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Grand Fromage posted:Can you give some examples? The only language I've learned in any detail with genders was German, and they're totally meaningless and arbitrary there. Well just that if you're talking about Animal Masculine and Animal Feminine, then you can say "it ate it" using gendered pronouns without confusion. Just like in English you can say "he loved her", but in Finnish you have to say "[name] loved her" or "the man loved her" or "he loved the woman" etc., because the pronouns don't have gender (or in Spoken Finnish animacy, so you'd say "it loved it").
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Dec 29, 2013 19:14
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Ras Het posted:They don't require huge amounts of active memorisation for the native speaker, because statistical learning does the job for you. So as such they're not an impediment and there's not necessarily a reason for them to disappear from language. There's languages with dozens of completely arbitrary noun classes. But I'll tell you what: to people whose native language doesn't have articles, those are just about as arbitrary and daft as gender is to you. Indeed. German distinction of genders makes much more sense to me that the arcane magic required to use English articles (both languages are foreign to me). German does have articles as well, but they are much easier to grasp.
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Dec 29, 2013 19:57
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Reveilled posted:Question for anyone who speaks a language with grammatical gender, did you learn a foreign language with grammatical gender in school, and how did you find that? I had a hard enough time remembering der/die/das for nouns when I learned German in school, I imagine it must be even worse if you already have genders for nouns in your own language and they bear no relation whatsoever to the genders of your own language. Or is it easier, because you already understand the concept? My native language is Romanian, and I speak French (which I learned for 11 years in school) and Italian (which I learned from watching Italian TV when I was a kid - they had the best cartoons!). The biggest problem I had was with the many words that are identical in Romanian and French/Italian, but have different genders (it mostly happened with Italian since I didn't learn it in an organized fashion). To make things worse, Romanian is the only Latin language that has preserved a neuter gender, and the way neuter nouns are handled is pretty arcane. So when speaking Italian, I tend to use the Romanian gender out of habit, and I think I'd have to like live in Italy for a long time and be immersed in the language to finally get all the genders right.
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Dec 29, 2013 20:15
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steinrokkan posted:Indeed. German distinction of genders makes much more sense to me that the arcane magic required to use English articles (both languages are foreign to me). German does have articles as well, but they are much easier to grasp. Can you explain what you don't get about English articles? I'm a native English speaker so of course they seem obvious to me, but I'm having difficulty figuring out how they can be confusing. I'm not trying to invalidate your opinion or belittle your intelligence; I'm genuinely curious. Here's how they work. English only has three articles: the, a, and an. Use "the" if you're talking about a specific thing, use "a" if you're talking about a nonspecific thing and he next word begins with a consonant sound, use "an" if you're talking about a nonspecific thing and the next word begins with a vowel sound, and use no article if you're talking about an actual person's or place's name (like Barack Obama or Chicago). Yes, there are exceptions, but these four rules cover 99.9% of cases. The only cause for confusion I can think of right off hand might be that the a/an distinction depends on the word immediately after the article, not the noun that he article is referring to. My German is far too rusty to be reliable, but if I remember right the article depends on the gender/case combination, and not every combination gets a unique article. That just seems a lot more complicated to a learner, though just as natural to a native speaker.
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Dec 29, 2013 20:28
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Golden_Zucchini posted:Here's how they work. English only has three articles: the, a, and an. Use "the" if you're talking about a specific thing, use "a" if you're talking about a nonspecific thing and he next word begins with a consonant sound, use "an" if you're talking about a nonspecific thing and the next word begins with a vowel sound, and use no article if you're talking about an actual person's or place's name (like Barack Obama or Chicago). Yes, there are exceptions, but these four rules cover 99.9% of cases. That's the basic framework, yes. But in practical use it doesn't seem to be nearly as regular, though it may be to some extent due to personal biases of every individual speaker in using them. Even after years of active use of English, I still get lots of articles wrong whenever I must use complicated expressions.
