Other languages have gendered words...
Le Lol
>>24758821
That's because every language that isn't English is wrong.
>spanish dont pronounce "h"
>>24758821
>he
>she
>her
>his
>not gendered
>>24758821
yeah, my language does. it's kinda stupid now that I think about it
>>24758821
Should we start something about how the french language is sexist? We could make a hashtag about how it projects gender roles onto people and objects and blah blah. Maybe the SJWs will latch onto it or something.
>>24759368
Pretty sure that he means gender as in things like inanimate objects have specified genders. Like in German when you want to say the table, you say der Tisch, which shows that the table is masculine and when you want to say the church, you say die Kirche, which implies it's feminine
Who here /firstlanguagewithabsolutelynogenderedwordsincludingpronouns/?
>>24759490
same with my language, norwegian, but why did OP make this thread?
does it matter in any way?
>>24759772
He's making fun of your monkey language.
>>24758821
Only Turks and Brits don't have gendered words
>>24758821
>his language has gender-neutral personal pronouns to cater for trannies
>>24758821
That's why english is so damn easy to us, man.
>>24759793
But he isn't even doing anything other than stating a fact
that's just dumb, OP is a faggot
>trying to learn Russian
>the NOUNS have to be conjugated in addition to the verbs
>>24759490
>>24759368
English still has traces of gendered nouns. Cf. the way ships are referred to as 'she'. It's exactly that.
>NOUNS have to be conjugated in addition to the verbs
First, conjugation is by definition inflection of verbs. Nouns are declined. Second, English as nominal inflection too. It even retains more than one Germanic plural, cf. -en of children/chicken.
>>24759839
What's wrong? Can't learn a fleshed-out language?
English is shit tier desu
>>24759839
russian is like one of the easiest languages to learn ayy lmao
>>24758821
Grammatical gender != natural gender.
>>24759869
Meant to quote >>24759839.
quoteblox
>>24759875
>russian is like one of the easiest languages to learn
Not for romance language speakers
Spanish and Italian were literally more easy
>>24759875
>>24759897
Actually, complaining that languages with cases are difficult is a bit misconceived because cases have to be marked *somewhere*. Consider the locative. What's the difference between 'he is in a house', 'he inis a house' (a prefix), and 'he is a housein' (a postfix)? The word denoting 'in' has to be *somewhere*.
>>24759941
And before you say that e.g. Slavic languages realize cases with many different affixes depending on the declension: it's exactly the same way English is hard for learners who have the remember the arbitrary rules governing e.g. whether one is 'at', 'in', or 'on' school, or meets 'at', 'in', or 'on' Friday.
>>24759985
desu I'd say that what's fucking most foreigners learning English up is the arbitrary as fuck pronunciation and silent letters
>>24760066
Probably, but a spelling reform would probably break up parallels, i.e. cognates that are spelled the same way (for instance, they share the same suffix), but for one reason or another came to be pronounced slightly differently. Forcing people to unify the pronunciation wouldn't work. It we let the word be pronounced differently nonetheless, the reformed spelling wouldn't be a phonetic spelling. And we adjusted spelling to pronunciation, letting both suffixes be spelled differently, the common origin of those words would no longer be evident in writing.
>>24760175
But outside that problem, which I just invented really and I'm not sure is real, I'm all for a reform.
>>24759567
Your first language is Yoruba?
>>24760196
>which I just invented really and I'm not sure is real
(Okay, I just looked it up on Wiki, and other people have noticed it too. Sage.)
>English
>only one form of 'the'
>Romance languages
>two forms but it's easy to remember
>German
>five forms that are impossible to remember the rules for
>Some languages conjugate negations but not the verb that follows
>>24760740
I think that articles, and pronouns, are often basically adjectives, i.e. come from them etymologically and, with some caveats, share their inflections. I believe Latin is that way. And then, adjectives often share inflection with nouns (in fact, in my language, there are fully nominalized adjectives that aren't recognized as such at all, such as 'wozny', a janitor, literally 'pertaining of carts', or 'konny', a horseman, literally 'pertaining of horses'). The moral is, don't get too hung up on parts of speech. There are strict distinctions in language, but parts of speech don't involve those.
>>24760772
Examples?
>>24760740
>five forms that are impossible to remember the rules for
git gud fgt
>>24760966
In short, it is pretty safe to consider 'the' or 'this' or 'that' adjectives, just like 'no'. 'If it determines nouns like an adjective, it is one'.
>>24758821
>la boeuf
>>24761110
Consider:
>'Is that friend of yours a or the?'
>'A.'
Is perfectly correct.
