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I refuse to believe Twain didn't know better than that. Funny, but very obtuse.
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Nov 14, 2021 08:51
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German gender is a grammatical poke in the eye that really highlights the arbitrariness of the concept compared to other gendered languages. I studied German in high school, between Latin in elementary school and Russian from college onward, and I don't think I've hated learning anything more than the articles paired with each noun, because the only way you could ever divine that we live on a runde Welt instead of a rund or rundes one is by memorizing that it's die Welt and not der Welt or das Welt, and you have to read that off a list if you didn't grow up speaking German, because the word itself sure as hell isn't telling you what to do with it. It doesn't even decline! With Latin, "feminine" is a practical name for the system in which a magna regina is magna instead of magnus and becomes a magnam reginam if anything happens to her, the way any word ending in "-a" works, but German really makes you wonder why you're talking about die Welt when we could just call everything das whatever and be done with it. (Well, then we'd lose the gendered adjectival declensions where each one has half the endings of the others shuffled into it and they all change if you add an article.)
Sham bam bamina! fucked around with this message at 10:50 on Nov 14, 2021 |
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Nov 14, 2021 10:30
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in norwegian we have a gendered noun system as well, but, especially in bokmål, there’s a bit tendency to use the masculine form instead of feminine (such that many will write a book/the book as en bok/boken instead of ei bok/boka). danish and swedish has long since lost the third grammatical gender such that they only have common and neutral, just like dutch, but I think due to our second written system nynorsk (which generally don’t allow this as much, also has a more rigorously gendered adjective system than bokmål) that might not happen completely over here.
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Nov 14, 2021 10:47
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Gender in German and Swedish makes them a pain to produce, but fortunately has very little effect on understanding.
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Nov 14, 2021 11:05
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yeah it’s kind of a guessing game for non-natives. tree, house and grass are neutral but flowers, plants and cars are masculine, and there’s nothing in the concepts of these words to help you try to create a definite rule that makes it more intuitive than just pure memorisation
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Nov 14, 2021 11:34
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Sham bam bamina! posted:German gender is a grammatical poke in the eye that really highlights the arbitrariness of the concept compared to other gendered languages. Eh, I don't see how gender in German is any more arbitrary and structurally unnecessary than in most romance languages, which don't even have article or adjective declensions (or keep only vestigial cases). None of them hold a candle to Latin, where gender is basically indispensable to parsing the written form. At any rate the Twain passage is very funny and relatable even if you've learned German coming from another gendered language, especially the nigh-universal shock at learning that infants and girls are genderless. lost in postation fucked around with this message at 12:21 on Nov 14, 2021 |
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Nov 14, 2021 12:19
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lost in postation posted:I don't see how gender in German is any more arbitrary and structurally unnecessary than in most romance languages Same. For what it's worth, there are also a whole bunch of suffixes in Germanic languages that dictate the genus of a word. It's not all guesswork. Anyway, of course it's weird that "girl" is neuter, but the part that everyone always neglects to mention is that it's only neuter because of its diminutive suffix "-chen" and any diminutive is neuter. Much like any word ending in -ung is female in German and any word with the suffix -aard is male in Dutch. Romance languages do this too? Tack -age onto any verb stem in French and the result is male. In fact, I'm having a hard time coming up with more than one case at all where genus contradicts sexus where it's not a direct result of the suffix, diminutive or otherwise. The one case I can think of is "baker" in Dutch, but honestly that's an edge case because strictly speaking I don't think -er there is strictly speaking a suffix (any word with the suffix -er is typically male in Dutch, "baker" is the one exception I can think of where the genus of the word is female). I'd be curious to hear other instances. Also, can anyone give an example of a language + instance where the following isn't the case? quote:and his head is male or neuter according to the word selected to signify it, and not according to the sex of the individual who wears it Lex Neville fucked around with this message at 12:45 on Nov 14, 2021 |
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Nov 14, 2021 12:43
