Every language has something dumb about it that makes it "not a great choice for a global language". English spelling is a nightmare, but the grammar isn't too bad, and most importantly, it has no gendered nouns.
Gendered nouns are really simple. I'd say the hardest part is the subjunctive case but it's not critical for communicating.
Apparently the information density of most languages when spoken by native speakers is much the same, despite variations in verbosity.
While there are good things about Spanish, speaking as a native English speaker there are annoyances too. One big on compared to English is that English is seemingly more economical with syllables than Spanish for many common words e.g. Demasiado, todavia, many adverbs like recientemente.
Spanish does seem to be one if the better languages for gender of nouns in that fairly simple rules seem to correctly classify many but still not having a gender for table or chair is imho inherently better from a cognitive load standpoint. Likewise the agreement of article, gender and number is much simpler than, say, German.
English also wins with much simpler verb conjugation. The forms in Spanish are distinct enough that pronoun subjects are often dropped. I prefer "I speak" and "we speak" to "[yo] hablo" and "[nosotros/nosotras] hablamos". Again English is far more economical with syllables here.
Spanish object pronouns are a PITA because they're ambiguous to the point that you gave to add "a ella" to things.
I also find the number of accents used to be incredibly tedious but at least they don't seem to be critical and are consistent with the pronunciation.
Modern English also has only one second person form. Spanish has 3 or 4 (tu, usted, ustedes and Latin American Spanish doesn't seem to use the vosotros form that Spain does).
I also find the ordering of pronouns common in mainland European languages a PITA meaning objection pronouns before the verb, non-pronoun objects after.
English actually front weights important information pretty darn well from a linguistic standpoint but at least Spanish doesn't have anything silly like German's separable verbs or putting the verb last in Nebensatzen.
The interesting thing about English was that it lost a lot of the linguistic bullshit (basically) during the centuries wheer it wasn't the official language of England (French was), this being the transition from Old English (essentially a foreign language at this point) to Middle English (mostly comprehensible to Modern English speakers).
(Editing this comment because I made a conjugation mistake for the millionth time – "add" instead of "adds".)
What they all missed was that German already had degendering built right in, the diminutive (something dearly missing from the English language) : der Holzfäller -> das Holzfällerchen, der General -> das Generälchen, die Kanzlerin -> das Kanzlerchen, die Maid -> das Mädchen
The gender is often derived from synonyms or etymologically related words. I'm guessing the reason it's "Der Computer" for example is that "Computer" works similarly to e.g. "Trockner" (drier) or "Rechner" (calculator, in fact often the German synonym for "Computer") and these are all male (as generally words ending in -er tend to be).
OTOH it's "Das Steak" (maybe because "Das Fleisch" or "Das Kotlett"?) and "Das Shirt" (maybe because "Das Hemd"?). The fallback generally seems to be "das", i.e. neuter, not male.
An example of something with inconsistent use is "Der Laptop" vs "Das Laptop". Presumably this is because "Der Laptop" is derived from "Der Desktop", which in turn is likely simply a shorthand for "Der Desktop-Rechner", making it male. Even the Duden (the closest thing to a "standard" dictionary in Germany) lists it as "der; auch das Laptop" (i.e. "der" seems to be somewhat more common but both are in use).
Some words are kind of gender-fluid too. E.g. a word meaning "hall" was female and neuter in past centuries, and now is male. The word for "coffee" is male in formal/educated speech and neuter is less-educated but (to my despair) rapidly gaining legitimacy speech. Russian is fun :)
For things like the user, you can always assume male, but as with other such assumptions, some people may object to it. In some cases, there is a built-in assumption that male includes female when gender is unknown, but in others it just means male and that's it.
FTFY
Two can play this game. There is no sane answer.
Except for rules of thumbs like "Romance-sounding word ending in -a is probably female".
On a semi-related note: in the Rhineland gendered articles are also used colloquially when talking about people: "Der Mark", "Die Steffi" and so on. I was born into this but I'm unsure how I feel about it after finding out it's actually non-standard in the rest of Germany.
