Completely unimportant language misuses that bug you

[Knaight]

Yes. I blame it for being possibly the only language that doesn't have gendered nouns. Italian, german, french, latin, spanish, probably even mandarin, every language uses that system. Ingrish, y u so genderless?

Mandarin isn't gendered, Italian, Spanish, and French are all direct descendants of Latin and thus only demonstrate similarity from that descent, and that leaves your list at effectively two (German, Latin) to two (English, Mandarin). That's without getting into the question of how grammatical gendering adds a bunch of needless complexity for no gain.

[Rockphed]

I don't really see that as being different to just adding an additional small word to correctly gender specify the following noun--for instance, the female thrush would generally be called the hen thrush, and I suspect the forum word filter will prevent me saying what the usual term for the male one would be.

For discussing things like when Cocks crow getting around the filter is acceptable.

[Vinyadan]

Mandarin isn't gendered, Italian, Spanish, and French are all direct descendants of Latin and thus only demonstrate similarity from that descent, and that leaves your list at effectively two (German, Latin) to two (English, Mandarin). That's without getting into the question of how grammatical gendering adds a bunch of needless complexity for no gain.

I disagree with your reasoning. Maybe later I'll have time to explain why.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

That's without getting into the question of how grammatical gendering adds a bunch of needless complexity for no gain.

For little gain, rather than none.

It assists distinguishing between closely related terms that have been given opposite genders. I understand that it is believed it is specially helpful for small children learning the language.

For example, in Spanish, "la llave" and "el llavero" (key and keyring) are both very similar sounding. One being female and the other male means that the way the ear tells them apart is from their respective articles, rather than waiting to see if you tackle on an extra syllable. Put another way, for some stupid reason, while the singular articles in Spanish are very distinct ("la" and "el"), the plural articles are practically identical ("los" and "las") and there is usually a lot more confusion about such words in the plural (I've experienced it myself more than once).

Ultimately, it likely makes little difference in this day and age, and I have no idea if there is any studies on how much it helped as the Spanish language evolved from the soldier's Latin.

GW

[2D8HP]

English *does* have gendered nouns for situations where gender is relevant--e.g. "man", "woman", "king", "queen" etc. Why is it necessary that, say, a table have a gender? If it's feminine do you have to cover up its legs to stop the men getting too excited around it?

Please, it's table limbs you scamp.

For discussing things like when Cocks crow getting around the filter is acceptable.

Once another Playgrounder asked me for some plumbing advice, and to my dismay trade terms were being filtered.

I knew that me and my fellow plumbers were foul mouthed (when I started as an apprentice I was told "Kid you don't curse enough. We're going to teach you to curse"), but apparently our whole nomenclature is as well.

[Vinyadan]

Mandarin isn't gendered, Italian, Spanish, and French are all direct descendants of Latin and thus only demonstrate similarity from that descent, and that leaves your list at effectively two (German, Latin) to two (English, Mandarin). That's without getting into the question of how grammatical gendering adds a bunch of needless complexity for no gain.

So, here's why I disagree.

First off, English does have grammatical gender. You have grammatical gender in pronouns and names. So calling a cow "bull" is wrong. Calling a waiter "waitress" is wrong. And so on. You are left with three genders.

Secondly: the assumption that Romance languages can be dumped together as one because of their common origin in Latin is mistaken. They are separate languages now, and they have been for a long time. More importantly for this discussion, they all have developed in their own way the Latin three-gendered system, and redistributed noun genders. So now you have stuff like Latin mar (neutrum), which gave mer (feminine) in French and mare (masculine) in Italian, and Asturian even has mar, which can be both masculine and feminine.

But, even if you wanted to use this wrong method, then your reasoning would still be mistaken, because English is a Germanic language, and proto-Germanic had grammatical gender, which English has not eschewed. So you simply can say English is irrelevant, in that its simplification of the gender structure has actually left the old tripartite grammatical gender system of proto-Germanic intact, doing nothing more than redistributing gender among nouns and losing declension of adjectives and articles.

As for utility, you can use the masculine-feminine divide to create collective singulars of masculine names using the feminine form. In Italian you can say "legno" as stick, "legni" as sticks, and "legna" as a collective singular for a group of sticks you want to burn or collect or use for other purposes. Same with fruits (frutto, frutti, frutta). You avoid some ambiguity (ball in English can have two meanings, which are expressed as masculine and feminine in Italian). You can call out at people using an adjective declined in their form, thus reducing the number of persons you could be referring to and increasing the chance that they understand that you are referring to them. You can sell stuff better, however weird this sounds. You can identify an all-women formation simply with the article (e.g. It. le Indica).
Not that I expect to convince anyone -- your mother tongue is always going to be the most ductile and expressive one, from your point of view. And then you have the same problem you have when comparing different martial arts, a martial art is only as strong as its user, so you could try to estimate efficiency of a language or poetical expression or anything else, and you would only be calculating the prowess of the speaker.

