I still feel Armenian is such a great Indo European language. No articles, no genders, completely phonetic, consistent verb endings, no particular word ordering
Genders, or word classes in general, often work like registers in a computer. So you can quickly refer to things mentioned earlier.
In armenian we dont even have he/she and its fine. In some cases Im sure its not as elequant. For a natural speaker it doesnt matter, and for the vast majority of history you more or less had only natural speakers, but if were talking about learning languages, it is needlessly complicated for little to no benefit
EN: “I carried over the sofa and the table, but it(?)/the sofa broke”
Like in “John met David. He was delighted to meet him.” We have a conflict over the ‘masculine object’ register, so ‘he’ and ‘him’ are ambiguous.
But if we had a pronoun like ‘de/dim’ for ‘previous subject’ and ‘ne/nim’ for ‘previous object’ you could unabiguously say “John met David. De was delighted to make nis acquaintance, but ne wasn’t so keen”
Do you know if, if any language had such a system and it's intuitive enough, it is more likely to perpetuate than an inferior system? I was thinking about what makes a language spread but, short of the language being so poor that it causes the speakers to be outcompeted by other tribes with other languages (like if you couldn't convey where the attack is coming from before the enemy killed you), it seems to me entirely arbitrary. You speak whatever the person you want to talk to understands (and in rarer cases, what your oppressor tells you to speak), which is just a chance factor (whatever they grew up with) and not based on any quality of the language. I'm not aware of any case where both sides agreed to speak a different language for that language's efficacy and not just because they both speak it better
> Ioannes Davido occurrit. Hunc occurrere illi placet.
Here it's clear that hunc refers to Davidus, since that's the closer name in the sentence, and illi refers to Ioannes, since that name sits further out.
> “John met David. He was delighted to meet him.”
'The former was delighted to meet the latter.'
There's also other languages which have different ways to class nouns. Have a look at eg Chinese.
Upon digging, I actually found it fascinating. As I understand how it happened for Proto-Indo-European languages (with a bit of healthy speculation because for the earlier parts there's not much reliable statistical data to confirm it exactly, and there are always some competing explanations by different linguists):
First, before PIE, the older language had no genders, but instead had cases with a twist similar to what they have in Basque language: instead of our usual nominative+accusative cases it had absolutive+ergative cases. The difference is as follows in two sentences: "cat walks" and "dog eats bone". In modern PIE descendants we have "cat" and "dog" in nominative, and "bone" is in accusative case. In modern Basque and the hypothetic language before PIE the "cat" and the "bone" are in absolutive case, and the "dog" is in ergative.
So basically, there was a word form that meant "something does action upon something else" and another word form that meant "something receives an action from another actor or performs the action by itself".
Then these word forms were reinterpreted as "people or animals that do things" and "inanimate or dumb things". So it became two genders: animate and inanimate. People started assigning new words to these genders (sometimes randomly).
Then the plural form of inanimate gender started meaning collective and abstract things. As an analogy, "cows" would also start meaning a collective "herd", not only multiple cows; "grains" would start meaning "cereal", not only multiple grains of wheat. Over time, people started conjugating the plural inanimate abstract words in a pattern similar to singular animate, thus a third gender appeared - many thousand years later we called it "feminine", the former animate gender we started calling "masculine", and the former inanimate gender we started calling "neuter" (literally means "neither").
After the word gender patterns established over time, new words and new word forms started being distributed among these genders also without strict rules, sometimes by chance, or by analogy with existing words that sounded similarly in that period.
Thus we had three genders of Proto-Indo-European languages that developed over millenia for no particular reason and without a specific goal, just naturally and due to fossilizing old speech elements being reinterpreted a little bit differently by new generations — over many generations over thousands of years.
It used to have dual number, now it's just singular and plural. There are, however, exactly three words that use the dual number rules for its plural, even for N>2: hands, eyes and ears.
Well, as I understand, the actual animate/inanimate split was there at least 10 000 years ago (or more)! And the language has gradually changed over the years until it's barely recognizable. For half of the period that passed we didn't even have written languages, and can only approximately deduce the words by tracing their common origins in related languages.
See how modern English has changed in 500 years from the earlier Middle English — as a non-native English speaker, I can barely recognize a few things, and it's otherwise completely unintelligible for me. Now multiply that change by at least 20x.
So how words are split between genders in modern languages - has very little relation to how they were before. For example, in modern Spanish, masculine gender is a fusion of Latin masculine and neuter genders. So technically if we say that in Classical Latin there was still a statistically significant animate/inanimate split between masculine and neuter genders - nowadays it's the same single gender in Spanish.
