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Those 15 cases are always predictable from the nominative in many if not for all regular nouns,yes, there are complex consonant mutations that must be learned and other sound processes but they are very predictable, Finnish is almost completely free of any non-predictable forms. Now contrast that with having to memorize several parts of other European or Europeanized languages (that reminds me, Finnish didn't inflect adjectives like English until contact with the rest of Europe). The number doesn't matter, Icelandic has 4 cases but over
40 declensions, the nouns are rapidly merging since native speakers are confusing them but their language academy is still promoting the keeping of them...where was I? Oh yes, it alls comes down to regularity in the end.
Quote:
Originally Posted by xander.XVII
By the way, "cane" (dog) is masculine because it ends with "-e", like "donna" (woman) is feminine because it ends with "-a", that's how it mostly works (there are exceptions obviously).
It's not that genders are assigned by randomly choosing which gender it belongs to.
The declensions were originally assigned based on the gender, Proto Indo European didn't have grammatical gender but personification led to assigning genders to objects based on their religious and cultural beliefs, modern gender is an appendix you see. The next step is to get rid of gender like Armenian, many languages in India, and English, or to reform the gender so that there is a semantic reasoning such as how some flat round objects have become feminine in some German dialects now, to overtly mark it like Russian or Spanish where the words sound gives it away, or they just keep it and let it sag around further for no reason just because!
I actually believe that modern European languages would be much more regular if it weren't for prescriptivism, I have brought this up before, Xander:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mahhammer
One thing I don't get is why European language prescriptivists try to make the languages stay as irregular as possible. They don't let things settle down, they attempt to force as many irregular forms and exceptions to continue to exist.
In fact, I would expect prescriptivists to force the language to be as regular as possible.
This is what happened to Sanskrit, the Indian grammarian Panini took the local Vedic language and forcibly regularized it to the point of looking almost artificial.
For a more clear example of what sorta happens without prescriptivism holding things back, compare Swiss German to Modern German,
Swiss German has removed the genitive case, the simple past tense is almost gone, it has removed case markings from nouns leaving articles the only thing indicating cases, word order is freer, in some places the 2nd person plural conjugation suffix has disappeared and all relative clauses are introduced with "wo" which is even simpler than the ones in English!
Or Samogitian Lithuanian,
The accentuation has settled more, the neuter gender is completely gone with no remnants, 2 declensions are dissappearing from the nouns and the second adjective declension is almost extinct, there are only 2 conjugations as the 2nd one has disappeared, the habitual is formed using the word "liuob" before the past tense instead of an inflectional suffix, the 3rd person singular and plural conjugation suffixes have merged.
It preserves the dual number though but this is a semantic complexity, the suffixes are the same as other cases.
The question is, why are grammarians attempting to prevent these things from happening in their languages, some Icelandic people must be reminded the declensions of their own nouns nowadays since mergers are occurring which they are trying to stop. What does irregularity accomplish? It's natural for native speakers to let go of them.
As a reply to when someone claimed native French speakers have trouble conjugating correctly:
If native speakers conjugate incorrectly, then isn't their "incorrect" grammar actually correct and your idea of what is correct is but a prescribed standard and not how people would actually talk if left alone?
Just think, it would only take hundreds of years, not thousands for regularity to occur. That is why European languages are STILL the most irregular and horrifically redundant in the world (although NE caucasian nouns are the exception, they have random unpredictable suffixes added to cases of 50% of nouns in 4 areas (800 irregular nouns with 4 parts each!) for no reason, it is not sound change! But everything else is not like that of European languages. And we now know people wouldn't scorn English for what it has chosen to do, remove things when another method already exists were it so. It's things like Russian that holds on to everything so that its hands can barely hold them all!
Last edited by Mahhammer; 10-12-2014 at 06:54 PM..
