Why Do Languages Have Grammatical Gender? | Ask a Linguist
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 27 มิ.ย. 2024
- If you're a native English speaker, you were probably surprised the first time you encountered grammatical gender. So what is grammatical gender, and why do 25% of all languages have it? One of our linguists, Jennifer, explains.
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It certainly is not to make learning another language easy.
depends of the language. In portuguese, some 95% of the words ending with A are feminine gender, 95% of the words ending in O are masculine.
And that is already a big share of our nouns.
Yeah pisses me right off. Put me off learning two languages. Stuck to speaking, thinking, dreaming and swearing in English since then...
@@120201atta That is just lazyness.
In Iberian languages 90% of the gendered words match the sound at the ending of the word.
It's about 50 times easier to decorate than to decorate the COMPLETE ruleless english language, where NOBODY FUCKING KNOWS how a word is supposed to be spoken unless you heard the word before, therefore requiring you to decorate the entire fucking dictionary.
Why do you think "spelling bees" are not as popular in other languages?
@@rogeriopenna9014 that's nothing in greek it's more like 99.9%, because the ending is the marking, therefore you couldn't even say the object without knowing its gender, but that still is a problem isn't it, why learn the genders and not have all nouns end in more predictable ways.
I know right. it makes me wanna say putangina
*"Laughs in gender free language"*
Like English,Turkish,Korean ....
@@polynedkovafanchannel7754 Tagalog too
Gotta laugh in persian
@@polynedkovafanchannel7754 english is not that gender free actually, there is the "he/she", if you're talking about a truly gender free language it would be like indonesian "dia" means both he/she, farsi, with "او" etc
@@samirkhoury2935 There are She/He because Old English has had grammatical gender.
my first language is italian and we have only the two genders m/f and we gender EVERYTHING. it was never a problem when learning english because i just have to "switch off" and use "the" for everything, and french was pretty easy because being so similar the majority of nouns have the same gender. but then i did one year of german and oh boy. that was a mess. i could not for the life of me remember which nouns where m and which f, except for the obvious ones which refer to people. and also it was so weird referring to objects which to me where clearly fem in a masc way (and viceversa)! and that's just a great way to start seeing that gender in german grammar seems to be the basis for fucking everything.
Wait what do you mean gender in German nouns is the basis for everything? (I don’t know any German if that helps)
@@M_SC basically the articles and adjectives and pronouns are all different for every gender (masc, femme and neutral) and they change with every case, so instead of learning 1 or 2 articles/pronouns for every noun you have to memorize at least 4 and all the suffixes for the adjectives etc.
Anch'io ho avuto tantissimi problemi a causa dei generi in tedesco... L'unica regola "fissa" che ho imparato è che solitamente i sostantivi che terminano in -ung sono femminili. Per il resto lasciamo perdere, tutto molto a caso 😂😂😰 Credo che un modo più efficace per imparare i generi in tedesco possa essere attraverso l''acquisizione spontanea e non con l'apprendimento meccanico, a memoria. In realtà quello dell' acquisizione implicita dovrebbe essere il metodo utilizzato in generale per imparare una lingua, al posto del tradizionale metodo usato a scuola... Ma vabbè. Ci vuole ripetizione e tanto input, ma il risultato è molto più naturale ed efficace, anche a lungo termine.
Dopo molte volte che senti dire, per esempio, "der Tod", qualsiasi altro articolo davanti alla parola "Tod" ti sembrerebbe sbagliato, perché l'hai imparato spontaneamente, e anche se l'articolo corrispondente in italiano è femminile non ti viene da usare "die Tod", ti sei abituato naturalmente al suono giusto. Non so se possa essere utile...
Poi vabbè, i problemi purtroppo si presentano anche nelle lingue che sembrano più "vicine". Anche in francese mi sono trovata a dover correggere forme fossilizzate che sbagliavo soprattutto a causa di un'interferenza dall'italiano. Esempio banale : "étude" femminile che io usavo sempre come maschile, oppure "art", "minute", "air", "mer" e compagnia bella... Chiaramente per il tedesco è ancora peggio, anche e soprattutto perché, diciamocelo, ce lo insegnano male.
Scusa per il romanzo 😂
Man you are so lucky. You are whining about learning German even though you are able to speak Italian. German and Italian are European languages and seem so similar. My first language is Turkish. It is too hard to learn things related to gender while learning German. Because we don't seperate man or women. Futhermore we have no pronoun for animals and objects. We don't have 'he' and 'she' that's normal Turkish is neutral language but we don't even have a different pronoun for "it". We just have 'o' for all the third singular pronouns.
We don't have "the" or something similar. If you try to translate "the" from English to Turkish, Google translate will show a blank. We don't put verb after the subject. We put it to the end of sentence
If you combine all of differences it's being completely confusing to learning a European language. English is hard. German is nirvana for Turkish speakers.
@@youredefinitelyrightbut463 You're also whining while being able to speak one of the most beautiful and difficult languages ever as your mother tongue. You should be grateful for that.
In Croatian, there is masculine, feminine and neutral, but it's very simple because every feminine gender noun ends with A, neutral with O and masculine with almost every other letter!
Similar in polish, only that neutral ends with O, E or Ę
Feminine endings of '-a' are fairly common in balto-slavic languages in general, iirc
For Spanish, I've heard that most masculine end with -o and feminine with -a.
@@sapphoenixthefirebird5063 yeah and that’s one of the reasons why spanish was very easy for me to learn
@@denek5637 yeah I forgot to mention, neutral in croatian also ends with E
Me laughs in Hindi, that has gendered conjugations for the verbs.
मैं अच्छा हँ। "I'm fine" said by male speaker.
मैं अच्छी हूँ। "I'm fine" said by female speaker.
So, the speaker's gender is always clear. But oddly enough, the word he/she/that वो (vo) is the same for all three.
Interestingly, it's kind of opposite of some languages that we have -ā ending nouns for mostly masculine and -ī ending ones are mostly feminine (it gets a bit complicated when the noun has neither ending, and especially when it's a loanword from another language).
In italian only with some adjectives or past participles. Like I’m scared or I’m calm. Sono spaventato, spaventata. Sono calmo, calma.
I don't think you answered the question WHY!! you just described what some languages have and others don't!
I don´t think you watched the whole video. The end describes why genders help speakers and listeners, and thus, obviously, why they appeared in so many languages.
i expected an elaborate historical narration
@@rogeriopenna9014 Well I think the reason so many of us are here, is because using genders for inanimate objects clearly doesn't help. It makes things several times more complicated.
