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There was a joke that Estonian is more closer to Japanese than any other European language. As to not say its related to Japanese, but how much it differs from European ones. No future tense, no genders, but 14 cases.

This illustrates nicely where finno-ugric languages(Finnish, Hungarian, Estonian) reside compared to other European languages.

https://images.mentalfloss.com/sites/default/files/196.jpg

Benefit is that people are somewhat safe for scammers, as no translator does a good job. Downside is, none of the translators work and its way easier to just translate to english for example.

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What is the benefit of genders anyway? Especially when gender neutral alternatives are available. It never made much sense to me, they introduce a lot of complexity for very little. Worse, nowadays you have all the problems of misaddressing and offending folks.

There was an interesting/amusing post here the other day about learning German and how it relates to programming concepts. They suggested that gendered words work as a kind of parity bit for error correction.

> There was an interesting/amusing post here the other day about learning German and how it relates to programming concepts. They suggested that gendered words work as a kind of parity bit for error correction.

Slightly off topic (not about grammatical genus, but about German's case system): I often compare German's case system to a type system in a programming language: the verb expects the sentence's object in the suitable case. If you use a wrong type, it gives a compile error. In most cases, the case (type) that you have to use makes sense, but there are rare cases where you simply have to learn the case. The latter is like having to use a (programming) library that was designed by some other programmer with an interface that you would design differently.

Just like you have to write a computer program that gives no compile error (e.g. because of typing), in German, you also have to formulate your sentences in a way that gives no compile error to its case (type) system.

I am trying to learn German and gender is infuriating there. Why? Because you can't simply scan an existing sentence and color-code the words based upon simple heuristics to guess the gender.

The first thing you learn is that three genders are indicated in the nominative case using der (masculine) / die (feminine) / das (neuter).

So you see "der" in a sentence and that thing must be masculine, right? Nope, because "der" is feminine in the dative case.

The gender system in German wouldn't be such garbage if the articles weren't overloaded. Imagine if in your type system "float" could mean two different types, and you needed more information to figure out which type it is (like, for example, memorizing the type of the object its referring to). It breaks the idea of locality.

> The first thing you learn is that three genders are indicated in the nominative case using der (masculine) / die (feminine) / das (neuter).

I personally would never teach it that way. To me the four cases are like different faces of, say, a cube (I know a cube has six faces - sorry), where the cube represents the noun. Just like looking at a cube from different perspectives (in the direction of some face) gives you a different view on it, each case gives a different "perspective" of a way that the word relates to some different clause in a sentence.

How the articles and endings "rotate" when the case changes ("as the cube rotates") is something that I developed a really smart scheme for (which can be found in no book on German grammar that I am aware of) that every "mathematical-minded person" immediatelly grasped, told me it perfectly made sense and wished that someone had taught it this way in school. On the other hand, nearly every "humanities-minded person" told me that they cannot understand what I am even talking about and what advantage this perspective is supposed to have.

Typical language teachers are "humanities-minded". :-(

Unluckily, I have far too less time to write this all down in sufficient detail that other people can learn from it; I have far too many other things to do. :-(

> Imagine if in your type system "float" could mean two different types, and you needed more information to figure out which type it is (like, for example, memorizing the type of the object its referring to).

You are describing declarations and definitions in C++ and the problems of parsing C++? ;-)

I don't think you're wrong, but my experience has some nuanced differences maybe.

I have known plenty of German speakers, including natives and often myself, who make case/gender mistakes with no real impact on comprehension.

There certainly can be some ambiguity, but context and word order can often mitigate that, no? I feel like if you used "die" for everything and just a neuter nominative case, I could still figure most things out. My experience is that many German speakers (especially when speaking a dialect) just mush articles and suffixes together and it's not entirely clear that they use specific genders and cases most of the time anyway. For example, my relatives near Frankfurt pretty much say "d- Milch", "d- Hund", "d- Mauer", etc. SOMETIMES, you can hear a bit of an "s" when it's supposed to be das, des. YMMV of course.

I don't really find German to be less forgiving of mistakes than English or the handful of other languages I've studied.

At least, this what I take away from your comment about compile errors. Maybe -Wcase or -Wgender is a closer analogy?

Anyway, I like your analogy overall. :)

> There was an interesting/amusing post here the other day about learning German and how it relates to programming concepts.

This one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19109371

> Worse, nowadays you have all the problems of misaddressing and offending folks.

Languages are tightly inherited, even more so than genes. How languages are structured varies highly. Some have gender-like tenses for the cardinal directions, where things are not feminine but 'northy'. Some have no genders, but do have time-like tenses, where things are 'future-y' or 'present-y'. Just look at sign-language, with it's use of height similar to an exclamation point in English at times. Human communication is weird.