Well, the complexity of abstract thinking I guess - how would you ascribe genders to a lot of abstract things, on what ground? With tribal people, I imagine, everything would have been much easier in this respect))))
Could you elaborate?:
Here are my further opinions:
There is a correlation of gender predictability and modernization, a language spoken by farmers in the mountains may have predictable gender such as farm animals that women take care of are feminine, farm animals that men take care of are masculine, tools, tree, and things made of wood, leather, and things made from leather of course, are masculine while cooking pots are feminine, some birds are feminine since the mother goddess uses them as messengers, pests or animals they dislike due to superstition are neuter, etc. but if this bunch of farmers moved to the city, converted to christianity, islam, or buddhism, yet still used the same genders and their kids use them, a thousand years later the gender is the same but their are no clues at all, they use them out of habit.
If one looks at Latin, one can find some correlations such as trees and rivers belong to one or the other but the lines further blurred as their civilization throve, similarly, one notices abstractions that show "manlike" qualities are masculine in German and so are many long objects with pointy tips, or that words referring to a category of things are neuter such as "Das tier" since the word categorizes animals, or a "hiearchy" such as "der ozean", "die see", "das meer" (which originally meant a large lake, not a sea as it does now), each one a smaller body of water showing masculine as the dominant with neuter as the smallest, etc. but there is no productive categorization of new words, gender is chosen for random reasons such as having a similar meaning to another word, the prescriptivists choose one, the original gender from the other language or the sound. These are remnants, basically, there was a dialect of English in the late 1800s that had 2 genders which were predictable based on "god given of the wild" vs "man made that which is under our control". Image if we spoke that today, the reasons would be lost and it would be random.
Am I correct? The better question is if learners of a language with gender should expose themselves to the culture of the language so they can easily know gender by the same reasons the speakers assign them, or if there is no reasons except habit for the assignment and speakers should just drop them or reorganize them like the ways I mentioned above.
Could you elaborate?:
Here are my further opinions:
There is a correlation of gender predictability and modernization, a language spoken by farmers in the mountains may have predictable gender such as farm animals that women take care of are feminine, farm animals that men take care of are masculine, tools, tree, and things made of wood, leather, and things made from leather of course, are masculine while cooking pots are feminine, some birds are feminine since the mother goddess uses them as messengers, pests or animals they dislike due to superstition are neuter, etc. but if this bunch of farmers moved to the city, converted to christianity, islam, or buddhism, yet still used the same genders and their kids use them, a thousand years later the gender is the same but their are no clues at all, they use them out of habit.
Well then what are you going to do with definitions like love or hate? Or the morning rush or disappointment?
What genders would you ascribe to them?
VERY interesting thread. I've had a good time reading it.
I see many people say Spanish is one of the easiest European languages to learn. Maybe it's true, but I won't be convinced until I hear a non-native speaker say these two sentences correctly in Spanish.
Well then what are you going to do with definitions like love or hate? Or the morning rush or disappointment?
What genders would you ascribe to them?
Love is feminine when a woman speaks but masculine when a man speaks, I would have to use "he" for that word while women would use "she", hate is neuter as it is lifeless, it is the absence of human warmth.
Morning Rush is neuter as the word "rush" is a noun-like usage of a verb "to rush" and verbal nouns are neuter, and disappointment would take whatever gender "-ment" gives, I guess whatever gender it originally had since it's a loan suffix.
But the randomness of gender still puzzles me, the examples above are exceptions to the rules, the vast majority of words are random. 3/4 of langauges have no gender, and the ones with gender about 2/3 are predictable from meaning, only
1/8-10 then has this randomness, I just find it strange people say that most languages have gender except English.
I will ask you, why is the gender of table whatever gender it is in any European language? Or is the reason only explainable before the Proto Indo Europeans left the black sea and spread all over, leaving their metaphorical "farms in the mountains"
Last edited by Mahhammer; 10-13-2014 at 09:38 PM..
Love is feminine when a woman speaks but masculine when a man speaks, I would have to use "he" for that word while women would use "she", hate is neuter as it is lifeless, it is the absence of human warmth.