- what utility do you think a language gains from gendered nouns?
- (more immediate to my experience) how do you know what gender a noun is? I assume there are "themes" that might inform you. But if you're unclear, how do you do find out? Is there a social cost to getting it wrong?
- how are new genders decided? I'm struggling to think of an example as "laptop" presumably has the same gender as "computer", but it must come up sometimes.
I would say that (at least in Spanish) gendered nouns mainly provide some redundancy that helps error-correct sentences, but apart from that and the occasional meaning subtleties that can carry, they are not very useful.
> what utility do you think a language gains from gendered nouns?
None whatsoever. When speaking of things that don't have any meaningful gender, it makes things unnecessarily complicated. When speaking of things that do have physical gender, it often forces you to make assumptions about it even when it's completely irrelevant.
> ow do you know what gender a noun is? I assume there are "themes" that might inform you. But if you're unclear, how do you do find out?
In Russian, it mostly follows the spelling of the words - i.e. if a word ends with a certain vowel, it's feminine, except if ... etc.
Sometimes it doesn't work that way, mostly with loanwords. Some loanwords so obviously don't match any "genderizing" pattern, that they basically end up with neuter by default.
In other cases the historical form of the word did match a pattern, and was assigned a gender accordingly - and then changed (e.g. by re-loaning it in a more accurate spelling), and no longer fits. When that happens, people will use the more "appropriate" rather than the "right" gender in colloquial speech, and eventually it becomes the new standard, collecting the mismatch.
A good example of this is the Russian word "coffee". When it was first loaned back in 18th century, it was "kofiy" - and in Russian, that is definitely masculine. Eventually it got re-loaned as "kofe", which would normally be neuter; but the masculine gender assignment stayed from past spelling. In the dictionaries, that is - in practice treating the word as neuter became one of the common incorrect colloquialisms, just because it doesn't "look" masculine. Language purists fought this for several decades, and eventually lost: it's still nominally masculine, but neuter is considered an "accepted variant" in modern dictionaries.
> how are new genders decided? I'm struggling to think of an example as "laptop" presumably has the same gender as "computer", but it must come up sometime
For new words, by their spelling, as described above. So "laptop" is masculine because it ends with a consonant, for example.
Personal names are an exception to this stuff. As in, when a foreign name is used in a context where gender cannot be guessed, people will often apply the usual rules (and then often get it wrong). But once context is established, it's properly accounted for.
On the other hand, for place names, gender is automatically assigned by the usual rules. So to a Russian speaker, New York and Texas are masculine, while California and Florida are feminine.
Much like English spelling it's all a mess now.
Some people say Lithuanian has kept most of proto-Indo European features. If that's true, inanimate/neuter had to evolve later than gender split.
For my part I'd say that it probably doesn't maintain them that much more than the huge number of other modern-day descendants of PIE.
The idea that Lithuanian is extremely conservative from a PIE perspective is rather outdated. Lithuanian does preserve a number of features of what might be termed “Proto-Nuclear-Indo-European” (to use the terminology of Lundvist & Yates), but the insights from the Anatolian languages show that not all of these features can be reconstructed back to Proto-Indo-European itself.
Got any links or literature on how that evolved according to the new school?
Any recent introduction to IE linguistics starting from Beekes' Comparative Indo-European Linguistics will discuss the neuter being an innovation after the Anatolian languages broke off. However, I would especially recommend the Handbook of Comparative and Historical Indo-European Linguistics that will be published by Mouton de Gruyter this September, as it will contain a state-of-the-art survey of the field by a number of prominent scholars. See Lundvist & Yates' chapter on Morphology in it (you can also download a preprint PDF of this chapter from Yates' papers on Academia.edu if you have an account there).
Some languages (Dutch and Danish at least) still only have two genders: male+female and neuter.