>yfw Japanese adds all tenses and conditionals to the end of the verb
>At the same time
>Dekinai ("Can't do") can become
>Denakerebanaranakunarimasen ("Unless it becomes that it can't be done", roughly)
>>24761307
>yfw you realize English does exactly the same thing, except with spaces?
Imagine being a Japanese.
>Can't do ("Dekinai") can become
>Unlessitbecomesthatitcan'tbedone" ("Denakerebanaranakunarimasen", roughly)
>>24760233
Nah nigga, Finnish.
>>24761360
The effect is kind of lost in Romaji (Western characters). Since Japanese doesn't have spaces, Kanji (chinese characters) are actually really helpful in discerning the meaning of a sentence, despite what everyone thinks. When it's a big jumble of hiragana, reading it is an absolute nightmare.
Oh, dumb robot won't let me post moonrunes. Oh well.
>>24761518
That's not conjugation. Conjugation is 'inflection of a verb for person, number, tense, voice, mood'.
What you described would be:
>He exercise daily.
>We exercise yesterday.
>He nots exercise daily.
>We noted exercise yesterday.
>>24761435
Japanese and chinese have always fascinated me merely from a typographical standpoint. Their language seems so complicated to a westerner but I can only imagine how much simpler their system is if you grew up learning it.
Being able to condense entire phrases into a single character is pretty damn cool.
>>24759838
The concept is silly and OP is laughing at it. Why would an inanimate object like a table be gendered? It's silly
>>24761612
>Being able to condense entire phrases into a single character is pretty damn cool.
Is it?
Let's define 'c' to mean 'to be able to condense entire phrases into a single character', as in 'He has ced since birth, while most people are only cing from time to time.'
Possible, but not very impressive.
>>24758821
What do you Americans even say when the gender of the person doing the action is unknown?
In my mother tongue the masculine is acting as a neutral (so if it's not feminine, it's "masculine" by default), which is arguably patriarchy-tier but at least it's simple to remember.
> I don't know what gender he is, he left by this door
> I don't know what gender she is, she left by this door
> I don't know what gender xhe is, xhe left by this door
> I don't know what gender it is, it left by this door
>>24761678
And if it is true that some kanji are basically combined radixces that are put against or above or within each other, then it doesn't mean data compression at all -- onlz that their writing system isn't horizontal, linear, going directly l2r or r2l, but meanders, namely that the reader has, essentially, to sometimes zoom into a glyph and microtraverse it, and only then resume reading the next one in the first-level sequence, bringing the chess' knight's tour to mind.
>language is so keked it doesn't conjugate verbs based on pronouns nor grammatical case anymore
Norwegian feels
>>24761612
>>24761776
It's really mind boggling when you start out, before you start learning Kanji. Hiragana is hard to read due to all the aforementioned conditionals clogging up a sentence if you don't use Kanji.
Even though there are over 2000 Kanji in Japanese alone (vastly more in Chinese, obviously) only so many of them see day-to-day use unless you're reading newspapers, which use as many as possible. Many of them are pretty easy to guess the meaning at once you learn the radicals (original character). For instance, the Kanji for forest (Mori) is literally just the 'Tree' kanji (Moku) written three times.
The only hard part about kanji are the separate readings, Onyomi and Kunyomi. The first is the chinese reading, the second is the Japanese, but both are used equally, and some kanji have like 25 different possible readings depending on the context. The Kanji for "Going" (Iku) can be read as Iku, Kou, yuku, iki, Gyou, An, Okonau, etc etc. depending on the context. And they don't always follow the rules (two kanji together means Onyomi reading, 1 kanji means Kunyomi, typically.)
>>24761743
I'm using 'they' personally usually, but I'm more and more inclined to return to 'he' just to spite the stereotypical liberal.
>>24761743
They left it by the door
>>24761779
[inquisitive grunt]
>>24761743
There was a movement by feminists to change to the more grammatically incorrect "they" (implying plurality), but I just default it to "he" since English has no gender neutral 3rd person pronoun. If someone wants to make one up, fine by me.
>>24761779
The you go mis-using the word "cvck" again.
>>24761802
>The Kanji for "Going" (Iku) can be read as Iku, Kou, yuku, iki, Gyou, An, Okonau
So those readings are basically homographs (like english 'can' and 'can'), heterophones and heterosemes? How did the come to be represented by the same glyph? Or are those readings not words, i.e. representations of meaning, or just names for sounds, in the sense that a single kanji will in speech be sometimes represented by the sound of 'aye', sometimes 'bee', 'cee', 'dee'...?