Even in English, our sense of gender has changed over time. It used to be that we cared more about the number of items/people over their gender, but now we care about the gender. IE: Thee/Thou/You/ became Him/Her/You.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_in_English

English is, herself, a pidgin language. The irregularity of the verbs and the reliance on context make it very accommodating to new terms and nouns, but VERY difficult to learn fluently. It is standardizing though, the Afro/Urban-American vernacular use of 'be' is a perfect example (I be going to the store, not, I am going to the store). This change of 'be' is very similar to the romance languages. English is very slowly being wrenched into standardization. It will be very interesting to see how Chinese and Computer Programming languages affect English.

The Story of English is a great look into this language and it's story:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mj9jJiPwsp0

To make things 100x complicated in our "modern" world :)

For example you can select a gender pronoun in English to match your gender. https://uwm.edu/lgbtrc/support/gender-pronouns/

In Hungarian we just say "Ő" to refer to someone, privacy is baked into the language :)

A pragmatic advantage is that you use different pronouns to refer to multiple different persons (or things, with grammatical gender) in the same sentence without ambiguity. In programming terms, you have a "local variable" slot for each pronoun, instead of just a single one with gender neutrality.

Like having separate registers for even and for odd numbers. Now try building a good compiler for that... (no bitshift trickery allowed)

I don't think that analogy works. You're not forced to use the gendered forms - you can just say "the person", "them", etc - and (at least as far as the language is concerned), it's only about communication, not about reasoning. So your "calculations" are unaffected.

I don't know what you mean exactly, but genders can be something intrinsic to a language and I don't think they have been introduced as such. If you wanted to call a table in Italian, you could choose the masculine or feminine noun for it (tavolo - tavola), no neuter form though. Ask the table first.

Why would it be intrinsic? Somewhere in their evolution they must have been introduced for some reason I would guess. Also, they could be removed the same way if there is no benefit distinguishing between a masculine and feminine table.

Could it mean that gender was something so obvious and useful as a concept that early people, while trying to figure out the world around them and how it all fits together, just naturally extended the idea to just about everything?

It doesn't really make sense to anthropomorphise things once you're an adult, but I bet everyone can remember trying to figure out the world as a kid and just assuming things are of similar nature as people.

I think that even languages which currently don't have gender forms of words, like English, still have the concept psychologically firmly embedded in the culture. The generic "cat" is more female than male. The "tom-cat" is only male. A "rock", I'll bet, is also subconsciously male, and a "river" more female than male. It's all there, even if not explicit in language. OTOH, it's not really universal, different languages assign gender pretty much randomly - but they do assign it.

Social determinism and radical neutrality go against the grain of this "making sense of the world" phase of development, and probably don't result in a practical world-view.

I believe the intrinsicality of it has to do with alliterations/rhymes/rhythm (more in the vowel than in the consonantal sounds)

Similar to effects of (past) umlauts in English or the a/an difference.

PIE (Proto-Indo-European) was most likely a gendered language. So the concept goes deep into prehistory. English lost its gender system fairly recently, during the Middle English period.

  "Tommy, Frank, and Susan burned their homework and fed it to the dog."
  "Who fed it to the dog?"
  "That person."

Overhearing this conversation, you don't know who they were pointing at. If they said "She did.", you know who they were pointing at. There are many other situations where gender provides extra data, which is convenient.

Our languages keep having gender, so it's clearly been advantageous from an evolutionary perspective. The problem is when we let gender become more important than the data it's trying to express, like when a society lets gender dictate your social class. That shit needs to stop.

But that's human gender, not noun gender. In grammar, gender is a class of noun and generally unrelated to human gender.

In German, words like "library" (Bibliothek) and "street" (Strasse/Straße) are feminine, for example. It's true that some feminine words, such as "woman" (Frau) and "mother" (Mutter), are feminine. But then you have words like "girl" (Mädchen), which are not.

Your example ("she did") could actually have ambiguity in languages that extends the noun gender to pronouns, such as French. "She" doesn't need to refer to a woman, just a feminine noun. For example, "car" (voiture) is feminine, and you can refer to "it" as "elle" (she).

Noun classes are advantageous. Gender happens to be a useful way to categorize nouns because mostly we like to talk about other people. Gender (and animacy -- "it" versus "s/he") split things up efficiently for many conversations, where, say, paper versus non-paper wouldn't.

>No future tense

Many European languages also lack a future tense. English, for example. (https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-English-has-no-future-...)