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Sham bam bamina! posted:German gender is a grammatical poke in the eye that really highlights the arbitrariness of the concept compared to other gendered languages. I studied German in high school, between Latin in elementary school and Russian from college onward, and I don't think I've hated learning anything more than the articles paired with each noun, because the only way you could ever divine that we live on a runde Welt instead of a rund or rundes one is by memorizing that it's die Welt and not der Welt or das Welt, and you have to read that off a list if you didn't grow up speaking German, because the word itself sure as hell isn't telling you what to do with it. It doesn't even decline! With Latin, "feminine" is a practical name for the system in which a magna regina is magna instead of magnus and becomes a magnam reginam if anything happens to her, the way any word ending in "-a" works, but German really makes you wonder why you're talking about die Welt when we could just call everything das whatever and be done with it. (Well, then we'd lose the gendered adjectival declensions where each one has half the endings of the others shuffled into it and they all change if you add an article.) i learned the system formally in school at some point but was bad at memorizing it. i just do it by feeling now, like i knew it would be runde welt right away without really thinking about it, but i live near germany and sometimes have to speak it when i go there to buy beer. it's a matter of exposure. i also don't think it's entirely useless from a literary perspective, i like how it adds a variety of words and sounds to every sentence, a bit like what old english sounds like as well
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Nov 14, 2021 12:59
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to me, coming from a language without cases, what makes german sometimes confusing is all the case particles thrown into the mix
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Nov 14, 2021 13:44
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Lex Neville posted:Same. well i mean in that quote itself you have an example of exactly that: in english possessive pronouns agree with the gender of the possessor, not the thing possessed, as it would be in french for example. this is obviously not super clear in modern english due to the fact the gender system has almost completely disappeared. classical arabic tends to mark gender by suffixes, and then also has the possibility for possessive pronouns as suffixes so i think in that case words change gender based on the possessive pronoun used but i'm not entirely sure that is how it's understood
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Nov 14, 2021 15:31
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That isn't an example at all. The sex of the possessor "never" changes the genus of the signifier, which is what Twain seems to argue should be the case.
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Nov 14, 2021 16:16
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Sham bam bamina! posted:German gender is a grammatical poke in the eye that really highlights the arbitrariness of the concept compared to other gendered languages. I studied German in high school, between Latin in elementary school and Russian from college onward, and I don't think I've hated learning anything more than the articles paired with each noun, because the only way you could ever divine that we live on a runde Welt instead of a rund or rundes one is by memorizing that it's die Welt and not der Welt or das Welt, and you have to read that off a list if you didn't grow up speaking German, because the word itself sure as hell isn't telling you what to do with it. It doesn't even decline! With Latin, "feminine" is a practical name for the system in which a magna regina is magna instead of magnus and becomes a magnam reginam if anything happens to her, the way any word ending in "-a" works, but German really makes you wonder why you're talking about die Welt when we could just call everything das whatever and be done with it. (Well, then we'd lose the gendered adjectival declensions where each one has half the endings of the others shuffled into it and they all change if you add an article.) well it's not the way any word ending in -a works because although there is a strong association between declension and gender it's not 1:1. a great sailor is a magnus nauta, when something happens to a blind poet it happens to a caecum poetam, for example. it's all almost completely arbitrary no matter the language (or rather so muddled up by thousands of generations of people trying to impose systematic order on hugely variable input that it gives the appearance of arbitrariness) and no matter what language and what particular syntactic or semantic thing you're basically looking at a system that divides the world into things owned by the emperor, things included in the present classification, things that from a long way off look like flies etc etc
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Nov 14, 2021 16:27
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Lex Neville posted:That isn't an example at all. The sex of the possessor "never" changes the genus of the signifier, which is what Twain seems to argue should be the case. for that example the signifier is the possessive pronoun itself, and the gender of the possessor changes the gender of the possessive pronoun. in english you can kind of make a clearer but sort of dumb example that only exists in orthography and requires a lot of very baseless assumptions about dependencies but in the sentences 'his hair is blond' vs 'her hair is blonde', you could make the argument that the adjective has to be agreeing with the noun it modifies, and since the adjective changes gender according to the gender of the possessor, the gender of the hair must also be changing according to the gender of the possessor and that this is basically the only example in english where that would ever come up. i think you're probably right that that basically doesn't happen in any languages i'm aware of and it's an odd point for twain to be making, but you can actually make the argument in english.