[Aedilred]

I think it's fair to say that English is unusual among Indo-European languages for its lack of gender. This isn't because English is inherently more sensible but just because of the way it developed: it had an unusually powerful superstrate (arguably, more than one) and the language that resulted was less inflected than any of its parents. It's worth noting that English didn't just lose gender from its nouns and adjectives, but case and adjectival number too. French went through English grammar like a chainsaw, hacking out so much of it that what was left had even less inflection than French did itself.

Also, from what I'm given to understand, grammatical gender is only really a problem if it's not your native language. If you grow up with it it's just a part of how language works and comes entirely naturally. Consequently, what English gains in simplicity for its own use, it loses as a base language from which to learn others. It also has a horrendous number of hopelessly irregular words, and a mammoth lexicon, which for those seeking to learn English likely more than make up for the lack of grammatical gender in terms of ease of learning.

[BWR]

So, here's why I disagree.

First off, English does have grammatical gender. You have grammatical gender in pronouns and names. So calling a cow "bull" is wrong. Calling a waiter "waitress" is wrong. And so on. You are left with three genders.

This isn't grammatical gender, it's actual gender.

[georgie_leech]

This isn't grammatical gender, it's actual gender.

For instance, both actors and actresses act. It's not the case where, say, one acts and the other actes.

[Gnoman]

English has nouns that change based on the gender of the animal it is referring to. It has pronouns that shift with the gender of the animal they are referring to. That is not grammatical gender - that's the nouns reflecting an objective (to the language - the complexities of gender identity aren't particularly relevant here) reality.

English has a few specific nouns that are referred to with gendered pronouns rather than neutral ones, mostly vehicles. That is not grammatical gender - that's anthropomorphism, because the objects in question are traditionally vested with a personality and identity beyond that of what most inanimate objects are assigned.

English does NOT have every noun assigned a gender. That would be grammatical gender, but English does not have it.

[S@tanicoaldo]

I wonder why Actor and actress, waiter and waitresses are an exception.

[georgie_leech]

I wonder why Actor and actress, waiter and waitresses are an exception.

Host/hostess, heir/heiress... there are a bunch that follow a similar pattern. Worth noting that the masculine form is increasingly used to refer to either gender, meaning it's transitioning to a neutral word.

[Vinyadan]

It could also be due to the historical presence of women in that profession/area. It would be interesting to check it out. In some cases, the difference expressed could have been more than mere gender, and have implied different roles because of the position of women at the time.
There's also priest/priestess (I think that priestess is falling out of favour now, isn't it?). Then you have the obvious ones referred to the family, mum, sister, daughter, niece...

This isn't grammatical gender, it's actual gender.

Tell that to that cat called "it" in Dowining Street. (Cameron was reprimanded by the press because he didn't love the Premier's Cat enough to call him a "he", instead going for "it".)

More imporantly: "Look! It's Mike!". That strikes me as a neutrum used in spite of the fact that the subject is masculine. The moment you are pronouncing the phrase, you know that the pointed thing (Mike) is actually Mike, who's a manly man. So you aren't using the actual gender. Which is an example of grammatical gender used instead of actual gender.

Not that it changes anything. Even if it always used actual gender (which it does in the overwhelming majority of cases; I couldn't think of other examples), English still would have grammatical gender, because its grammar assumes the presence of three genders, masculine, feminine, and neutrum, each one of them represented by pronouns that are used according to the gender of the noun they represent. Is this a residual aspect? Yes, totally. But it's still there, and something of everyday use. It's mostly gone, but it isn't really gone (yet).

To be clearer: by "grammatical gender" I mean "gender as a category within grammar", not "a situation in which grammatical gender (as a category within grammar) doesn't reproduce natural gender". Wikipedia uses the concepts in a different way from me.

[Lissou]

I've been told that "actor" means both and using "actress" is considered sexist by some.

But yeah, English doesn't have grammatical gender. Saying that any language that have different words for "man" and "woman" or for "he" and "she" is misunderstanding what grammatical gender is. It has nothing to do with sex (or gender) of actual beings. That's actually why some people resisted the use of the word "gender" being used for people. A table is feminine in French, but not female. The two are different.

I think grammatical gender is the equivalent of stresses in English. They differentiate words. And just like English speakers have a hard time wrapping their heads around the concept of grammatical gender, I have a hard time understanding stresses. I keep putting them on the wrong syllable and remembering where to stress each word is by far the hardest part of speaking English for me.

[The Extinguisher]

Personally, I'm more interested in how noun classes became intertwined with gender to begin with. Grammar is weird for every language so I can't really say anything about the existence of noun classes, but it just seems wild to me that they're associated with gender and to such an arbitrary degree.

There's a lot of mix up between grammatical gender and gender, so maybe its best to stop calling it gender? If you remove that association its very easy to see that English doesn't have noun classes.

[Fiery Diamond]

I've been told that "actor" means both and using "actress" is considered sexist by some.

But yeah, English doesn't have grammatical gender. Saying that any language that have different words for "man" and "woman" or for "he" and "she" is misunderstanding what grammatical gender is. It has nothing to do with sex (or gender) of actual beings. That's actually why some people resisted the use of the word "gender" being used for people. A table is feminine in French, but not female. The two are different.

