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CoastalCoder

> Old English had 5 genders, ...

Would you mind elaborating on this?

I know almost nothing about the topic, but IIUC from Wikipedia, Olde English only had 3 genders: [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English_grammar#Gender

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The way I learned about it, in addition to masculine, neuter, and feminine, there was also a distinction between weak and strong. So a man would be strong masculine, a body weak masculine, a girl weak feminine, and a woman strong feminine. Add in neuter and you get 5 genders.

But reading https://oldenglish.info/wam2.html, there were also 2 weak neuter nouns, eage and eare. Which are now eye and ear. Not sure how that fits with what I was taught.

I never quite got used to the added layer of polite verb conjugation in French, but I hear Japanese is far worse.

As a native speaker it might not be so bad. But as a second language it means that at some point you're taking a class that consists largely of learning to beg your betters for favors. Which I don't think is ever going to sit well with students of quasi-democratic nations. Doubly so for more stereotypically cantankerous ones.

Formality in discussion with others, seems to be very common in other languages, and is very hard for a native North American speaker to use correctly. The whole concept sounds like contrite begging for us. Please sir, sir I could I sir ask you sir, to possibly pass the cheese, sir. So, of course we over correct and throw in more sirs(or ma'ams) willy nilly.

> Formality in discussion with others, seems to be very common in other languages, and is very hard for a native North American speaker to use correctly. The whole concept sounds like contrite begging for us.

Kind of ironic, in that English lost the ability to make formality distinctions because its speakers were so consistently formal to each other that the language lost its informal second person singular pronoun and associated conjugations.

Living proof of this is the that when translating from English to my local Slavic language Google Translate strips out all instances of "please". I felt like it sounded rude but it actually stops me from sounding overly pleading and a little pathetic.

My solution for good interaction, since I'm fluent, is to state to the person i'm talking to, is right up front and say; I'm not a native, so forgive me if I sound informal. Usually that's enough for the person to be forgiving, and possibly impressed, sometimes I just get a confused or rude look.

>I never quite got used to the added layer of polite verb conjugation in French, but I hear Japanese is far worse.

I've only passed the N4 exam so far (about the skill of a Japanese elementary school student), but I fear the polite speech rules I've already learned. It's easy to conjugate verbs a little politely (-masu at the end, or desu for "to be"). Being more polite is a beast. There are different verbs to tack on depending on the basic verb, your relation to the person you're speaking to or speaking about, and whether it's a request, offer, or statement.

Then there are polite pronouns, polite particles (those are like prepositions), and it's usually polite to refer to things obliquely.

All that, and I'm sure I'm missing or misunderstanding a huge portion of the style.

They probably meant cases. Nominative, accusative, dative, genitive, and vestiges of the instrumental.

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