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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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[-] 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.

this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2023

115 points (88.1% liked)

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