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Dec 29, 2013 20:50
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Maybe I just need to pay more attention to what my friends and I are actually saying, then.
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Dec 29, 2013 21:11
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Golden_Zucchini posted:Yes, there are exceptions, but these four rules cover 99.9% of cases. I think I found the .1% (and also I guess when Brits say "I went to hospital" or something)
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Dec 29, 2013 21:16
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Golden_Zucchini posted:Can you explain what you don't get about English articles? I'm a native English speaker so of course they seem obvious to me, but I'm having difficulty figuring out how they can be confusing. I'm not trying to invalidate your opinion or belittle your intelligence; I'm genuinely curious. It's intuitive to you because your native language has made you aware of any noun's definiteness. In most languages, definiteness or indefiniteness only needs to be marked when it's necessary for clarification. Look at this bit from The Metamorphosis: As he was thinking all this over in the greatest haste, without being able to make the decision to get out of bed (the alarm clock was indicating exactly quarter to seven) there was a cautious knock on the door by the head of the bed. None of those articles really need to be there. They have a grammatical function, but they're not exactly necessary for clarifying anything. Why "the greatest haste"? Well, it's an idiom, and there's a loving lot of those to learn. Why not "the bed"? It's a specific bed, isn't it? Why "the alarm clock"? Because somehow the idea that there's only one alarm clock next to Samsa's bed is there, somewhere between the lines of the text? Why not "the cautious knock"? And so on. None of this is intuitive if your language only marks definiteness when it's important.
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Dec 29, 2013 21:28
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Golden_Zucchini posted:Maybe I just need to pay more attention to what my friends and I are actually saying, then. What trips up a lot of people are things like "Bob Smith is a man you can trust." Bob Smith is a specific person, which makes ESL speakers assume that it should take the definite article, but the intent is to include Bob is a group of non-specific persons that share a particular attribute, making the indefinite article correct. Another frequent area of confusion is that the indefinite article can only be used with singular forms, and it is replaced or omitted entirely when dealing with plurals. (eg. "I had a meeting today." "I had three meetings today." "I had meetings all day today.") Conversely, you can use the definite article with plurals just fine. (eg. "I met with the client today." "I met with the clients today.") This inconsistency confuses the poo poo out of people who aren't familiar with the conventions.
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Dec 29, 2013 21:29
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Ras Het posted:It's intuitive to you because your native language has made you aware of any noun's definiteness. In most languages, definiteness or indefiniteness only needs to be marked when it's necessary for clarification. Look at this bit from The Metamorphosis: Protocol 5 posted:What trips up a lot of people are things like "Bob Smith is a man you can trust." Bob Smith is a specific person, which makes ESL speakers assume that it should take the definite article, but the intent is to include Bob is a group of non-specific persons that share a particular attribute, making the indefinite article correct. Another frequent area of confusion is that the indefinite article can only be used with singular forms, and it is replaced or omitted entirely when dealing with plurals. (eg. "I had a meeting today." "I had three meetings today." "I had meetings all day today.") Conversely, you can use the definite article with plurals just fine. (eg. "I met with the client today." "I met with the clients today.") This inconsistency confuses the poo poo out of people who aren't familiar with the conventions. Ah, these examples make a lot of sense. I understand the difficulty much better now. I guess I was even more oblivious to my own speech than I thought I was was. Thanks! Also, I'd completely forgotten about the differences between American and British usage.
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Dec 29, 2013 21:34
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Jedi Knight Luigi posted:I think I found the .1% American English has the same construction with school. We usually say, "I'm going to school." If we ever say, "the school," it usually means, "the school [building]," for some purpose other than learning. For example, a kid might say, "I can't go to school today, I'm sick," and his mother might reply, "I'll run to the school and pick up your assignments for the day."
