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Comment by deno | Hacker News Reader

“The books, she is green” is not very unique to Arabic actually. It's also how you'd say it in Polish, for example. Most languages, that have feminine and masculine forms (unlike English), have some arbitrary rules as to what form to assign for different material objects.

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You've misunderstood this part. The unusual behavior is not having grammatical gender, but treating all non-human plurals as feminine singular.

Not sure if this applies to Arabic, but sometimes this happens when there is a old case which got lost and which had the same suffix as feminine singular. Usually that's genitive. For example Croatian (I'm a native speaker) uses genitive plural agreement for number >=5.

Feminine genitive plural happens to have the same suffix as feminine singular, and it could be possible to envision an future evolution of the language where the genitive is lost, while the number agreement rule could be preserve. So it's possible that grammars of this future language would state that feminine plural agreement for numbers >=5 you have to use the feminine singular.

Btw, I once read a very nice title of a german language book:

"Der Dativ is dem Genitiv sein Tot"

literaly, "the dative is [to] the genitive its death"

Which denotes the fact that in modern German the genitive case is being lost in faviour of constructs based on dative (the correct form would be "Der Dativ ist der Tod des Genitivs", i.e. "the dative is the death of the genitive")

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Der_Dativ_ist_dem_Genitiv_sein_...)

Hmm, yes; it seems I did. I hope that my basic premise holds true though — in that this doesn't make Arabic inherently sexist.

I think the point here was more about how Arabic treats groups of non-human objects as feminin singular. I assume that in Polish you would use a plural form of "green" when talking about multiple books and you would only use the feminine form if "book" is a feminine word.

That's right. Polish adjectives agree in number, gender and case with the nouns they modify.

Maybe the underlying idea is that "a group of something is green", and a group is singular and is feminine (at least in Russian ^^)

Nope :-)

obligatory noticeable case: swahili (one of the widely studied non-indo european languages) comes with _18_ noun classes.

How does that compare to the other languages in the Bantu family? Long ago I studied Ichibemba, and think it had something like 18 noun classes, too.

IIRC, Finnish has something like 28 noun cases. That is intimidating.

"IIRC, Finnish has something like 28 noun cases. That is intimidating"

Finnish (and other agglutinative languages) use suffixes to express many concepts that in English are expressed with prepositions: imagine if instead of "in my room" you would have to say "room-my-in" and you would call this the noun case of "containment" or something similar, the number of cases would go up pretty quickly.

> IIRC, Finnish has something like 28 noun cases. That is intimidating.

It's not actually that complicated, most are simple suffixes - so for example, instead of on the table in Finnish you say table-on (pöydällä). Once you learn the rules of vowel harmony and consonant mutation it's a pretty regular, straightforward language.

My knowledge of bantu languages is only what I read on wikipedia, so I am not qualified to answer, but it seems they orbitate around 20 :)

As for cases: I am learning hungarian which is related to finnish and also has more than 20 cases.

The problem, in my personal experience, is that learning such an agglutinative language is slightly harder than others because when you are learning you don't know all the suffixes and at the same time you don't even know enough vocabulary to understand what's what. Especially once you consider that suffixes stack up.

I see something like "ccddee" and it's hard to understand where I should break up the thing (<ccd,dee>, <cc,dd,ee>, <cc,dde,e> etc). YMMV :)

as a native hungarian speaker, let me wish you fun and many discoveries while learning this enormous grammer.

hungarian is not related to finnish, rather to turkic languages. i am a native hungarian speaker, and i know hungarian grammar is logically closer to turkish than to finnish. the story how they became related is purely political, and references easily found on this subject and i do not intend to get into. in hungarian literature class we studied finnish words that were similar, grammer, and a few poems.

> hungarian is not related to finnish

"" The Uralic languages ( /jʊˈrælɨk/) (sometimes referred to as Uralian languages) constitute a language family of some three dozen languages spoken by approximately 25 million people. The healthiest Uralic languages in terms of the number of native speakers are Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, Mari and Udmurt. ""

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uralic_languages

the referenced wiki article also mentions another point of view. the referenced article also does not mention the significant number of hungarian speakers in Canada.

i will not comment any further on this thread. my view is based on extensive research of turkish, finnish, hungarian, english, german, spanish, and russian grammers.

Swahili is supposedly quite easy compared to Arabic or Amharic (also a Semitic language like Arabic).

As far as I know, in Arabic, it should say "The books are green". "Green" has the same form and pronunciation that singular feminine has. However, green is used as an adjective here for the group of "Books", not "she is".

A literal version:

الكتب books(definite) حضراء green(feminine singular indefinite)

A de facto rule of spoken English: "Everyone should floss their teeth" - Singular nouns of indeterminate gender take plural, and therefore genderless, possessives.

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