Many new nouns are nouned forms of verbs. In German there are a bunch of fixed suffixes for turning verbs into nouns, and they have their own fixed genders: "-er" (masculine), "-ion", "-ung", "-age" (feminine), "-en" (neutral).
For other words, speakers, over time, sort of converge on a consensus, which may only be regional. For example, in some regions "Cola" (the drink) is "die Cola" (female), in others it's "das Cola" (neutral).
Others... not sure. "Mobile phone" is "das Handy" (neutral), I guess from "das Telefon". I'm fairly sure "das Internet" came by analogy from "das Netz", which is the German word for "net".
> - what utility do you think a language gains from gendered nouns?
Not a whole lot, but a language doesn't gain much utility from English features like mandatory plural agreement or a/an distinction either. Even something like "his/her" and "he/she" distinction isn't necessarily and a lot of non-native speakers of English struggle with it. You can dream up some sentences that are clarified by the distinction, but in a different language you obviously just express the same idea differently.
Ultimately a committee sitting around asking if a feature has utility and should be added is not very close to the way languages actually form.
> how do you know what gender a noun is? I assume there are "themes" that might inform you. But if you're unclear, how do you do find out? Is there a social cost to getting it wrong?
Sure. If a Spanish word ends in a it's probably feminine unless it's of Greek origin. But there is also memorization involved. Getting the wrong gender on an inanimate object is a lot like any other non-native mistake; it's likely someone who is talking to you can figure out what you meant.
Again, having to just memorize some cases is common in languages. How do you know what preposition goes with which verb? It probably seems very natural to you, but there isn't much logical basis for a lot of them. In Spanish you dream "with" someone rather than "of" them. Someone who wants to speak native-sounding English has to spend a lot of time learning the right pairings (as well as stuff like which compound expressions should have the infinitive versus the gerund).
> - how are new genders decided? I'm struggling to think of an example as "laptop" presumably has the same gender as "computer", but it must come up sometimes.
It's not really like a group sits around deciding, but of course there's a lot of precedent with existing words that could inform you which answer is likely. Synonymous words can have different genders, so it's not really like, for instance, computing words are all masculine. In general if a totally new word is borrowed into Spanish it's more likely to be masculine (so, like, el kabuki, el ánime, etc.).
Danish is my primary language. We are blessed with only two genders, not three as in German. As closely related as the two languages are, I really cannot make a useful gender mapping from one to the other. That's one - not the only, but definitely one - reason I shall never speak German with anything like the ease with which I've mastered English, even though being exposed to the former at a much younger age.
It's not the concept that is difficult, it's the extra piece of information that makes it more difficult.
[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/05/30/spell...
My native language is English, and I never have to remember whether a "keyboard" or a "rock" is masculine or feminine. I've studied a few other languages (French, German, Spanish) that do expect me to remember such things.
To be clear, I'm not trying to refute your statement that they're useful, just asking how. I'm interested in learning about a different perspective.
Now, in English, the author might have used fewer pronouns if they were ambiguous... but I've seen a lot of ambiguous pronouns in English writing.
Substituting "he" and "she" for gendered articles:
"I have he keyboard and she rock. He is large and she is grey"
Without that, I'd have to repeat the "keyboard" and "rock".
The question of course is whether this is worth all that rote memorization (since no language I know is fully logical here - german's "Das Mädchen" - girls are apparently of neutral gender - being a particularly egregious example).
The major argument for keeping gendered nouns as they are in existing languages is that speakers would be uncomfortable with having their language changed by some standards body.
I agree it feels silly to learn the gender of "sexless" words; but this case and the rule behind it are quite clear in the respective languages this occurs in. I guess it's not unlike English using neuter for animal pronouns, which feels strange to speakers of most Germanic languages.
It's similar to English which uses "an" instead of "a", but it happens very very very rarely.
(Needless to say, "águila" and "ala" ARE feminine nouns, what's changing here is the determiner so the two a's don't clash, not the gender of the nouns)
But it's not that important, gender does add some redundancy and some error-correction to a language. It's not necessary (as shown by English) but it has some use.