I also wouldn't be at all surprised if English (despite being derived from several languages) is one of the easiest languages to learn for the reason it doesn't have genders for everything. The English language is very sophisticated, there's a lot to learn for anyone willing on going beyond what's necessary, but for learning the basics it's gotta be easier than any Germanic or Latin language.
@@rogeriopenna9014 she did state that it can help you process meaning more quickly but does not even try to explain how or why or even give an example. I would say that this video most definitely fails at living up to its title.
@@C.D.J.Burton if it made things more complicated, it would not exist in so many languages.
I’ll research more of this on my Feminine Computer which is placed on my Masculine Desk in my Neutral Room 👌🏻😎
Huy Pham 😂😂🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Forget about word genders as being about biological sex. They are CLASSES of nouns whose purpose is concordance with other words in a sentence, thus making it easier to understand meaning with less words, or through noise.
those are all masculine in german :D
@@rogeriopenna9014 Can you elaborate on the concordance part?
@@dudeofsteel3118 Sorry, in english the term used is AGREEMENT
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agreement_(linguistics)
Kazakh language is too non gender language as Turkish. There is in Kazakh language only one universal word " O'L ". (read as spelled). We have gender words as turkish but we don't use them, even if we know gender. And we don't have to transform (Convert) verbs or other words for their gender, as it should have to be in Russian, for example.
We call "O" for "he,she,it" in Turkey Turkish.
I love my native language Armenian, also Turkish, Persian, English, no grammatocal gender=easy
I don’t see why it is necessary to assign genders to inanimate things. Nor the logic behind. The speaker here says it can be used as a sort of filter and retrieve things faster, but that means you have to spend more resources to categorize the object. But why not categorize it with the objects innate attributes? Like Hammer. It’s a tool. Filtering that through the function of the tool is not only does the job the speaker explained, but you don’t need to learn the gender that was arbitrarily assigned. Just by having gender in the language for ALL things, one basically added an attribute to all things that don’t really need it. Such an inefficiency.
I wish if all languages were like turkish and finnish
Well, those languages have their own complexities.
Glad to know that grammatical genders aren't devised by some sinister Ancients just in order to mess up with future learners. Come to think of it I sorta remember a couple of times when the gender of a word did work as a crutch for me when trying to recall that word from memory.
As a native speaker of Japanese it strikes me as interesting that the Japanese language throws not only the grammatical gender but also the very concept of pronouns out of the window seemingly altogether*. On the flip side It's got tons and tons of gendered speech markers that differentiate and identify the individual speaker as male, female and various inbetweens with myriad intersections with class, social interactions, display of affection/distance and whatnot.
*I often see well-intentioned language-learning related articles online that say something along the lines of "There are such diverse and colourful personal pronouns in Japanese at your disposal" but in my opinion they're misguided at best, because none of watashi, ore, boku, anata, kimi, kare, kanojo, or (insert one of your choice) are "pronouns" that work in the way they do in English or any other IE languages as far as I know of, in which the grammatical structure often requires pronouns to form a complete sentence. On the other hand in Japanese I can't come up with a sentence that strictly requires aforementioned words on a grammatical level. So 999 times out of 1000 when you use a pronoun in a sentence in English it's best to omit these "pronouns" in Japanese unless you're in a classroom.
As someone who is learning Japanese this was an interesting read. 英語上手 (笑)
Yeah hold crap your English is good
Those "sinister Ancients" must have been busy doing other things. I agree: the word "pronoun" works well in describing European languages, not Japanese.
English speakers often don't grasp why it's more useful and sophisticated to have genders in grammar.
Example: if your English daughter says she's going out with "a friend", you have no way of knowing whether the friend is a boy or a girl.
But in Italian, your daughter would have to say either "amicO" (male friend) or "amicA" (female friend).
That meaningful nuance is completely lost in English.
That hasn't much to do with 'true' grammatical gender, because you're referring to things that have a non-grammatical gender. It's the same as English waiter/waitress, English just doesn't have an equivalent for 'friend'.
This comment is just going to further the misconception that grammatical gender is in any way related to human gender. It isn't. The reason the genders, which I'll hereafter refer to as noun classes, are masculine and feminine in languages with two noun classes is because men and women usually happen to be in different noun classes.
Since you have two noun classes, and one of the most intuitive distinctions between people humans have historically made is that of gender, it makes perfect sense to put the different genders in different noun classes, so they can be more easily told apart in language.
To say a noun is a feminine noun isn't to say it shares any properties with women. It just happens to belong to the same noun class that 'woman' does. Because, again, the distinction between genders has historically been important to humans, the noun classes were named based on which of the human genders they included. That's all there is to it.
That's why it's usually masculine/feminine for two-class systems and masculine/feminine/neuter for three. One class happens to contain men, one class happens to contain women, one class happens to contain neither.
You can see this distinction in how most people with non-binary gender identities use pronouns in three-class systems where the culture historically only has _two_ genders when it comes to _people._
It does happen, but it's unusual for non-binary people to use the pronouns of the 'neuter' noun class, because (due to the cultural precedent of there only being two genders for living things) all living things have to belong to either the 'masculine' noun class or the 'feminine' noun class. To use pronouns of the 'neuter' noun class is not to say that you identify as neither male nor female, but that you are a non-living inanimate object. Cultural gender is _completely distinct_ from grammatical gender.
That's why the far more common solution is to create a pronoun that doesn't tie them to a specific noun class or use the pronouns for the masculine and feminine noun classes interchangably.
@@ccaagg
What's your point?
@@shaggygoatboy1125 Sorry, I did ramble way too much there.
Distinguishing amico and amica isn't really the same thing because those are both animate, referring to a thing which is alive and has an actual, real gender. English also does that, but only sometimes.
You can always just say "female friend" or "male friend". I don't really understand why the gender of the person you're friends with is important info, especially considering the fact that (at least in the US) gender can be a hot topic and it's sometimes rude to assume. You'd need four or five endings for gender and it really doesn't provide enough useful information to be worth the trouble for building it into the word.
@@xshadow193
"You'd need four of five endings".
No, we wouldn't.
Italy isn't the U.S, mate.
We don't allow microscopic minorities to reshape our entire vocabulary on a whim. That's not how language naturally evolves: new words spread around when they are useful and people spontaneously pick them up, not when a group of activists tries to push them by legislative fiat.
As for the original argument, to point out the obvious: by changing a single letter at the end of the word "amico/amica" we can convey a distinction you would need two separate words for, in English: "male friend/female friend".
In other words, gendered langauge conveys that detail a lot more quickly and efficiently.
That's just one example out of possible thousands.