A relic of gendered nouns in English can still be seen in how we treat concepts like countries, churches, schools, organizations, languages, and complex machines (especially ships). While usually people ascribe the pronoun "it" to these, occasionally they use a gendered pronoun, and if so, it's always "she", never "he". Two churches or organizations or even ideas might be "sisters" or in a "mother/daughter" relationship. The common theme through all these examples is plurality and abstractness.
It's the first and only time I've had the sense of what it probably sounds like to speakers of gendered languages when an English (or other) speaker gets the gender wrong.
FWIW I struggle with using English articles and past/present/future perfect time, because those concepts are absent from my language. Despite decades of experience with English at this point.
For most words, yes. Some loanwords are tricky to gender because of their declension. For example gender of "coffee" in russian is highly disputed: https://www.reddit.com/r/russian/comments/h08q29/the_insiste...
And different car brands usually have their own gender too: for example Mercedes is usually masculine even though named after founder's daughter, and Honda is isually feminine.
Said every native speaker I suppose.
>it's not complex if you're a native speaker
Of course this is very complex and not intuitive if you're a language learner. My point was that while there are parts of grammar that native speakers struggle with, and kids drill them for good grades in school, this is not one of that parts. And my broader point was that "needlessly pointless part of the language" is subjective and something language users should judge.
> My intention was [...] just to underscore the point that native speakers have it easier and may not be able to experience or understand the difficulties of a non-native speaker.
Fwiw, that was not at all clear to me from a sarcastic few words
Basically, most feminine words end with an “a” while masculine words end with an “o”, although there are some words that end with other letters whose genders is not that easy to identify. For instance “árvore” (tree) ends with an “e” and is feminine (“a árvore”), while “peixe” (fish) also ends with an “e” but is masculine (“o peixe“).
But not every word can be irregular. Mostly the words that belong to a gender will match a set of patterns, and the words belonging to another gender will match a different set of patterns. If you're lucky, you can learn a word from some usage that makes its gender explicit (and for irregular words, this is the only way you can learn about their irregularity). But often all you have to go on is the word, and in that case, when you want to use it, you have to make a choice. You'll do that based on the form of the word.
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If you want some examples of how gender irregularity in nouns works, here are a few different phenomena in Latin:
- An adjective in the first/second declensions has masculine (singular) endings -us, -ī, -ō, -um, -ō, -e and feminine endings -a, -ae, -ae, -am, -ā, -a. If you see one of these endings, and you know the adjective is first/second declension¹, then you've fully specified the gender of the adjective. There are no exceptions.
- First and second declension nouns mostly follow this pattern. Lana means wool and, as the -a suffix would lead you to expect, it's feminine. Campus means field as, as the -us suffix would lead you to expect, it's masculine. What this means is that "white wool" is lana alba and "a white field" is campus albus.
- Trees are weird. They are second declension (or sometimes fourth; pretend that's not true), appearing to be masculine, but instead they're feminine. So you'd have pinus alba, a white pine tree, or quercus alba, a white oak tree.
- There's a short list of profession terms that are first declension, appearing to be feminine, but that are nevertheless masculine. So it'd be agricola albus, a white farmer, or nauta albus, a white sailor.
- What about corpus? Well, it's neuter. Corpus album, a white body. Corpus is a third declension noun, and the third declension works completely differently. The apparent -us ending is misleading; the root of this noun is actually corpor- and the suffixes, of course, belong to the third declension.
- What do you do if you run into a word you don't know how to deal with? Pretend it's normal. Manus is a Latin word that means "hand"; it appears to be masculine, but it's feminine. It turns out that referring to hands is common enough that Spanish speakers today still remember that this masculine-looking word, now mano, is actually feminine. But we may compare Biblia, which is feminine in Spanish today despite the fact that in Latin it was neuter. It's feminine now because of that -a ending.
¹ That isn't actually true; the neuter suffixes are mostly just masculine suffixes except for one that is feminine. There are no distinctive second-declension neuter suffixes. But the suffixes by themselves are sufficient to distinguish masculine gender from feminine.
I'm glad that Portuguese doesn't try to trip up foreigners on purpose here, like Spanish does with "el agua" (which is still a feminine word, but takes the masculine article because "la agua" is too hard to pronounce).
Livre (book) is actually an example of where the gender creates a different meaning: un livre is a book, while une livre is a pound (the unit of weight).
It is an area of current dispute whether the pronoun it can be applied to people or not.