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Nov 14, 2021 16:39
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CestMoi posted:well it's not the way any word ending in -a works because although there is a strong association between declension and gender it's not 1:1. a great sailor is a magnus nauta, when something happens to a blind poet it happens to a caecum poetam, for example. it's all almost completely arbitrary no matter the language (or rather so muddled up by thousands of generations of people trying to impose systematic order on hugely variable input that it gives the appearance of arbitrariness) and no matter what language and what particular syntactic or semantic thing you're basically looking at a system that divides the world into things owned by the emperor, things included in the present classification, things that from a long way off look like flies etc etc
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Nov 14, 2021 18:49
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CestMoi posted:'his hair is blond' vs 'her hair is blonde', Is that really the standard English usage? I always assumed that since it was a French loan word, the French gender rule applied, i.e. "she is blonde" but "her hair is blond".
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Nov 14, 2021 19:44
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no it isn't. also your assumption isn't correct. blond and blonde are used interchangeably. english doesn't give a gently caress about using loan words correctly
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Nov 14, 2021 19:49
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Also, that's not a distinction of grammatical gender. If English had gender, the words "blond" and "blonde" would take whatever gender would agree with "hair", irrespective of their social connotations, although I don't think they would be distinct words anymore in this scenario. Edit: They're not used "interchangeably"; a man is blond, with blond hair, and a woman is blonde, or even a blonde, with blonde hair. Sham bam bamina! fucked around with this message at 19:57 on Nov 14, 2021 |
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Nov 14, 2021 19:52
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I guess coming from a gendered language, I conceptualised it as people having both grammatical and social gender and every other noun being neuter, but I can see how it doesn't quite fit how English actually works in practice.
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Nov 14, 2021 19:58
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lost in postation posted:Is that really the standard English usage? I always assumed that since it was a French loan word, the French gender rule applied, i.e. "she is blonde" but "her hair is blond". it got kind of muddled up at some point, and you'll see most people just choosing one and sticking with it so it's only really a point of pedantry now and doesn't really make any sense, but i'm relatively certain that standard british english usage is the -e depends on the gender of the person who possesses the hair, which is admittedly, insane
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Nov 14, 2021 20:03
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Sham bam bamina! posted:Edit: They're not used "interchangeably"; a man is blond, with blond hair, and a woman is blonde, or even a blonde, with blonde hair. I mean, I would love for that to be the case, but it'd make too much sense.
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Nov 14, 2021 20:06
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Sham bam bamina! posted:Also, that's not a distinction of grammatical gender. If English had gender, the words "blond" and "blonde" would take whatever gender would agree with "hair", irrespective of their social connotations, although I don't think they would be distinct words anymore in this scenario. from a purely formal syntactic theory perspective, in "blond/e hair", "blond/e" must necessarily modify and be linked to hair, and since this modification is contingent on the gender of the person who possesses the hair, "blond/e" is gender marked, meaning "hair" in english itself has a hidden unmarked gender, which is only exposed in this particular instance, and that gender is a function of the possessor of the hair. or yeah, you could say blond and blonde are completely different adjectives with no gender, just usage conditioned on context but that's nowhere near as interesting or dumb. imo it's clearly ludicrous to think of it the first way, but it's also the only way you can make that twain statement as written make any kind of sense and provide an example of what he wants a language to do
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Nov 14, 2021 20:12
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I think he wants a language to be English and just not give a poo poo.