>>24761919
>or just names for sounds
*but just names for sounds
>english
*English
>>24760966
Latin doesn't have articles.
>>24761977
>Latin doesn't have articles.
Pleb here. Is this true? How the fuck does a language even work without articles?
>>24761977
This is not a very meaningful distinction. Insofar as we define an article as a determiner, why can't 'hic' or 'nullus' be articles?
>>24760196
One problem with spelling reform is that there would be no reason to learn the old way. Within a few generations, anything written before the reform would be illegible to most of the English-speaking population. Imagine trying to use an old car or machine or something and having to find someone that can translate the manual.
>>24762022
they go at the end of the word
>>24760966
I've noticed that Portuguese (and probably Spanish) is pretty flexible with adjectives and nouns. Instead of "the fat person", you can just say "the fat."
>>24762022
>How the fuck does a language even work without articles?
It can't. That's the point. I'm >>24762027. Again, there is no need to insist on morphological demarcation of parts of speech ('in English, an article is only the member of the "a(n)" plus "the" set'). The definition of an article should be semantic, namely: any word that clarifies the context (denotes focus, topic, whatever).
>>24761919
It's a complicated deal going back to when Japan first adopted the Chinese alphabet. Japan didn't always have a system of writing, but they did of course have a language. When they brought chinese characters into their language, there was NO hiragana, and they just superimposed their own pronunciation over those symbols. This lead to a bunch of kanji with arbitrary meaning (The kanji for America is 'Beikoku', which means 'kingdom of rice', ironically) and some which were just used for their phonetic sound. Eventually they added little markers to denote which meaning of the kanji they were using, leading to the current 3-alphabet system (Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji).
In short, it's like you said; the kanji will sometimes represent a different sound depending on the word it's being used in. As I said before, the different readings follow semi-regular rules; two or more kanji next to each other will probably be read using the Onyomi (literally 'Sound reading') while a single kanji with Hiragana on the end is almost always Kunyomi (Literally Japanese reading). There are exceptions, but it's no different than learning said homophones in English.
>>24762070
And how exactly does postposition stop a morpheme from being article/a determiner?
>>24762117
(In other words, if we said 'Catthe is on matthe.' rather than 'The cat is on the mat.', the '-the' would still be the definite article.)
>>24761743
"They" is actually nice because it leaves both gender and number ambiguous.
>I don't know who robbed my house, but they were probably black.
All I know is that I was robbed, not how many people did it.
>>24762198
Inflection of verbs for the grammatical category of race of the agent when?
>>24762022
Japanese doesn't use articles, either. It's really just a western thing; most east asian languages don't have such a distinction. it's all context.
>>24762198
The problem is that 'They' sounds impersonal when the 'they' that you're talking about it right there with you. I don't agree with SJW's trying to reinvent the wheel, but I can see where there's an issue.
>>24758821
yeah, german does, for example. I don't really care using this shit.
>>24762198
>>24761804
>>24761819
>>24761886
Using "It" would make more sense, though in my experience the native speakers either recoil in horror when I do that, or assume I'm speaking of some pet.
Is there even a language with a "number-neutral" word?
I know arabic has dual (so it differentiates between singular, two people, more than two people), which is funny.
Japanese I think is pretty neutral in that regard, you have to add thinks to clarify if the cat you're speaking about is male/female or is actually several cats.
> I may be wrong, not a real moonsreaker desu.
>>24762624
I definitely wouldn't call someone 'it' to their face. It sounds like you're talking about something less than human.
Japanese doesn't have gendered words in the same sense romantic languages do. Kare (He) and Kanojo (she) are more familiar than regular pronouns and actually mean Boyfriend and Girlfriend, respectively.
But you're right, Japanese doesn't use plurals.
>>24761670
The fact that we call them "gendered" is the only thing that makes them gendered, and that they're devided in three (non-gender)
It's not like it implies anything at all
>>24762624
>I know arabic has dual
Dual used to be common in Indo-European languages I believe, even my Polish a trace of it in proverbs.
>Is there even a language with a "number-neutral" word?
I think it would be rather unintuitive. When you use language, you want to point attention to something -- one thing, inherently, the one that's different from the contextually irrelevant 'rest'. The singular being the default is rather obvious. The plural is an addition.
>>24762834
>The singular being the default is rather obvious. The plural is an addition.
Though then, this made me curious why English has a singular verbal suffix -s and no plural verbal suffix, which Old English apparently had. Maybe because Old English didn't inflect plural verbs for person had to do with that lone suffix's disappearance.
>>24758821
https://youtu.be/ahA9S-f2Vlg
Obligatory.
>>24762232
https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.html