French has quite a few words that break the apparent gender rules: un musée, un lycée, un mille (meaning "mile"; the homograph meaning "thousand" is feminine but usually doesn't take an article), le mort (dead person) vs. la mort (death), etc. All adding to the shit you gotta memorize. If you don't, your meaning will still come across but you'll sound "off".
(I don't even think I remember all my Vandertramp verbs...)
I agree it's harder for students though.
Example:
A basket is in the car -> some kind of basket of unknown shape or color.
The basket is in the car -> a specific, known basket.
HTH
My native language don't have anything like articles. I frequently misuse a/the in borderline cases. Or just omit the article completely..
Yet gender is super easy in my language! Each noun has gendered suffix. Once you know the word, you know it's gender. Or once you know the gender, you know the suffix... :)
A == non-specific The == specific
'A dog' could be any old dog.
'The dog' is a specific dog we know.
Thus
A == any The == thing
Perhaps I'm not clear where with this understanding it would trip you up. Can you think of an example?
On the other hand, I omit article completely more frequently than using a wrong one. I find I have to consciously think if I should use an article and which article should I use. When I write/talk quickly without double checking, shit happens. Even after using English a lot for 2 decades, articles is just a foreign feature that I have to use consciously.
Like tones in Chinese are another example of "easy enough for native speakers, really freaking hard to non-native".
It also makes translations to other languages hell, when noun genders are used for allegoric purposes.
Ugh, really? How disappointing.
https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Ein_Fichtenbaum_steht_einsam
Now try translating this to a language where the tree names are gendered differently, such that e.g. both are male, or both are female.
https://ru.wikisource.org/wiki/%D0%9D%D0%B0_%D1%81%D0%B5%D0%...
In Russian, both words are female.
Although it's actually more complicated, because there's more than one Russian translation, and this problem was tackled in different ways. Lermontov just did a straightforward translation, changing the implied meaning. Tutchev and Fet both changed the pine to another tree such that the word is male: cedar or oak (in the latter case, this also required changing the described environment in which it grows).
This sentence is short. It is short.
"What did you do today?"
"Rode bike"
Sometimes we even use genders for nouns even though it's not official:
The ship sank. She sank.
Compared to German:
The dog jumped on the table and bit the man.
Aww shit there are three "the"s in there... if I'm speaking, I can just slur through it and say "d'Hund" or "d'Tisch" but that doesn't work when I'm writing... okay let's try to get through this.
Der Hund sprang auf... Hmm, well "the table" is Der Tisch, but hang on, I have to figure out what case this is... ah, accusative! den Tisch und biss Ah fuck, "the man" is "der Mann" but what case is this... I don't even care anymore... d'Mann. Nailed it.
It's not like anyone is going to say "he jumped on him and bit him", so the genders serve absolutely no purpose.
- Yoda
EDIT: Well, in English you can say "The dog jumped on the table and bit him", but it is not ambiguous. ;-/ The ambiguity in German is not due to gendered pronouns, but due to the gender of table/Tisch. :-|
I'll also make the contentious claim that they are clearly visible as being kinda sexist to progressively-oriented native speakers of languages that don't have them. Of course, if you honestly follow that train of thought, it doesn't stop at having gendered pronouns for inanimate objects. See https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.htm...
The masculinity or femininity of a table ought not be controversional except among those who are eager for things about which to be offended. It would seem there are certain groups of people that seem to derive pleasure from being offended. It might also seem, to speakers of languages with gender, that these so-called progressives are being regressive by imposing their linguistic ideology upon others.
Of course I support sex equality for humans, but really sometimes so-called progressives venture into Newspeak territory or at the very least, absurdity. “Womyn” is another example of similar nonsense.
Gendered nouns are a significant barrier to learning a new language.
Languages also differ significantly in terms of which grammatical gender they assign to things.
It's worse than useless.