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Nov 14, 2021 20:16
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but english doesn't do the thing he says he wants! he wants the gender of the possessed thing to be inherited from the possessor, which english either doesn't do at all, because it has no gender, or you have to come up with a ridiculous example and english does it all the time, just gender is nearly completely unmarked, except in the case where someone has blond hair
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Nov 14, 2021 20:28
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i think he thinks german is weird and wants to remark on the weirdness of german without necessarily committing to a prescriptive theory of language
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Nov 15, 2021 02:22
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i am calling for a prescriptive theory of language, and i think we should have like 7-8 noun classes like bantu and each one should decline differently based on the speaker, the possessor, and the noun, and the evidentiality (“i heard that the woman down the street lost her hat” should share almost no noun suffixes with “she saw the man down the street lose his hat”)
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Nov 15, 2021 04:19
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Yeah I'm having no luck with Google right now but I'm pretty sure there are languages that mark "his hand" and "her hand" differently in the noun. I remember thinking similarly to Twain when I first learned a gendered language, that it's quirky that gender follows the noun, not the possessor
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Nov 15, 2021 05:53
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his/her depending on the object instead of the possessor in french always trips me up
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Nov 15, 2021 12:51
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Ras Het posted:Yeah I'm having no luck with Google right now but I'm pretty sure there are languages that mark "his hand" and "her hand" differently in the noun. I remember thinking similarly to Twain when I first learned a gendered language, that it's quirky that gender follows the noun, not the possessor Arabic absolutely does do this, possessives can be suffixed onto nouns and give them the appearance of being a noun of different gender (his hand being yadih, her hand being yaduha for eg) but i got a bit deep in trying to find a really solid example of whether there are languages that can be proven to change the gender of the noun based on its possessor, because i'm fairly certain in arabic adjectives agree with the original gender of the noun, not what the noun now looks like its gender might be, and i can't find any that do, despite how cool i think it would be. it's clearly a far too strong reading of the twain quote to think that's actually what he wants, rather than him just being a bit cheesed off with gendered languages, but it's what i want
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Nov 15, 2021 13:57
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now i think about it if the agreement of a noun were to change based on things like its possessor thats probably definitionally not a gender system and instead some other thing, but i still want to know if that other thing is actually attested
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Nov 15, 2021 14:03
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Carthag Tuek posted:his/her depending on the object instead of the possessor in french always trips me up
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Nov 15, 2021 18:53
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It's not stricto sensu "his/her" but yeah, the form changes according to the grammatical gender of the object: "sa pomme" (his/her apple, feminine-gendered article because "pomme" is feminine), "son chien" (his/her dog, masculine-gendered article because "chien" is masculine).
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Nov 15, 2021 19:06
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Yeah that was badly worded. I guess it's more of a singular "their", but my brain keeps interpreting it as son = his, sa = her.
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Nov 15, 2021 19:43
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what gender is 'fart'
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Nov 15, 2021 19:46
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derp posted:what gender is 'fart' They're all common gender in Danish (en fis = a small fart, en prut = a medium fart, en skid = a large fart)
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Nov 15, 2021 19:56
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Carthag Tuek posted:Yeah that was badly worded. I guess it's more of a singular "their", but my brain keeps interpreting it as son = his, sa = her.
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Nov 15, 2021 20:24
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derp posted:what gender is 'fart' all synonyms are masculine in norwegian  (en fis/en fjert/en promp = a fart)
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Nov 15, 2021 20:53
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Carthag Tuek posted:They're all common gender in Danish (en fis = a small fart, en prut = a medium fart, en skid = a large fart) en skid, lol ulvir posted:all synonyms are masculine in norwegian en fjert, lmao Farts are even funny in languages one doesn't understand! This is a revelation.
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Nov 15, 2021 20:59
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skid is the same word as poo poo 
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Nov 15, 2021 21:01
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Sham bam bamina! posted:I don't think it's French's fault if you're understanding it backwards. I'm not saying it is
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Nov 15, 2021 21:43
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why do you hate french carthag tuek
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Nov 15, 2021 23:47
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