Hi Jennifer,
I do recall reading once that gender in French was used to mark the "agency" of nouns. Things that had "agency" or "could act upon" something were masculine, and things that "were acted upon" were feminine. The examples I saw were "The horse dances on the mountain (Le cheval danse sur la montagne)", or "The ship sails upon the sea (Le navire a navigué sur la mer)". But I do not know enough French to say how well this framework holds up, or holds up for other Romance languages. I would love to hear your take on this, and the opinion of speakers of French.
Hello there! ✨ Grammatical gender is one form of a noun/nominal classification system. Many noun/nominal classification systems rely on properties of the entities (eg., agency, degree of salience in the environment, shape, how humans interact with it, etc.). To have a better take on this, we would actually require an historical linguist to unravel because it would date back to the early Romance language family genesis - when it started to diverge from other Indo-European languages (we’re talking around year 700 BCE) 🤓
We would like to thank you for your question and the knowledge you have shared with us today. Additionally, we have this article that you may find really interesting as well: www.babbel.com/en/magazine/evolution-of-grammatical-genders-why-french-has-two-genders-german-has-three-and-english-does-not-care
And some more data here:
- wals.info/feature/31A#2/26.7/149.1
- wals.info/feature/32A#2/26.7/149.1
- wals.info/feature/30A#2/26.7/149.1
I don't speak French, but I am a native speaker of another romance language, Portuguese, and I gotta tell you...I don't think this theory holds up. It's weird to the point where I don't even know where to begin to explain why it's wrong
it is not true
I personally can't really confirm that advantage when you're speaking, at least not as a bilingual (Spanish and German). Man, it happens so often that I start a sentence already having used and prepared one gender (with articles, adapted adjectives or pronouns) only to realize the coming noun actually has another gender. I have to say though that it happens more often when speaking German, since it's not my mother tongue, but I grew up with it since babyhood. Speaking Swiss German doesn't make it easier, since some words (don't know why) don't use the same gender.
Now, English may be easy to learn because of the lack of genders, but do you realize that barely anyone mentions how hard it is to know how to spell words or pronounce them when you read them? Iberian Spanish or even French are more reliable and consistent in that topic.
Never heard anyone say French is easier when it comes to how to pronounce words and spelling until this comment. How is French more phonetic than English?
Blame the French language and science's use of Greek and Latin prefixes and suffixes for the seemingly random spelling rules. For every weird spelling rule, either someone at sometime in history adopted a French word instead of creating or new one, and then that word's spelling probably got corrupted with time; or scientists wanted to have certain aspects of a concept or object being immediately assumed by other scientists through the use of a dead-language
I still have no idea what this means
As a Bengali, I feel glad that my native language is a gender neutral language!
that also causes the Bengali society to treat men and women equally to some extent at least in West Bengal. I have no idea about Bangladeshi society but I would assume they would be similar with certain exceptions
@@suhridguha2560 yeah it's true in the case of Bangladesh as well (at least Bengali people treat men and woman equally than others in this Subcontinent)
In Russian also 3 genders: мужской род - m, женский род - f и средний род - n. But it's easy to define. If the word ends with consonant it's generally masculine, if with vowel (except o, е) it's feminine. And if words ends with o, е so it's neutrum. But of course there some exceptions, and difficulties. For example папА (dad) - masculine because he's a man. Or шимпанзе (chimpanzee) - masculine. The most difficult thing about genders in Russian - The words ending with letter ь. It's impossible to define is it masculine or feminine.
Лень (Laziness) - feminine
Пень (Stump of the tree) - masculine
День (Day) - masculine
But in the comparison with German Russian genders are super-easy))
This didn't explain "why" at all. Why are shirts feminine and pants masculine in French and Spanish? What's the point of having to memorize articles that add nothing to the noun, especially when there are also exceptions?
In french you have a shirt for a guy that's feminine- "une chemise" -and a blouse for a girl that's masculine- "un chemisier"
French makes no sense.
@@Olivia-WIn Spanish both are femenine .
In Spanish we technically have three genders although effectively we only use two of them, as neutral gender has merged almost completely with the masculine.
This has caused trouble and misscomceptions by Spanish speakers that don't really understand their own language trying to come up whith a gender-neutral Spanish that thankfully never took off because oh boy was it disastrous.
I know what you mean but those people want a neuter gender to be used referring to people. You can’t say ello about a person, right? Anyway they can’t modify a whole language to fit their own ideology.
@@mattiamele3015those people say that Spanish is Tphobic (as well as other Romanse languages)...but they whould have chronical headache and trauma if they even try to find gender neuteal solution for Slavic languages. Because all Slavic languages are gendered even harder that Romanse languages.😂
This is from Serbian, South Slavic woman.😉
I feel like a lot of people here are suffering from the misconception that grammatical gender is tied to human gender, in that to say a noun is feminine is to say it shares properties with women. That's false, and I'll explain why.
The reason the grammatical genders, which I'll hereafter refer to as noun classes to avoid confusion, are 'masculine' and 'feminine' in languages with two noun classes is because men and women usually happen to be in different noun classes.
Since you have two noun classes, and one of the most intuitive distinctions between people humans have historically made is that of gender, it makes perfect sense to put the different genders in different noun classes, so they can be more easily told apart in language.
To say a noun is a feminine noun isn't to say it shares any properties with women. It just happens to belong to the same noun class that 'woman' does. Because, again, the distinction between genders has historically been important to humans, the noun classes were named based on which of the human genders they included. That's all there is to it.
That's why it's usually masculine/feminine for two-class systems and masculine/feminine/neuter for three. One class happens to contain men, one class happens to contain women, one class happens to contain neither.
You can see this distinction in how most people with non-binary gender identities use pronouns in three-class systems where the culture historically only has two genders when it comes to people.
It does happen, but it's unusual for non-binary people to use the pronouns of the 'neuter' noun class, because (due to the cultural precedent of there only being two genders for living things) all living things have to belong to either the 'masculine' noun class or the 'feminine' noun class. To use pronouns of the 'neuter' noun class is not to say that you identify as neither male nor female, but that you are a non-living inanimate object. Cultural gender is completely distinct from grammatical gender.
That's why the far more common solution is to create a nonstandard pronoun that doesn't tie their identity to one specific noun class or use the pronouns for the masculine and feminine noun classes interchangeably.
It's true that studies have shown grammatical gender has a measurable influence on cognition leading people to associate feminine words with more typically feminine human qualities, but this is the noun being classified as feminine leading people to see it as having more feminine qualities, _not_ the other way round.
