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Comment by eru | Hacker News Reader

> Genders in language is seemingly such a needlessly pointless concept I am really confused as to how it ever developed.

Genders, or word classes in general, often work like registers in a computer. So you can quickly refer to things mentioned earlier.

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Great way to frame it. But it does rely on just chance that the nouns you’re talking about will slot into different categories. Would be much more useful if pronouns let us refer to ‘the previously mentioned subject’ or ‘the previously mentioned object’ rather than ‘the previously mentioned masculine person’.

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”

Sounds logical; I'd like such a system.

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

Yep. Languages would be much better if they followed an RFC process.

Latin, does this. It's a bit of an unidiomatic construction, but roughly translated into Latin, you get:

> 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.

English has these options, too.

> “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.

How does gendered nouns make it so you can more quickly refer to something mentioned earlier?

For example, if I am talking about a window and a door, and a window is masculine and a door is feminine, I can use the pronoun "it" in either masculine or feminine form to clearly refer to one or the other. Or I could use a verb "opened" in a masculine or feminine form, and it will be clear which of two things I mean without explicitly repeating.

Ah not all gendered languages have gendered verbs but for the ones that do it makes sense.

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

Well, in German you don't have gendered verbs, but windows are neutral and doors are female. So you can use the German equivalent of 'it' to refer to the window and 'she' to refer to the door, if you just mentioned them. Especially for long nouns, that's a lot faster than repeating them.

FR: « J'ai transporté le canapé (M) et la table (F), mais il (M) s'est cassé. » -> the canapé/sofa is broken.

EN: “I carried over the sofa and the table, but it(?)/the sofa broke”

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