP is all like, “you WILL, this is not an option, sinner.”
I don’t know though! I’m a typical English first language speaker and I’m just going with what feels right and using my understanding of grammar from my French education.
It does get confusing! I’m kind of a Shakespeare nerd, and the cult I was in till I was a young adult was big on the King James Version of the bible, so I guess I’ve just had a lot of exposure. I don’t really know the rules.
The nouns still are gendered. Only the article is gender-neutral.
Tarzan is a man. He lives in the jungle.
Jane is a woman. She is visiting Africa.
The elephant is a non-named animal. It eats fruits and leaves.
If you really want to know a confusing issue about the English language, just look at the pronunciation of words. It is more or less rule-free, and all over the place. Don’t believe me? Try to read the poem “The Chaos” aloud. Even most native speakers need several attempts.
It still bugs me that Sean Bean’s name doesn’t rhyme.
Where, were, ware…
I will read that book again that i read before
Not with that attitude it doesn’t!
Try Finnish or Hungarian, even their pronouns are genderless.
OK, but ugro-finnic languages are incredibly harder compared to English, I would say even much harder than German (saying this as a basic Estonian speaker - which is similar to Finnish from what I can tell).
You get used to it. The other way around is likely a lot harder, considering that a new concept is being introduced.
As someone trying to learn Spanish I wish there was no gendering in Spanish. It makes the language significantly harder to learn.
Not at all, it’s easier that other gendered languages since object genders get shuffled up.
Not a problem at all for me.
I find the lack of capitalisation to be worse honestly. A lot of sentences where it is not clear at first whether something is a noun or not
Capitalisation also makes skimming texts so much easier and faster since you can just jump from noun to noun until you find something relevant. I wish more languages would do it.
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Some of them are, which is even more confusing.
For the most part I don’t think about it at all. I guess you only consider things when they cause extra effort, in this case it mostly doesn’t so it’s very unconscious. That said, I generally use the few gendered ones I know (I listed in another comment) because it is the way my native language works.
By the way, from grammar perspective English is a very simple language. Compared to similar languages (French, Italian etc.), for example, verbs are much simpler too. The harder part of English I think has to do with pronounce.
Eh, gendered nouns are just an old holdover. At least English (usually) uses words to improve specificity. For example, “Pick up my medicine” as opposed to “pick up medicine.” It seems redundant to some until suddenly you need to specify after the fact.
The more precise the language the fewer chances of miscommunication. A perfect language would be precise and unambiguous without deliberate effort (as opposed to laziness, slang, shorthand, etc.) which is probably completely impossible to craft, much less about.
I disagree that being perfectly unambiguous is a feature of a “perfect” language.
Ambiguity creates holes for us to fill, and some people don’t realize how good it feels to fill those holes.
Out of German and English, I always found German to be better suited for factual texts (scientific papers and essays, news textbooks, encyclopedias etc.) because it’s less ambiguous and English for more creative writing (novels, poems, opinion pieces, speeches etc.) because there is more scope for the imagination and the ambiguity leaves more room for double entendres, puns and other fun stuff. There are advantages to both.