I have to disagree with the last paragraph. There are no studies that have shown that grammatical gender influences the perception of social gender. Almost all of the studies that have been conducted in this area so far are first of all politically motivated (they are especially prevalent in the humanities and interdisciplinary fields like feminist linguistics) and, more importantly, they discuss only certain words in certain contexts (e.g. asking kids about specific names of occupations they want to pursue in the future). There is no conclusive evidence that grammatical gender in general [meaning grammatical gender of any word, in any language, in any culture, and in any (historical) context] influences people's cognition or perception of words. It's important to point that out since it has been a huge talking point in activism that is pushing for gendered or gender-neutral language changes. That activism is not based on or supported by large-scale international empirical studies but in small case studies with n
In Mandarin Chinese the third person pronoun ta covers masculine, feminine and neutral in speech but it is written differently depending on gender. I think this was introduced due to western influence. Other languages such as Hebrew have different gender forms for second person pronouns. I found that this might be happening in Mandarin. I was in a hospital waiting to have an X-ray. On the wall was a notice in
several languages saying that if you were pregnant, tell the nurse. The Mandarin version had the second person pronoun ni altered to indicate a female was meant. I have never seen this character anywhere else having looked through every dictionary I could find. It seems whoever wrote the Mandarin version was trying to make a small change to this language.
Not exactly from Western influence" we been writing Ta in F/M from since I don't even know when . For non human is also Ta but written differently ,sharing same pronunciation is a thing about Mandarin, for the ni that comes with a feminine on the left side, it's the traditional one using in Taiwan and HK. We also have ancient Chinese words to describe man and woman using completely different words.
The female tā她, was introduced sometime during the mid 1900s. Before, only 他 was used to mean all people of any gender.
I still cannot wrap my head around Finnish and Turkish being close languages.
What is the origin of German noun genders? I think knowing this will help to categorize things by noun gender more easily.
I like that in Italian almost all masculine nouns end in 'o' and almost all feminine nouns end in 'a'. And most plural masculine nouns end in 'i' and most plural feminine nouns end in 'e'. This is a huge help in identifying the correct definite and indefinite articles to use.
Grammatical gender for me doesn't matter, the matter is how to use (in)definite article or without article. Can anyone help me?
Thanks for making the idea of 'genres' of nouns make sense (genders is so loaded...genres removes the politics) ... just like how we divide flavours into categories like sweet, salty, etc., to help understand their nature. I'm curious as to when, historically, the categories of genres of nouns started to be labelled 'masculine' and 'feminine'? Did it result from social dogma about males and females being applied to more ancient categories of 'active' and 'inactive' with the onset of the agricultural revolution and patriarchy? In places where languages evolved outside the Indo-European language family, do explicitly 'masculine' and 'feminine' markings of noun genres exist, ie. do they pre-exist European settlement? What about Finnish and Turkish, the outliers? What explains the absence of noun genres in those languages?
Interesting content! It would be better supplemented with some informational visual examples, such as gender noun tables. I found the cutaways to short animations distracting and did not complement the explanation.
Great video, thanks. Does anyone know if there are any language(s) where getting the noun gender wrong on the article actually makes you incomprehensible?
in french if you confuse le tour and la tour, it would change the meaning
Some language coming from a Latin root. Changing the gender would not make in incomprehensible because, we think, the context remains the same... but it would generate certain confusion. In some other cases, it could even change the meaning.
Swedish example, en öl vs ett öl. The trick is that *en öl* means a (glass) of beer and *ett öl* means a beer in the more general sense. So if you tell me, *den här ölen var inte god*, that glass of beer tasted off. If you tell me *det här ölet var inte gott*, that brand of beer is not your thing. (Note that we don't say "the öl" but we say "ölen", "ölet"; the definite article is the suffix.)
It does not make you incomprehensible. It's just interesting.
I love my language TURKISH 😆🇹🇷❤️😊TÜRKÇE
Yeaahh i love turkish too 👌so unique and beautifull
Thanks
Ok..so clues in sentences will help retrieve memory etc. But languages without gender seem to perform just fine. So I’m still not sure why there’s gender.
Why not? Different languages evolve in different ways.
Spanish language for example uses a very precise verbal system that together with the gendered articles allows it to convey a lot of information without the need of reiteration of words.
@@eukarya_ why not? because it's unnecessary confusion, that's why. and it really doesn't matter if the chair is a woman or not
@@evandien9947Gramatical gender has nothing to do with sex or gender as a sinonim for it . Although sometimes femenine gender is used for females and masculine for males or as unmarked plural ( neutral) for living beings . Gramatical gender just marks the set of endings of the adjective and article and the pronoun you can use instead when there are both options, and helps to comunicate more with less words .
@@TheMaru666 That is a very smart way to spell synonym. Makes sense.
Thanks for the interesting video! Could you do a video on why Germanic languages largely don't indicate the grammatical gender by word endings?
austronesian languages don’t use gendered nouns and pronouns which can be advantageous in many areas
Woaaah really?. I always thought genderized pronouns make no sense, because they only work in certain situations, when you are describing 2 people to someone else and they are a man and a woman.
Like, "Luke and Lily are playing basketball. He passes the ball to her." Who threw the ball? Well in this case you can tell that Luke obviously threw the ball. But if its just slightly different, like "Lily and Rachel are playing basketball. She threw the ball to her." Who threw the ball? No one fucking knows, it's so stupid to have gendered pronouns when ppl can have the same gender.
@@evandien9947 the pronoun for "He/She/It" is only "Ya" in Kapampangan language (an austronesian language spoken in the philippines). it's also a pro-drop language so you don't have to use pronouns all the time, you just have to rely on context and logic.
Quand t’es français et que tu te tapes une barre quand elle dit « fwèw » 2:17
Dès que je l'ai entendue dire "seuw", j'ai su que ça allait arriver juste après.
Btw. there are much more points about grammatical genders in the german language.
Some definete artikles change there gender to show plural for example: das Haus/ the house (neuter singular) - die Haeuser / the houses (female plural) ... mind the noun mutilation while getting plural.... 🖖
Portuguese speaker here. It's pretty easy to determine wheter a word is masculine or feminine. If it ends with a consonant, it's masculine, and if it ends with a vowel it's feminine.
Tá sabendo legal!
Voce e um cara bacana.
So slavic
How about "elephant"?
Gendered words, UNLESS specifically describing people or animals with sex, do NOT describe biological sex or gender.
They just use the human biological genders for objects for convenience, so you keep only two genders instead of having 2 genders for people and 3, 4, 5 genders for objects, none of them related to biological genders. Now... THAT would be difficult to remember.
Think of genders as word categorization, not really as genders.
Genders help comprehension and help shortening sentences and also help many times the listener understand a sentence even if he missed part of it.
Example:
"John put a vase over a chair. It broke"
WHAT BROKE? The vase or the chair???
In english, you don´t know.
Now suppose you did not even hear the word chair. There was noise when the other person was speaking. Now you think it was the vase that broke.
