• School_Lunch@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    It’s just one more thing to memorize when trying to learn them. I’m not going to intuitively know what gender a chair is…

    • Glowstick@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      I’ve asked the following question before and I’ve never gotten a good answer - why do the words need a gendered suffix at all? Why can’t the final O and A letters simply be omitted from all words that aren’t inherently gendered? Like the word for library is 'bibliotheca", so why can’t it just be called “bibliothec”?

      • phdepressed
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        5 months ago

        The long and short of it is that it was decided on however long ago and now the people who learn the language growing up are used to it and they decide the rules that are followed.

        English (and any non-native language) does many weird things that native speakers are just used to and will get upset if you try and change it.

        • Glowstick@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          That’s sort of exactly why i as an individual don’t understand why they don’t do it, because I’m a native english speaker and there’s a lot i would like to change about it. Like imo in spelling, almost all the silent letters that don’t effect pronunciation should be eliminated. Debt should be spelled det, night should be spelled nite

          • Belastend@lemmy.world
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            5 months ago

            You do realize that this is kinda bad, right? No english spelling reform ever took hold because of the vast difference in english pronounciation. your “nite” might completely differ from the aussie version of “night”. so you’d have to declare one dialect to be the supreme one. That’ll be fun :)

            Secondly: Gender and gendered terms are sociallinguistic conventions. And they do not follow stereotypical gender norms. Often they radiate outwards from gendered terms for humans and then encompass things that follow similar sound structures. sometimes gender is historically motivated: Spanish generally divides things along the lines of “does it end with an -a or -o” and then assigns gender. But terms like “diversidad” stem from female latin words and retain their gender. “problema” seems feminine, but stems from a male greek word and is therefore male. Not because “tHe MaLeS aRe ThE PrrObLeM”, but because ancient greek sound structures classified this as “male-sounding” and Spanish ran with it.

            In German, “das Mädchen” (the girl) is neutral. Not bevause all girl are secretly enbies or equivalent to possesions, but the diminuitive “-chen” turns things neutral.

            all that to say: “Why dont they do that” can always answered with a resounding “Why dont you have feature x?”. Why doesnt English use eventiality or cases or dual and trial numeri or tones or different conjugations depending on registers? Because the language didnt develope that way.

            • barsoap@lemm.ee
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              5 months ago

              In German, “das Mädchen” (the girl) is neutral. Not bevause all girl are secretly enbies or equivalent to possesions, but the diminuitive “-chen” turns things neutral.

              There’s actually a somewhat tongue-in-cheek proposal to solve the “Doctor/Doctress” problem by turning absolutely everything diminutive. Das Präsidentchen, das Bundeskanzlerchen, etc.

              • Belastend@lemmy.world
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                5 months ago

                there are soooo many proposals, but thats actually one i like. of course, it would render the entire diminuitive meaningless, buuuut its cute uwu

            • Glowstick@lemmy.world
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              5 months ago

              There isn’t a single widely-used english dialect that pronounces the g in night.

              • Belastend@lemmy.world
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                5 months ago

                In case of night this might work, but for words like might it doesnt. Might now becomes orthographically indistinguishable from mite. Right and rite also lose their distinction.

          • MindTraveller@lemmy.ca
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            5 months ago

            I pronounce epitome as epi-tome and refuse to change it no matter how many times I’m “corrected”

      • Patapon Enjoyer@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        I think the answer to every “Why doesn’t this language work like this” question is “because it doesn’t work like that”.

        Also since the definite articles (e.g “the”) is just the vowels, you lose them entirely. And words would just sound weird cause it would create sounds that don’t really exist in the languages

        • Belastend@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          Genus isnt sexus. The chair isnt female in Spanish because ancient Spaniard thought it might have titties, its feminine because of its phonology. La silla ends with an a, so it gets the la article.

          Why does English still use actor and actress? why do you use definite articles instead of marking definiteness with prefixes? Why do i have to “i saw Mike steal your bike” instead of included something inside of the verb “see” to mark that i witnessed it?

          Language is just that. An evolution of changes that happened throughout millenia and rarely was any pressure applird to that change.

    • barsoap@lemm.ee
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      5 months ago

      I’m not going to intuitively know what gender a chair is

      There’s phonological rules. Just don’t try to ask a native speaker about them we have them internalised and thus intuit everything, actually look them up.