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Dec 29, 2013 21:36
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Reveilled posted:Do you always refer to cats as she in German, then, even if it's an actual male cat? Or just for general use the way English speakers default to "it" if it's a cat of unknown gender? Well there is "Kater" for a male cat but I rarely use it. You see a cat you call that animal Katze. If someone asks you specifically you could say it's a Kater. Same with dogs. If someone asks about my sister's dog I call it "Hund" even if the dog is female and there is a German word for it (Huendin). It also depends on the dialect. Butter and Semmel (bun) are both feminine in standard German whereas in my dialect they are masculine. Can't think of any more examples right now.
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Dec 29, 2013 22:00
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Das Teller, das Monat, das Tunnel, der Kartoffel, der Schoklad (in Standard German der, der, der, die, die) - bronin and I speak related dialects. I've never heard of der Semmel, though!
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Dec 29, 2013 22:19
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Jedi Knight Luigi posted:With Bokmål though, you can use the masculine form for all feminine forms, so you'd only have two genders: neuter and common. I took Norwegian in college and we didn't bother with remembering which nouns were feminine.
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Dec 29, 2013 22:19
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System Metternich posted:Das Teller, das Monat, das Tunnel, der Kartoffel, der Schoklad (in Standard German der, der, der, die, die) - bronin and I speak related dialects. I've never heard of der Semmel, though! And I've never heard of das Monat 
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Dec 29, 2013 22:23
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System Metternich posted:der Kartoffel Don't you mean der Erdapfel? 
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Dec 29, 2013 22:27
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Some maps from Indigenous Tweets mapping Twitter conversations in Celtic languages. He can only localize certain percentage of tweets but it's interesting anyway. I expected Scottish Gaelic to be a lot more like the Welsh map and vice verse. http://indigenoustweets.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/mapping-celtic-twittersphere.html Welsh  Irish  Scottish Gaelic  Scottish Gaelic just in Great Britain and Ireland  Breton  Cornish  Manx 
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Dec 29, 2013 23:15
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Soviet Commubot posted:Irish Is that Chicago and St. Louis for Irish? I have Irish family here in St. Louis but they don't speak the language. It wouldn't be surprising given the past immigration patterns of those two cities that may lead to interest in the language, but "Irish identity" isn't as much of a thing here in the Midwest anymore as it would be in say, Boston/Massachusetts, outside of your last name starting with Mc or O' and knowing how to sing "Danny Boy". Are all of those Celtic language speakers in the American Midwest recent immigrants? edit: apologies if that's for Minneapolis and Kansas City, going with my gut on Chicago/St. Louis since they're much bigger, and more often immigration targets. I'd also be surprised to see Bosnian between St. Louis, NYC, and the Balkans.
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Dec 29, 2013 23:25
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I checked the top 500 list for Scottish Gaelic that was linked there - I'm not on it, it seems. Need to tweet more in Gaelic! Worth noting that the location mapping picks only one spot for each location listed in twitter bios, which especially affects the Manx map - there are three people off the Isle of Man tweeting in Manx, which is shown, but any intra-island conversations aren't mapped. Love those maps anyway. Really interesting.
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Dec 29, 2013 23:37
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dinoputz posted:Are all of those Celtic language speakers in the American Midwest recent immigrants? I honestly have no idea, although I think that would be a pretty fair bet. I was a bit surprised by so many tweets in Breton going to and from a single place in Ireland but I realized it's Galway which is a favorite Erasmus destination for students from Brittany. Also surprised at so many Irish tweets coming from Rennes but many of those might be people with Brittany as their location that he just stuck there for convenience's sake.
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Dec 29, 2013 23:47
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I'm more interested in those Irish tweets from Finland and Brazil. People on vacation maybe, especially the Brazil ones?