Morning Rush is neuter as the word "rush" is a noun-like usage of a verb "to rush" and verbal nouns are neuter, and disappointment would take whatever gender "-ment" gives, I guess whatever gender it originally had since it's a loan suffix.
But the randomness of gender still puzzles me, the examples above are exceptions to the rules, the vast majority of words are random. 3/4 of langauges have no gender, and the ones with gender about 2/3 are predictable from meaning, only
1/8-10 then has this randomness, I just find it strange people say that most languages have gender except English.
I will ask you, why is the gender of table whatever gender it is in any European language? Or is the reason only explainable before the Proto Indo Europeans left the black sea and spread all over, leaving their metaphorical "farms in the mountains"
So far, off top of my mind I can tell you one thing ( since I am talking only about European languages, and I am comparing English and Russian in particular.)
Both of these languages ( as opposite to each other as they are,) so both of them throw your mind in two different modes of thinking.
In Russian the language ( as a tool of communication) becomes an object of extensive study; you have to go through a long list of samples of different writers to recognize the examples of "good writing," you have to master how to decipher the half-page sentences and what's more important - to learn how to create them yourself in proper way. By the time you'll come to the end of the sentence, you'll forget the original reason why you wrote it, lol - your mind will take you already in hundred different directions. So even dealing with the "tool" alone ( i.e. mastering the language,) it develops your mind on its own; in Russia the language you use in written form is basically your "business card" - it reveals your intellectual level and level of education pretty fast.
With English it's rather different. English is "ascetic" language. It cuts out all the fluff; it gives you only enough of information to keep your mind on track; it focuses you on bottom line, narrowing it down and constantly"sorting things out."
Long time ago a friend of mine from Italy, who came for practice of Russian language to Moscow through her university told me that one of the interesting subjects they've studied was... heck I don't remember the name of it, but it was about the direct interconnectedness of languages and countries/cultures they came from.
So I can't explain the origin of the genders in each and every language, but it's just a food for a thought.
Am I correct? The better question is if learners of a language with gender should expose themselves to the culture of the language so they can easily know gender by the same reasons the speakers assign them, or if there is no reasons except habit for the assignment and speakers should just drop them or reorganize them like the ways I mentioned above.
Exposing oneself to the culture is always a good idea since you are forced to actually learn things like genders/articles by heart. I highly doubt, though, that you will find out the reasons why we assign a certain gender to certain words.
Observations like that "Ozean" - "See" - "Meer" thing would never cross a native speaker's mind. German speaking kids also have to learn them, they just start at an earlier age. It's not unusual for kids in Kindergarten to confuse them at times.
There are some words that don't even have just one gender attributed to them: "Butter" (butter) or "Teller" (plate) for example. You can use both der/die for Butter and der/das for Teller. Changing or getting rid of the articles/genders would have the same effect as those words with multiple articles: It just sounds wrong to native speakers that aren't used to such variations. And after all you are learning a language in order to communicate with native speakers. It doesn't matter whether it would be a great idea to do so.
As a non native speaker the Der, Die,Das, Ihn, Ihnen, Ihre... is, I think near to impossible to get to a native level. When I don´t think too much I am often right but if I start to think about it I get confused. In speach I notice my mistakes are not so apparent but written is much harder. I do find spelling in German quite easy though, I am a horrible speller but in German not so bad.
Russian is my Native language English, Dutch German ,French, Japanese , Sinhalese, fluently spoken and written, spanish Arabic and Sanskrit some what I can understand but I am not good at so I am not preferred to use. But French is difficult for me during the time I was learning the rest went very well.
As a non native speaker the Der, Die,Das, Ihn, Ihnen, Ihre... is, I think near to impossible to get to a native level. When I don´t think too much I am often right but if I start to think about it I get confused. In speach I notice my mistakes are not so apparent but written is much harder. I do find spelling in German quite easy though, I am a horrible speller but in German not so bad.
If I compare Dutch and German I think German is easier!
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