> English has no inflected future tense like Latin and Romance languages. In linguistics, “tense” refers generally to how a verb is inflected

English has no inflected future tense because of the way words are usually defined. Verbs in English only have 4 types of inflections because words are defined as whatever is surrounded by spaces in writing. If we define words as the unit that carries a single beat in speaking, so "He is-to-see-it tomorrow" is 3 words, then verbs also have prefixed inflections. English then does have an inflected future tense.

The "is to" future form isn't mentioned in discussions on future tense very often but seems to have the most predetermination, whereas "is going to" and "will" indicate more volition by the doer.

No, it isn't just a matter of orthography. English has no future tense on any reasonable analysis. There is no unit of English syntax which (i) behaves like a verb and (ii) has a distinct future form. This is a completely uncontroversial point. See e.g. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=897 for further discussion.

> If we define words as the unit that carries a single beat in speaking

Note that this definition clearly won't do what you want it to do (even ignoring the imprecision of "single beat"), as the units you want to treat as verbs can be separated to an arbitrary degree. E.g. "Is he really, in your opinion, to see her tomorrow?"

There is a standard analysis of English in generative grammar where verbs and tense are are seperate nodes at deep structure [0], and we get inflected verbs through some form of V-T movement [0]. Under this analysis, English clearly has a future tense. It just gets pronounced as its own word (will) instead instead of being involved in V-T movement. A more popular analysis is to replace "T" with "I", and do everything I talked about above. (The question here is really if other features share a d structure node with tense or if they all have their own functional nodes. I haven't seen a clear argument either way)

Edit: not clearly. There are still some additional assumptions to make with no clear evidence either way (notably, the category of "will"), and the definition of "tense" is a amnigous.

[0] English's rules for V-T movemement are relativly complicated compared to most languages

>There is a standard analysis of English in generative grammar where verbs and tense are are seperate nodes at deep structure

Yes, there is.

>Under this analysis, English clearly has a future tense.

No, this does not follow. You can just as easily (and more correctly) analyze "will" as a modal auxiliary like "can" or "would". Supposing it's true that "will" is the daughter of I/T/whatever, it doesn't follow that the I/T/whatever head has to have a future tense feature.

You could argue, and some people have, that at some level, the interpretation of "will" involves future tense in some semantic sense, which conceivably might be realized as a feature on a head somewhere in the inflectional spine of the tree. But that tense feature would not have the same kind of straightforward syntactic and morphological motivation as e.g. the +past feature does in English. In the context of a general audience, this isn't a notion of "tense" that's relevant. After all, in this highly abstract sense, even a language such as Chinese might have tense.

FWIW I have a PhD in (generative) syntax. I'm don't think that any generative syntactician addressing a general audience would describe English as having a future tense.

I just have an undergrad degree in linguistics.

I am looking at this question from the perspective of x-bar theory, and defining "tense" as as a feature of the syntactic catagory that populates the populates the "T" node at deep structure (or a feature of the I catagory). [0].

As I alluded to in my comment, I have never seen a convincing arguement in either direction for wheather "will" is a T or a V; and this was an active discussion in my syntax class about 3 years ago where the proffesor (a syntaxtician) had also said that she never saw a compelling arguement either way. If you know of one, please sharer.

Edit: I think you edited your post after I responded. I would argue that all languages have the same featureset (including tense) at d structure, but that is going far afield.

Edit2: there is also a notion of tense at the sementic level. And English seems to offer a gramaticalized way of providing the sementic future tense, regardless of how you look at the corresponding syntax/morphology.

If we accept that "will" is a syntactic "T" and carries a sementic meaning of "future" then how is it unreasonable to call it a future tense? Sure, there are debatable parts to the above assumptions, but it is a stretch to say that no analysis has future tense. Heck, there is a universal grammar analysis that would say English (and Chinese) has all the tenses, and the only question is which ones surface as distinct pronounciations.

[0] This leads to a notationally weird case where "to" is a tense with a -tense feature.

Putting "will" in T doesn't mean that T necessarily has to bear a future tense feature. It could e.g. have a present tense feature.

Are you getting at the distinction between "will" being the T and "will" being the daughter of T? Regardless, under either analysis "will" would have just as much claim to being a tense as "run" has to being a verb. You can still argue over wheather there is a syntactic feature of future tense (which is a different question) which I have never seen a solid arguement for either way.

>Regardless, under either analysis "will" would have just as much claim to being a tense as "run" has to being a verb.

If you're punning on "tense" to refer to a lexical category, then sure. But we're talking about tense in the sense of past, present and future. In many textbook analyses, lots of things go in T. For example, "can" and "might" go in T. It doesn't follow that, say, "I might go to the store" and "I can go to the store" have a different tense.

I would say that "I can/might go to the store" go to the store having different tenses is what we mean when we say "can" and "might" are lexixally T.