I think grammatical gender is the equivalent of stresses in English. They differentiate words. And just like English speakers have a hard time wrapping their heads around the concept of grammatical gender, I have a hard time understanding stresses. I keep putting them on the wrong syllable and remembering where to stress each word is by far the hardest part of speaking English for me.

Speaking of stresses, there are words that are exactly the same but for where the stress falls. Universally (as far as I know) these pairs of words have one of them being a noun and the other being a verb. This doesn't stop many people who are native speakers (myself included) from pronouncing some of these pairs both of them with the same stress.

I believe (though I may be wrong) that the noun forms always have stress in the beginning while verb forms have stress at the end.


Wikipedia page with a list

Some (not all) examples of ones I pronounce the same, taken from that list:

absent accent access address ally annex augment detail insult update upgrade

I don't know about others, but what I do is pronounce the verbs the way the nouns are supposed to be pronounced.

[BWR]

Tell that to that cat called "it" in Dowining Street. (Cameron was reprimanded by the press because he didn't love the Premier's Cat enough to call him a "he", instead going for "it".)

My point exactly. People were upset that something with a real gender was considered not important enough to be referred to by that gender. With grammatical gender there would be only one pronoun that would be correct to use, regardless of the actual sex of the cat.

[Bohandas]

I think it's fair to say that English is unusual among Indo-European languages for its lack of gender. This isn't because English is inherently more sensible

Indeed, in many cases it's less sensible, but in this particular case it's more sensible

[Bohandas]

Tell that to that cat called "it" in Dowining Street. (Cameron was reprimanded by the press because he didn't love the Premier's Cat enough to call him a "he", instead going for "it".)

Was the cat neutered or intact?

[2D8HP]

I wonder why Actor and actress, waiter and waitresses are an exception.

The one that puzzles me is "seamstress" for women and "tailor" for men.

No seamstors or tailresses?

[S@tanicoaldo]

The one that puzzles me is "seamstress" for women and "tailor" for men.

No seamstors or tailresses?

Thanks to Discworld another profession entirely comes to my mind when I hear seamstress..

[Wardog]

My point exactly. People were upset that something with a real gender was considered not important enough to be referred to by that gender. With grammatical gender there would be only one pronoun that would be correct to use, regardless of the actual sex of the cat.

Is it even correct to say that a cat has "gender"? Isn't "sex" more accurate in the case of (non-human) animals?

[Gnoman]

The one that puzzles me is "seamstress" for women and "tailor" for men.

No seamstors or tailresses?

"Seamstor" is actually a word, it is just obsolete.

Originally, "Tailor" and "Seamstress" were two different job descriptions, with the former being clothes-specific and the latter referring to just professional sewing of any sort. Since the basic mechanical sewing has primarily been taken over by mechanization, the two have merged into one job that takes care of custom clothing and alterations.

[Hazyshade]

That's without getting into the question of how grammatical gendering adds a bunch of needless complexity for no gain.

So any arbitrary increase in the complexity of a language is going to make some things easier to express - it's not going to be semantically neutral.

But the specific complexity added by the gender system actively creates issues that don't exist in genderless languages: Germans Try To Get Their Tongues Around Gender-Neutral Language

Look at Dutch and Afrikaans. Did any Afrikaans speaker ever think "I really wish I had that system of gendered nouns that my Dutch friends have, that would be so useful to me"?

Grammatical gender needs to be strapped to a rocket and fired into the sun.

[dehro]

Thanks to Discworld another profession entirely comes to my mind when I hear seamstress..

I'm so very glad that I'm not the only one who thought of this...

[Charlie696]

Ive always thought Kroeger the store had an S. People get on to me constantly. but also when I hear Pacific instead of Specific

[Aedilred]

Indeed, in many cases it's less sensible, but in this particular case it's more sensible

I think it's a mistake to think in terms of one language being more or less sensible or reasonable than another. Not to mention that it's wildly subjective and what seems sensible will always be largely dependent on one's first language.

Things which you might take for granted in one language may not exist in another. For instance in some Celtic languages there is no single way to say "yes" or "no". To an English speaker (and speakers of many other languages), this seems mad, because we're used to a simple, definitive way to express affirmation or denial. But there are a number of scenarios where "yes" or "no" are outright confusing, depending on how the question is formulated, and require further clarification, whereas a language which constructs its positive/negative response based on the question being asked doesn't have this problem and people who have grown up speaking the language do not have a problem with the absence of direct equivalents to "yes" and "no".

Is one way more or less sensible than the other? No. These languages weren't designed; they arose organically depending on how people found it useful and necessary to communicate. You can't really step back and say "this language is objectively more sensible than that one" any more than you can say that one culture is objectively superior to another. Things get a little fuzzier when we get onto languages like Esperanto or sign which were artificially created with grammatical structures in place, but that's a different kettle of fish really.

[Peelee]

Is one way more or less sensible than the other? No.

Well, the Celts may answer that differently.

[Fiery Diamond]

Well, the Celts may answer that differently.

Ha! Man, that took me way longer to get than it should have.

[Peelee]

Ha! Man, that took me way longer to get than it should have.

Not gonna lie, I'm quite proud of that one.