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Dec 30, 2013 00:01
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Deltasquid posted:Maybe Flemish will sound more similar to English for you, since the pronunciation differs quite a bit between the two countries. The woman going around asking instructions is Belgian. Um it always kind of irks me when people - especially Flemings - often unconsciously - describe Flemish as a language, which it isn't. There are differences between Standard Dutch in the Netherlands and Belgium, but these are more or less comparable to the differences between British and American English. Flemish dialects can be really different from Standard Dutch, but dialects in the eastern part of the Netherlands even moreso (because they're actually Low Saxon, but that's another story), and as a Fleming you know that dialects of Limburg are very different from those in West-Flanders, so 'Flemish' as a language doesn't exist.
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Dec 30, 2013 00:04
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Flagrant Abuse posted:I'm more interested in those Irish tweets from Finland and Brazil. People on vacation maybe, especially the Brazil ones? There exists a rather well-known Finnish internet personality who, among his many other facets, is an Irish-language enthusiast. He also lives in the city where the tweets come from. I would wager it's him.
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Dec 30, 2013 00:04
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Aaaww. 
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Dec 30, 2013 00:10
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Flagrant Abuse posted:I'm more interested in those Irish tweets from Finland and Brazil. People on vacation maybe, especially the Brazil ones? The tweets from Finland are made by a known shitheap rape defending linguist. Edit: heh, too slow.
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Dec 30, 2013 00:17
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What's with the Cornish tweets to/from the middle of Germany?
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Dec 30, 2013 00:24
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Germany tends to have a lot of Celtic language/culture enthusiasts for whatever reason.
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Dec 30, 2013 00:35
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Ras Het posted:They don't require huge amounts of active memorisation for the native speaker, because statistical learning does the job for you. So as such they're not an impediment and there's not necessarily a reason for them to disappear from language. There's languages with dozens of completely arbitrary noun classes. But I'll tell you what: to people whose native language doesn't have articles, those are just about as arbitrary and daft as gender is to you. Nah, the second that Dutch people got away from it all and landed in Africa we immediately started dispensing with gender, irregular (strong) verbs, complicated spellings, and all that nonsense, so it's pretty obvious that the Dutch don't like gender either but they keep it around just to irritate foreigners. Carbon dioxide: confirm/deny?  Just sort of like how Anglos constantly bitch about our spelling rules but watching ESL learners try to spell is so entertaining that we refuse to reform it.
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Dec 30, 2013 01:33
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Reveilled posted:Question for anyone who speaks a language with grammatical gender, did you learn a foreign language with grammatical gender in school, and how did you find that? I had a hard enough time remembering der/die/das for nouns when I learned German in school, I imagine it must be even worse if you already have genders for nouns in your own language and they bear no relation whatsoever to the genders of your own language. Or is it easier, because you already understand the concept? I don't find it easier. I learned German, and my mother tongues are Swedish and Portuguese, both have two genders (common/neuter and masculine/feminime respectively). In both languages it's arbitrary which nouns get which gender. So yeah, in German i had to basically memorize them as they don't correspond to the genders of my native languages. There are some general rules to learn for all three languages that help memorization a bit, but there are so many exceptions. And the general rules are all different for Swedish/Portuguese/German, so knowing one doesn't help with learning the other. In my two native languages i don't even know all the rules, it's just instinct from being born with it and it just feels right. That instinct doesn't carry over to German which has a different way and different history of gendering nouns. Although it didn't make it harder either, the languages somehow felt too far apart to confuse the genders between languages. Falukorv fucked around with this message at 01:59 on Dec 30, 2013 |
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Dec 30, 2013 01:51
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VitalSigns posted:Nah, the second that Dutch people got away from it all and landed in Africa we immediately started dispensing with gender, irregular (strong) verbs, complicated spellings, and all that nonsense, so it's pretty obvious that the Dutch don't like gender either but they keep it around just to irritate foreigners. Carbon dioxide: confirm/deny? To contrast this, I've observed that in my language - Czech - there's actually been a resurgence of support for the existence of noun gender as a way to distinguish one's national identity from the genderless English which is seen as encroaching on our ability to express ourselves in our own terms. It's just not possible to generalize a role of gender in grammar since it does have significant extra-linguistic qualities. Especially since the cultural foundations of national culture can't be transofrmed into a genderless grammar without a significant loss of value.
