Comments on: On language and gender

By: lgd

lgd — Wed, 04 Jan 2006 14:26:14 +0000

i think that esperanto was good, but other than that why not just make nouns ‘l’ rather than ‘le’ or ‘la’? it would be easier. (however no i don’t think it’s ever going to change, or if it did maybe another twohundred years?)

By: Senji

Senji — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 +0000

The one thing I remember from French lessions is that the word for ‘shirt’ and the word for ‘blouse’ differ only in gender.

By: kNo'

kNo' — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 +0000

Why can’t they do? Because a language is not made to be logic. There have been thousands of years of history and the tongues have evolved by the contribution of so many generations you can’t find WHY a word has this gender or another.

IIRC, there is a “indian american” tongue where the genders of names are not based on the female / male / neutral distinction, but the alive (animals, humans) / almost alive (plants) / not alive (objects), and all their grammar is based on this. Is this distinction more or less logical than the indo-european one?

Senji:
The usual translation of shirt is “chemise“, and I think that “blouse” is “blouse“. They’re both feminine.

By: sil

sil — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 +0000

Ah, kNo‘, I don’t mean “why does word X have gender Y“, I mean “why bother with gender at all?” What stops the Academie Française from just declaring, tomorrow, that all French nouns are now masculine, and the words “une” and “la” are now no longer required? Would this harm the language or its understandability in any way?

By: mrben

mrben — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 +0000

Weirdly, I think that France probably both the most able to do it, with the Academie, and the least likely to do it…..

By: Grrrr

Grrrr — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 +0000

That’s a funny one. How about abolishing articles from English altogether – any Russian would tell you that it is possible to do without them. Or a number of tenses in English, for that matter, is too high for at least my tastes!

By: kNo'

kNo' — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 +0000

>“Would this harm the language or its understandability in any way?”

We would all speak French like English or American people.

And I really think that because our tongue is the result of a long-time evolution, it has some huge inertia, and you can’t wipe out these centuries of feminine / masculine (bad?) habits.

And I suspect we like our tongue to be complicated, so we can laugh at someone (matt, for example) mixing fem/masc. nouns. ;)

By: sil

sil — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 +0000

Grrr: not a totally unreasonable point, that, actually. That’s quite a good idea. I certainly wouldn’t be massively in opposition to it were it proposed.
kNo’: I agree that it wouldn’t happen because of inertia (although see the note about the Swedes above); what I was asking was whether there was any real reason, other than inertia, why it wouldn’t work; I take it that there isn’t?
Keeping them in just so you can laugh at Matt seems a bit extreme, as in favour as I am of laughing at Matt ;)

By: Colin Watson

Colin Watson — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 +0000

English, of course, went through exactly the same process of unifying the informal and formal second person pronouns, except that bizarrely we picked the formal “you” for routine use and kept “thou” for special occasions.

Swedish has two “genders” which aren’t really genders in the familiar Romance/Germanic style: neuter is usual enough, but instead of masculine and feminine they have “common” which apparently fused from m/f at some point in the past. This doesn’t wind up being quite so simple as an animate/inanimate distinction, but from what little I remember that can at least provide a useful starting point in trying to remember which noun is which. (And, speaking of articles, the indefinite article just gets fused onto the end of the noun.)

I have to say that it sounds like you’re ultimately looking for an artificial language, though; attempts to impose retroactive regularity on natural languages generally seem to be doomed to failure simply through inertia.

By: sil

sil — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 +0000

Colin: oh, I don’t know about imposition of regularity being impossible; take, say, spelling in English, which is now regular and not as carefree and laissez-faire as once it was.
I knew about English, naturally, but someone (who I’m still not sure are the Swedes, and I now think not since you didn’t confirm it) fused formal and informal forms recently rather than two hundred years ago :-) Moreover, it was an imposed change rather than everyone just deciding to do it over time like it was with English.