Same sentence in portuguese.
"João colocou o vaso sobre a cadeira. Ela quebrou."
Cadeira is a female gender word because most nouns ending in A are female gender. So it matches the article "A", which is a feminine article.
Ela quebrou = SHE BROKE.
You automatically knows SHE refers to the CHAIR. Suppose you did not hear the word chair correctly. Well, but the second sentence already tells you that it was NOt the vase that broke. Also, the fact it's a female gender word, may help you filter a list of words and correlate the remaining with what you heard amid the noise.
In Danish - and Norwegian and Swedish - we used to have three genders, as well. The masculine and the feminine gender have combined into what we call 'fælleskøn' (common gender) in Danish or 'utrum' in Latin. The other grammatical gender we have preserved is the neutral one. Some dialects have preserved the three genders in Denmark and Norway and possibly in Sweden, as well. There's even a dialect in Denmark that only has one grammatical gender.
Hindi is gendered but not in the same way as the Euro languages. There are no articles and there is no difference between he and she on the pronouns front, though there is on his and her. Nouns still have inbuilt genders which are usually expressed through *verbs*. This is why it's impossible to talk about oneself without giving away one's own gender - and the same is true when talking of anyone / anything else. You just can't talk without verbs.
WONDERFUL video... I really dislike Babbel's babying learning methods but yall's social medias are fire
Hi there, we're happy you like the video. 😄 Have you checked our podcasts?
I’m learning Spanish which has masculine and feminine for nouns and adjectives but not for verbs. “Habla” can me he/she/you (formal) speak
Gratitude 🍁
One language weirdness regarding gender is Mandarin Chinese [possibly other Chinese languages that I haven't studied too] where there are masculine and feminine _written_ pronouns- 他 (he) and 她 (she) that are pronounced identically.
"English doesn't have gender"
(casually calling ships "she")
A ship is an it. It's a tradition for a ship to have a female name, though, but it isn't a requirement and doesn't change the sentence like it would in Russian
I understand, I was joking :)
Maybe should have put /j at the end
In Spanish and French, the gender of a noun may be masculine and feminine. I E Livre If it is masculine, it means book. If it is feminine, it means pound. Is this common in languages that have gender classes? Thank you.
alors je pense que livre et livre sont plus des homonymes qu’un mot qui varie en fonction de l’article
When I first learned English, we were told that there were four genders: masculine (man, boy, bull), feminine (woman, sister, cow), common (cousin, person, driver) and neutral (house, land, tree, stone).
the easier to retrieve idea was interesting. But then I'm not sure it has to do with the gender. I mean it could equally confuse someone if they always have to think of for example a hammer as feminine or masculine. if the instead of male/female identifiers languages had something more useful e.g. alive / not alive , that would be more valuable. I think the language with four genders , the one that you mentioned, kind of had that. Buy why even call it gender?
Could you also address the grammatical genders in Chinese language? All I know is, in speaking, there’s no difference in the three genders. However, in writing, there are different words for the three genders. I’d like to know more.
There's no grammatical gender in Chinese. In writing, there are different characters for he (他), she (她), and it (它), although they are all pronounced the same. But that's the only difference, and they don't have any grammatical effect on the terms around them. That is, whether you write 他 or 她, the associated verbs and adjective in the sentence will be written exactly the same. Oh, and in some places there's limited usage of a feminine form of the character for you (妳) that contrasts with the more generic/male form of you (你), both of which are pronounced the same - this is not widespread, though, and again has no grammatical effect on the other terms in the sentence.
also, those three different words are a modern creation. They didn't exist in the near past.
Polish, French and Hebrew are all gendered as all heck. French and Hebrew have feminine and mansculine, and Polish, like German, has 3-effing genders.
I swear it's only there to make them more complicated.
I sometimes buy Polish products at an Eastern European grocery store and I swear I cannot understand a single word on the package, and all those weird accents! It's enough to make me dizzy.
I'm a little late to the party, but how do the creators of a language (like Latin) determine which gender a word falls under?
With something like Russian, it is based off of names. So Aleksander, a traditional male name, so words ending in -er are Masculine, whereas Aleksandra ends in -a, so words ending in -a are feminine(really simplified example, but I hope that makes sense)
I've wondered this as well. If I invent something new, does it have to go before some sort of authority to get gender assigned?
"somehow we lost it when coming in contact with old norse" :D this sounds like the scandinavians have stolen em :D
but as some additional info.. danish, norwegian, swedish.. they also have grammatical gender :P
It is clear that if you place dangerous and flammable things into one group it would be technically better to disguise what things are to do with. In other case if you put a dangerous thing among other safe things you would be more frightened of what would happen if you don‘t recognize the danger
I find it crazy that to learn a language, I’d need to know what gender every word in the dictionary. No point in gendering words! English is the easiest language in the world
Lmao at thinking English is the easiest language.
Slightly quicker recall seems a poor return for all that complication.
I got a question: how do they distinguish a word's grammatical gender when this word is created at first time. For instance, computer was firstly invented at last 60th, how did people at that time classify it as masculine or feminine?
In my native language Brazilian Portuguese words that end with an "o" are masculine and words that end with an "a" are feminine there are exceptions but there are a logic in it, computer is "computador" so it's masculine because the "or"
Interesting question. I would guess it was an organic development and the masculine noun class felt most natural for the language users. In German for example, there are, however, until this day people who use different noun classes for words imported from the English language. For example "Ketchup" or "Blog" are neuter to some people and masculine to others, hence some people will say "der Ketchup/der Blog" and some say "das Ketchup/das Blog" or any combination of those articles and nouns. Dialectical inclinations could also play a big role in what article people chose to use for new anglicisms. I'm definitely going to try to find out more about this because it is curious that it's "der Computer" (masculine), "die Maschine" (feminine), and "das System" (neuter). Seems completely random to me, to be honest.
Kind of surprised to hear a linguist talk about the "neutral gender", rather than the neuter gender.
Keith Ball I questioned this right away as well, but googled to find academic literature that confirms both are technically correct
@@dorman143 - Even people publishing papers (who may not be native English speakers) can be wrong. Online dictionaries suggest that "the neutral gender" is a mistake.
@@keithbtoo , yeah neuter means neither feminine nor masculine but also not homosexual, something different like non-living things, right?
@@peacock8394 "not homosexual", lol what?