Even restricting ourselves to the syntactic features, I have still never seen an arguement for or against English having a syntactic future tense feature that did not come down to UG, or a disagreement about which model is simpler, and neither side is convoluted enough for me to confidently invoke Occam's razor.

The two sentences have different words occupying the "T" head, but they don't have different tenses. What you're saying is just a pun on "tense".

> There is no unit of English syntax which [...]

Here you're defining syntax around your orthographic definition of what a word is.

> "Is he really, in your opinion, to see her tomorrow?"

The opinion words "really" and "in your opinion" added into that syntactic structure parallel the manner that opinion word "bloody" is added into a lexical structure to become "abso-bloody-lutely".

>Here you're defining syntax around your orthographic definition of what a word is.

No, I'm not. As I said, there is no unit in English (regardless of whether or not it is written as a single word) that both behaves like a verb and has a distinct future form.

>The opinion words "really" and "in your opinion" added into that syntactic structure parallel the manner that opinion word "bloody" is added into a lexical structure to become "abso-bloody-lutely".

You seem to have missed that fact that even if you remove "really" and "in your opinion", the unit you identified as a verb is still broken up in the example I gave. In "Is he to see her tomorrow?", "is-to-see" is not a contiguous unit. Although the idea of treating the subject pronoun as a verbal infix might be charming (English as Mohawk!), the subject could be a much larger phrase, as in e.g. "Is the man in the red hat to see her tomorrow?"

It is simply not true that adjunction of adverbials has the same properties as expletive infixation. Even if there is some loose analogy between these two processes, I fail to see how it's relevant to units defined in terms of a single "beat in speaking".

> "is-to-see" is not a contiguous unit

You can insert stuff between "is" and "to-see" (and between "to" and "see", I hope you agree) because English mostly parses into left-branching trees, which is the only reason why you can't insert stuff between "see" and "-ing". Natural languages don't liberally mix left-branching structures and right-branching ones because they're hard for people to understand. E.g. Pinker's "The rapidity that the motion that the wing that the hummingbird has has has is remarkable" is grammatically correct but not easily understandable. The contiguity or lack of it operates on a different conceptual plane to whether a "word" can be inflected or not.

> loose analogy

To take some example language from your reply, some people speak this as two words, others (e.g. some Americans) as a compound word. Because the concept of a word is not well defined, the boundary between morphology and syntax is blurred. Putting "is" and "to" noncontiguously before a verb is the same as putting "-ed" after a verb. They are both "inflections".

Look, if you have a totally radical reanalysis of English syntax according to which "is...to" can function as some kind of discontinuous inflectional affix, I wish you luck developing that.

It's clearly thousands of miles away from being a generally accepted analysis of English syntax. So unless you've written up your analysis in detail somewhere, there's not much further to discuss.

> There is no unit of English syntax which (i) behaves like a verb and (ii) has a distinct future form.

This seems like an arbitrary and peculiar way to define tense specifically to exclude periphrastic languages like English. If these are the rules by which we are arguing, the argument doesn't seem that interesting. By this argument colloquial French and German have no past tense because they use periphrastic constructions to expression this distinction.

It is indeed the case that (spoken) French and German have no past tense, strictly speaking. (I don't speak German, so I don't know to exactly what extent the German imperfect is unused in everyday speech. I think it may not be as unused as the passé simple in French.)

Tense is a piece of technical terminology with a particular definition. There's nothing very peculiar about the definition that I can see. The definition denies English a future tense because English doesn't have periphrastic units which (i) behave like verbs and (ii) have a distinct future form.

For whatever reason, people are really resistant to taking linguists' word for it on what technical terms within linguistics mean. You don't find people on here trying to argue with physicists about whether they should maybe adopt a different definition of "force" or "mass" or "electron".

It's not a question of taking linguists' word for it. It's a question of taking particular linguists' word for it. The discussion in that language log is interesting. You will notice that it isn't simply people calling "amen".

Certain things are settled: "will" in English behaves like other English auxiliary verb (setting aside those cases where it doesn't, as in contractions). Saying "English has no future tense", though, is settled only within the confines of a particular linguistic model with a particular technical definition of the term "tense", of which there are many.

>is settled only within the confines of a particular linguistic model with a particular technical definition of the term "tense", of which there are many.

Could you then provide a reference to a linguist arguing that English has a future tense (in the usual syntactic/morphological sense of the term)?

I'm baffled by the reference to the "confines of a particular linguistic model". Linguists who can agree on hardly anything else (and linguists are pretty good at disagreeing!) can agree that English lacks a future tense.

That's a great graphic, but where are Arabic and Georgian?

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