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Dec 30, 2013 02:02
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bronin posted:Well there is "Kater" for a male cat but I rarely use it. You see a cat you call that animal Katze. If someone asks you specifically you could say it's a Kater. Same with dogs. If someone asks about my sister's dog I call it "Hund" even if the dog is female and there is a German word for it (Huendin). I was meaning more in the sense of the pronoun itself though because you said it was weird to call a cat "he". If you owned a male cat called Heinrich and someone asked you what the cat's name was, would you say "Her name is Heinrich"?
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Dec 30, 2013 02:31
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Manx is definitely the losing party in the lanuage revivalist game. For that Irish one, I assume that is Brussels in Belgium?
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Dec 30, 2013 02:42
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Haven't seen this here yet. "Time zone deviation (the difference between legal time and mean solar time) around the world", apparently by 'hobbified' on reddit. I've heard Xinjiang uses more reasonable time under the table.
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Dec 30, 2013 03:04
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Syritta posted:Haven't seen this here yet. They do, everything is officially on Beijing Standard Time or whatever but all of the local events are posted in "BST-2".
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Dec 30, 2013 03:18
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Syritta posted:Haven't seen this here yet. Christ Argentina, get your poo poo together! What's with the small red areas on the eastern coast of Greenland?
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Dec 30, 2013 03:31
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They all look reasonable to me. Because, despite what the Zionist conspiracy would have you believe, red and green are the same color.
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Dec 30, 2013 03:52
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Spiderfist Island posted:Christ Argentina, get your poo poo together! Most of Greenland is UTC-3 (-2 DST), but Ittoqqortoormiit/Scoresbysund and the surrounding area on the east coast use UTC-1 (+0 DST), and the weather station at Danmarkshavn further north uses UTC+0 with no DST. Obviously, given the population distribution in Greenland, the borders between these time zones are probably pretty notional. You can also see that the area near Thule AFB in the northwest uses Atlantic Time on that map.
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Dec 30, 2013 06:00
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Reveilled posted:I was meaning more in the sense of the pronoun itself though because you said it was weird to call a cat "he". If you owned a male cat called Heinrich and someone asked you what the cat's name was, would you say "Her name is Heinrich"? Nope, if your cat has a male name you definitely say "he".
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Dec 30, 2013 06:13
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Yeah, but you also call him "der Kater" and make hangover jokes. Or at least I did.
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Dec 30, 2013 06:14
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I'm a little behind on the discussion, but I noticed there was a lot of confusion about linguistic gender I wanted to clear up. Gender in linguistics is not entirely arbitrary, it just has nothing to do with sexual gender. In fact, the word "gender" was first used in English to describe different classification of nouns, not to distinguish between men and women. The classifications of "masculine", "feminine", and "neutral" were create by Latin scholars as a way of naming the different noun declensions that existed in Latin, instead of referring to them as first declension, second declension, third declension, etc. Noun declensions in Indo-European languages are almost always related to the word ending. For example, in Russian nearly all words ending with a consonant are masculine, those ending with an "a" or "ya" are feminine, and those ending with an "e" or "o" are neutral. In Russian, Latin, and many other Indo-European languages there is a tendency for words related to woman to end with an "a", which is why this declension became known as "feminine", even though most "feminine" words have nothing to do with women. So the unifying quality of "feminine" words isn't that they are somehow related to femininity but that they all happened to end with an "a". Unfortunately, particularly in Germanic languages, many of the original word endings that would have signified the gender of a word have been changed or dropped. However, certain word endings persist. For example, the word for "girl" in German, "Maedchen" is neutral because it uses the ending "-chen". It has nothing to do with sexism being codified into the German language, as I have heard some argue. When the word entered the language, German speakers had no concept of "masculine", "feminine", and "neutral" words. They just knew that if a word ended with "-chen", the proceeding definite article should be "das".
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