@@tmuxor HAHAHAHHAH this guy's crazy
Slovak's and Czech's grammatical gender is fairly phonetically based, defined by endings alone. Non-gendered things and concepts can have a masculine gender (e.g. stôl, "table", is considered masculine, given the ending) or have a feminine gender (stolička, "chair", is considered feminine, given the ending), in addition to many being of a neuter gender. Also, stan, "tent", is perceived as masculine, but stanovačka, "camping trip", is perceived as feminine. Same word stem, different gender merely due to the endings used. But most interestingly of all, these rules go so far that in grammatical gender, even some terms for males can actually be... of a feminine gender. Wrap your head around that ! ;-)
In Slovak, the word hrdina ("hero"), despite ending in the far less usual -a, is still considered masculine, but a term like "chlapina", derived from masculine "chlap" ("man", "fellow") is actually feminine ! And so is "dievčina" ("young woman", "gal"). "Dievča" ("girl") is neuter, but this is a consequence of the once more common "chlapča" ("boy"), also neuter, being eventually displaced in use with "chlapec" (same meaning, just masculine). "Dievča" seems neutral in meaning even today, whereas "chlapča" is nowadays perceived as somewhat archaic, like some old-fashioned Victorian word for boy. Most terms for children and also for the offspring of various creatures are in neuter gender (likely because they tend to cover both genders of young individuals).
All of the above gendered noun endings might seem a little complex at first glance, but if you learn even just the basics of these, or the adjectival endings, etc., it actually becomes very intuitive, even remarkably so. There is only a small number of semi-exceptions to this, all very rare (they're more present in other parts of the grammar).
The gendered adjectival endings are arguably even more simple to grasp and learn than any of the noun endings. Tichý (m.), tichá (f.), tiché (n.) all mean "quiet", and the vowels used as their endings are pretty universal to immediately determining the gender of the adjective being used, and even the noun or pronoun used alongside it. If an adjective ends in -í or -ie instead, it's in a plural, in the absolute vast majority of cases. (Sometimes, -í can also denote some masculine adjectives in singular, but there's not that many of those. Most of the masc. adjectives in singular end in just -ý.) In turn, if a term like this ends in -o, e.g. ticho ("quietly"), it's an adverb. Very easy to derive, and once you learn the basics, it's almost impossible to get it wrong.
If you want to address someone in a completely gender-neutral way in Czech and Slovak, simply use a formal plural. As a formal mode of address, it is effectivelly entirely genderless, even when addressing a specific individual (since you're always talking about them in plural).
Also, given how intrinsic the minor gender ending variations are to the languages, you could actually inadvertently insult a person by continuing to refuse using the correct ending in certan nouns. In English, this wouldn't have been an issue, since it can be argued most terms for occupations are perceived as gender-neutral anyway. It isn't much of an issue when you call an actress an actor or an aviatrix an aviator, as people will generally get what you mean, because "actor" and "aviator" are seen as somewhat neuter, rather than an exclusively masculine form.
However, there are no gender-neutral terms for occupations in Czech and Slovak, so misgendering men or women (or anyone) in a particular occupation could be perceived as being disrespectful or even mocking. Just goes to show that the nuances of using grammatical gender are complex and there's no "one right way to use it". The beauty of our world, of nature, human culture and languages, is in pluralism and complexity.
There was a case in the Czech armed forces about twenty or so years ago, when the number of female soldiers and staff rose a fair bit in the 1990s, but official protocol still required officers to address all soldiers and officers as if they were invariably male. Even a lady with the rank of major could be referred to as a male major, which just makes no sense in that particular language. The female members of the military lobbied to change these antiquated rules, along with parts of the armed forces and the government. They felt it was demeaning to women, an unfair implication that the military can't have female members and can't acknowledge and address them as women. The changes were made, and from then on, protocol requires to address female soldiers with feminine variants of terms. The same sort of changes were made in Slovak. Terms like ranks, when used in their masculine form, do not double as neuter forms. This is why it's important to make the distinction, otherwise it might sound to either a female soldier or a male soldier you're being disrespectful on purpose, rather than out of ignorance.
Ugrofinnic languages both have and don't have gender. There is technically a universal pronoun for the third person, but at the same time, Finnish, Estonian, Sámi, Hungarian, Khanty and many others also signify gender from the context of the sentence. For the most part, it's unlikely you'd confuse the gender of someone while using these. It's also fairly useful that you don't have to bother remembering third person pronouns, since the pronoun you do have for that essentially covers all sorts of people. (The third person is literally "that person", rather than he, she or even it.) All in all, I'd say all of these languages have smart approaches to grammatical gender, even if every language's approach is a little different. Just goes to show what variety languages can have, and in that pluralism, each carries a beauty of its own.
In Adunaic, one of his invented, fictional languages, Tolkien established four genders: Masculine, feminine, neuter... and "common". The first three are clear, but the fourth one was a sort of "special neuter", reserved for referring to species of beings in a gender-neutral way. Karab is common-gender and means "horse" in the sense of "the species of horse", karíb is the universal plural of "horses" for all genders, karbó is masculine, a "male horse" (stallion) and karbí is feminine, a "female horse" (mare). For human beings, the grammatical gender system went common-gender aná ("human", "Man"), masculine anú ("man", "male") and feminine aní ("woman", "female"). There's also one more important detail: The language is far more literal about gender, with obviously masculine sex creatures being masculine, obviously feminine sex creatures being feminine, but the vast majority of the vocabulary does not pertain to living creatures and their gender, and is actually entirely neuter-gendered. :-) Really easy to remember, and there are also some distinctions between the genders based on their vowel or consonant endings, and even their pronoun-prefixes. (The only exception the author made was that otherwise inanimate, neuter-gendered things can occassionally be personified, e.g. the Sun as feminine, the Moon as masculine - but these are distinguished as poetic uses.)
In Turkish we don’t have a/an, the and f/m so we basically don’t use anything
I wished English had Gender Marking as it would make it easier on words like " I/me ". Japanese has no grammatical gender, but words like I/ME have no neutral equivalents. Which makes it so much easier and a more useful set of words.
I'm not trying to be combative, just curious; how would it make things easier? At a glance, it seems like it would just be another set of rules that you need to remember for very little to no benefit.
The only case that I can think of where anything is made easier is when you're referring to yourself and want to convey your gender to the listener/reader.
@@allaion2897 Conjugation and able to specify more nouns. As " it " is kind of not a thing in Italian as all nouns correspond to a " he " or a "she" by having information of the article / contraction that is a combination of the English "The+Of" or "The + From " you have more possibilities to specifics. English is practically broken as it is. Having a "Lui, Lei " is more than reasonable as most Romance or Germanic languages have this rule due to example if you are in a room and saying "Where is it? " well another person is thinking "What is IT ", but in Italian this is already narrowed down to where all masculine nouns got their articles and conjugations, and feminine nouns got their articles and conjugations. Therefore the thing can be sorted more easily as if the noun is masculine, the listener and the person can search those first, but if it is feminine can also be sorted easily. Also in a noisy environment, it's easier to limit what is being referred to unlike English where it's a reputation of " The or A, maybe with an ". Also from a reading point of view. When skimming instead of first letters in English, you can list things on gender or class, or better yet both.
