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What's the point of gendered words in certain languages? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by TheDarkKnight@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

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I know a lot of languages have some aspects that probably seem a bit strange to non-native speakers…in the case of gendered words is there a point other than “just the way its always been” that explains it a bit better?

I don’t have gendered words in my native language, and from the outside looking in I’m not sure what gendered words actually provide in terms of context? Is there more to it that I’m not quite following?

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[-] Scrof@sopuli.xyz 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Both my native language (Russian) and the one I use the most (Hebrew) have gendered words. The first one has a "middle" neutral gender, and the latter one even has a full set of gendered pronouns, every pronoun except for "I" has a goddamn gender. This shit is endlessly confusing and makes no practical sense except to annoy people using these languages.

That's one of the reasons why I love English so much, English is nice.

[-] lvxferre@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 year ago

That’s one of the reasons why I love English so much, English is nice.

English is morphologically nice but syntactically painful:

Adjectives must follow a very specific order unless you don't mind sounding like a maniac.
Questions require word order inversion, from SVO to VSO. That would be fine... except that most verbs don't allow such inversion, so you need to spawn a "do", let it steal the conjugation from the other verb, and then invert the "do" instead.
Articles are a convoluted mess in every language using them, full of arbitrary cases. Including English.
Prepositions are even worse. And English spams them since the only surviving noun case is the genitive/possessive. Oh wait there's a genitive preposition too! ("of")

And IMO the interesting part is that the syntactical painfulness - let's call it complexity - is partially caused by the morphological lack of complexity. Human language requires a certain amount of complexity; if you remove it from the words themselves it'll end in how the words interact with each other.

[-] KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 year ago

English is nice.

English hates you. And me. It just hates. If you think it’s being nice, that’s because it’s trying to lull you into a false sense of security.

[-] BackOnMyBS@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

Though I was born and raised in the US, my first language was Spanish. All I ever knew my entire childhood was that at home we spoke Spanish. I learned English via tv, books, and then school. Fast forward to now, I recently came back from a 2.5 week trip to Brazil. I loved Brazil, the Portuguese language, and the people in Brazil. Still, when I got to the airport in the US and heard the PA say something in English, it felt so calm. English is a calm language to me. I hadn't realized it until that moment.

[-] radix@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago

Hey, at least "they" for a group of people doesn't imply the genders of each person in that group (I'm thinking of Spanish ellos/ellas).

[-] Anticorp@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

This shit is endlessly confusing and makes no practical sense

Identifying the gender of the subject has some practicality.

this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2023

115 points (88.1% liked)

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