From a practicality stand point, by classifying nouns into more categories, you are pretty much able to narrow everything or better yet. Alter the meaning of words like "La vs El azúcar " where the meaning and context of the noun changes
Memorization of rules is not bad, what is bad when said rules are getting broken constantly or long list of exceptions. French from my point of view is the hardest to comprehend Romance language thanks to a merging of La and Le in the plural.
Grammatical gender is fairly useful as if know what word you are about to say, you already know which articles and contractions to use. Also you're able to infer more information.
Italian maybe nightmarish for the articles and a few exceptions of nouns... Italian limbs are the worst, but having a great feminine vs masculine system is more than convenient.
English He/She makes it clear that the noun is a human and an individual. Actor, Actress, blond vs. blonde, hero vs heroine, goose vs gander, female vs. male... Having pairings of words is able to add more information. Also it's a better system, not a perfection system, but grammatical gender is appreciative once you learn some of their systems.
@@allaion2897 Also when learning the other language this system can help as most Romance languages land similarly on the gender of a noun, a lot of exceptions, but it helps with relation like Hand always in the feminine, but with a rule break. :X
The argument could be made that grammatical gender is broadly arbitrary and illogical, a residual thing left over from prehistory, and that English is better off without it - but thats a view many linguists or social scientists would feel almost too politically incorrect to express.
I've researched that masc, fem, and neuter came from proto-Indo-Europeans use of animate and inanimate...is this accurate? reasonable?
The question is why not what. And she’s clueless. If you really want to know why indo-european languages have genders, watch this video th-cam.com/video/82uc2KdCPro/w-d-xo.html
I wonder if there are any languages that have grammatical gender, but where the nouns for men and women are in the same gender, and then the other gender/genders are maybe young people or very old people, or non human things. She says there are thousands of languages with genders so it would be interesting if men and women were in different genders in every language, one would imagine in some they aren’t
I think there are aborigine languages where they have a gender for non living things that aren’t human and another for living things which aren’t human
That is pretty common, though such systems are not always called "grammatical gender." Swahili's noun classes are one example of such a system.
I view gender in languages as totally unnecessary, they only really serve to complicate things. Even if a fluent speaker can process language slightly faster that trade off is definitely not worth it (I came here because I learned Norwegian has 4 ways to say "my" depending on gender and plural)
those muuuuuuuuuuh all languages are beauuuuuutiful idiots will totally disagree with you, though, and they're the vast majority. most people are braindead with no logic
It serves to comunicate more with less words. If I were window shopping with someone and we were looking at a scarf and a watch , and you say:" ¡Qué bonita! ", I' d automatically know that you are talking about the scarf, because " la bufanda " is femenine and " el reloj" is masculine .
If I tell you : "Vi a María y a Juan ayer, estaba muy guapa " , it is obvious that I refer to María .
It is hard for me to believe that because I recall the gender of a noun it will help be recall the word itself.
it's like a filter from Excel. And because your brain makes associations.
The moment your brain eliminates half the words of the other gender, it already makes it easier to recall the word from half of the vocabulary. Then there are the associations your brain made.
Almost like a rhyme. You don´t remember a word, but you remember it rhymes with LIME. That would already help you a lot to remember the word.
some have. some don't. it's a bother when you're talking about an unknown person with little information or animals but I guess you can just use he.
I didn't know grammatical gender exist in some languages until I learned romance languages
Persian does not have any gender. historically, It had and it backs to its Indo-European roots. In fact, there is a similarity between English/ German and Persian, for example, brother is baradar, new is noo or mother is madar ... , So I do not get surprised if it had a gender specificity. However, I don't know why gender specificity deprecated. One hypothesis can be mixing with other non-gender-specific languages like Turkish.
What was the evolutionary benefit of having grammatical genders? I speak Spanish and I always think that there is no reason we need to conjugate the articles & adjectives based on the noun's gender.
I listened patiently until minute 5, and still, no addressing of the reason, WHY do languages have grammatical gender? You should change the title of the talk.
Thanks for this, nobody talks about gender anymore.
We ignorantly believe that gender in language is the same as gender in a person. Once we learn that it’s different (in some but not all cases) then we can all get comfortable with gender in language again 😬 I’m very pro-whatever is best for a person but I’m not at all ok with removing gender from language. It’s stupid IMO.
@@takyrica We need to stop using the word "gender" to refer to a supposed attribute of a person. Some use it to mean "sex", while others use it to refer to some alleged property that a person has that might be different from their sex, although nobody seems able to give a coherent account of what it is. For the former, we already have the word "sex", so we don't need the word "gender" for that. For the latter, well, the very concept is incoherent, so we don't need a word for it at all.
Would've liked to have heard more of an explanation for masculine/feminine pronouns referring to inanimate objects (such as "die Vase", "der Tisch", etc), or for cases similar to German for example, where masculine gender is often projected onto gender-neutral occupations. Also, why not also mention the disadvantages that grammatical gender can bring about, such as association of random things with gender and potential reinforcing of stereotypes? Or what about people who don't feel comfortable assigning to a non-grammatical gender? I feel like there would've been room for an interesting and more balanced discussion here and it feels like this video's explanation for grammatical gender doesn't make sense in enough edge cases to the point where it's actually incorrect. This is from the perspective of a German / English speaker
> such as association of random things with gender and potential reinforcing of stereotypes?
There is no such thing... Clown.
English doesn't have genders for verbs and nouns, but the crazy pronunciation isn't facillating either.
There was an initial connection between biological male/female and grammatical gender regarding humans and animals and then by analogy to other objects or phenomena as they were conceived by primitive people. For example, in Greek the word sky (uranos) is masculine because by raining it fertilises the earth (ge or gaia) which is feminine. Similarly the names of trees bearing fruit are feminine and the names of fruit are neuter (e.g. melaia - apple tree and melon - apple. Neuter nouns initially referred to objects acted upon. Of cource,
grammatical genders do not coincide in different Indo-European languages. This is because of different conceptions and analogies. By investigating the logic of grammatical gender, you learn a lot about the culture of the people, their beliefs and values.
Babel Excuse me, can you please tell me what's the gender for the word LIST? Thank you very much.
she
@@evandien9947 Man! I even forgot why I made this question in the first place. But, thanks!
@@arihmancerquis825 yeah I made up the answer. I have no idea if list is feminine or not cause you didn't say what language it was in. figured you didn't care if I was telling the truth anyways 🤷
@@evandien9947 I must have cared about it if I asked. It was English of course. But I don't remember why I asked that question. It was long time ago.
In which language? All gendered languages don' t have the same gender for the same object . "La lista " in Spanish is femenine .
All I know is English does do it and I'm glad because languages that genderize words always annoyed TF out of me.
I remember an English speaking friend trying to learn French "How can a chair be a girl?"
In Japanese, words are categorized, according to social status.
In British English, we call the third gender in those languages that have it "neuter", not "neutral".
This video didn’t explain why some languages have grammatical genders and others don’t at all
With German and to a lesser extent French, you can't tell just by looking at the word whether it is Male or Female. You have to memorize the article that goes with it. Frere (brother) looks more feminine to me because it ends with -e. In English ships are always female, the Sun is male and small animals are often male.
I wanted to know why 😭 The video doesn't answer the question!
"It makes things easier". Sure it does- since when does having to remember not just one factoid (the word) but two (its gender) help anything? I've always said it: the perfect language has no irregulars, phonetic spelling, and no genders for nouns. Surprisingly, it exists! But no one uses Interlingua, for some reason.
I doubt grammatical gender made a language any more efficient. Is there any scientific proof on that? It can also be thought that it made a language laggy.
Forget about word genders as being about biological sex. They are CLASSES of nouns whose purpose is concordance with other words in a sentence, thus making it easier to understand meaning with less words, or through noise.
Total nonsense
@@laingman0727 Awesome argument. You must feel proud of your intelligence.
@@rogeriopenna9014 The real answer is no one knows why some languages have grammatical genders. Not you, the lady in the video, or any other apologists
@@laingman0727
ROFLMAO.
It's not SOME languages. Basically all indo european languages, except English (which had it however), and many other tons of languages, including native american languages.
About half the world languages have grammatical genders. And yet you think nobody knows why they exist?
Saying "no one knows" dismisses the work of linguists and researchers who have delved into this topic. While we might not have a singular, definitive answer, we do have knowledge and theories based on extensive research.
That's preposterous and pretentious.
@@rogeriopenna9014 Theories are not facts. No one, including linguists knows why genders appeared. If it was so useful 100% of languages would have it and English would have gone back to it because it would have turned out to be too ackward to communicate without genders. We all know this is not the case. And by the way all over the internet Spanish speakers are going around defending useless crap in that language. Ser and estar, amigo and amigo etc.
In Kurdish Sorani language we don't have any sort of Grammatical Gender and we use the same pronoun for men, women, kids, animals and everythings.
In hawrami and kurmanji nouns and are masculine and feminine. Něr w měr
4:09 this is my language's best feature. I love this feature of Turkish and Finnish. I hope one day i will learn Finnish too. I want to learn it so much. It sounds great.
Finnish is one of the hardest languages for an english speaker. Btw my native language is Finnish.
@@K-TheLetter you are so lucky i watched a video in finnish and i didn't get even 1 word i guess i won't learn it
@@youredefinitelyrightbut463 I wouldn’t consider my self as lucky, since it would have been better to have Spanish or French as my native tongue.
@@K-TheLetter your current mother tongue sounds great but tbh it is not better than French. But i still think that Finnish is far more better than Turkish
@@youredefinitelyrightbut463 My current mother tongue is a curse. I can’t get rid of my accent, just because my mother tongue is Finnish. And Turkish is way more useful than Finnish is, since Finnish has only about 5 million speakers compared to the 75 million Turkish speakers. In that sense Turkish is generally a better language.
In turkish there is no "he/she/it" we just say 'o' instead of everything. There is no 'the' also. It is too diffucult to learn for turkish people german or other languages.
I was hoping to find a reason for languages to attribute genders to things that have no genitalia. This video is long on waffle and bereft of valid information.
The key is to understand that gender is not sex. Forget about sex altogether. This is purely about the way a language categorises things. A gender is just a kind of noun. Some languages have more than one kind of noun, and some don't. The fact that the kinds of noun in Latin were labelled as "masculine", "feminine", and "neuter" led people to associate gender with sex, but this is really just a distraction. I repeat: gender is not sex. If Latin had developed differently, it might well have been that its genders were "long", "short", and "of indeterminate length". Or perhaps "cool", "uncool", and "meh". Nothing to do with sex at all.
For more informative content, ditch this TH-cam channel, and look up John McWhorter's "Slate" podcasts. They are available to listen to on the Web, and they are much more informative - and entertaining - than this video. There is one from January about gender, so you might want to start with that one.
my first language has simple grammar so learning german is a complete nightmare
Adjective inflexions.. When I saw it, I was like why, why would you do that? Why are inflexions different with ein/eine or der/die/das? Heck.
I have asked the question of why genders exist many times and never really received a convincing answer. Usually the answer is what they do in grammar but not why they are the chosen method for doing it when they appear to make the language much more complicated. I can see some relevance in clearly male or female but in German for example, to make non gender specific items such as a lake or cutlery etc masculine or feminine seems bizarre. Also a word like Mädchen is neuter because of the word ending. Genders in German also make the articles extremely complex. ‘Modern’ English shows genders are not necessary so are genders just a relic of a time when language was simpler or, if they weren’t there would it make sense now for them to be invented? I get the explanations but still can’t help thinking ‘why would you do that’.
Prima
4:46 When you need to know quickly what the people you talk to talk about.....
Well it's ironically that for the advantage I spend so much more time to learn the language ( German ) 🤭🤣🤣🤣🤣
And some people even stop learning.
Babbel is good. I was crying about stuff but they actually contacted me. Respect.
Hi Jasmine, We're happy to hear this. Thank you! 😉 It's all about communication...
If been struggling with learning Spanish cause of the gender in words
Just learn every new word with its article as an unit.
There is at least one English word that is always referred to with feminine pronouns - SHIP, even though there is nothing feminine about it. Does anyone know why?
I think the best guess it that the shipping industry historically employed men, who very well might not have been around any women for long stretches of time. In that context, there is a certain logic to assigning the ship a female role, which was otherwise absent. There was likely an association with female water deities (or other goddesses) who sailors looked to for protection-related to the custom of many figureheads of ships being female forms of one kind or another.
There’s also a linguistic argument that “ship” comes from a feminine word in Latin, but that raises the question of why that gendering didn’t survive for other English nouns.
me, an austronesian language speaker: *snickers*
Quite honestly I was just wondering WHY languages do. The video only adressed THAT some do, HOW they do it, WHICH do it, WHAT advantages and WHAT effect it has on the brain. Please title the video differently!
Two of the most unnecessary feature of a language in my opinion is grammatical gender and ARTICLES.
Articles are useful . You can know if you are talking about an especific object or person or any random one .