> I scratch my head at a society that makes its members memorize such useless information.
Such a weird perspective on language and on the agency of societies. There are tons of "useless" things in any language. For instance, why not get rid of all the tenses in English? Do we really need the past progressive?
To make English spelling more "logical" (so people need to remember less useless information!), we should again look to Mark Twain:
I recently started learning Khmer (Cambodian). It's an awesome language. No tenses (all assumed from context... if something happened in the past, you say it happened "already", and there's a single modifier to all verbs to indicate they will happen). No genders, at all (there's no "he/she/they" problem). The numbering system is simple adn consistent, and it's applied to months and hours ("one month" is a measure of duration, "month one" is January). I reminds me of reading good code; simple, elegant, with no unnecessary cruft.
It's given me a new perspective on (as you say) all the useless crap we have in English.
Oh, and I started learning German, too. TFA made me laugh.
I learned Thai, which shares Khmer's refreshing simplicity, like not having tenses.
However, it has "classifiers", which are used when counting things. In English, you might say "Three children", in Thai you would say "Children three persons", where "person" happens to be the correct classifier for children. Makes sense in that case, but in general it's weird (and somewhat comedic): for instance airplanes and bamboo share the same classifier ("long hollow things").
There are about 80 classifiers, and part of learning the language is learning the correct classifier to go with each noun, much like learning genders in German. Same as with genders, if you get the classifier wrong, you'll still be understood, but considered uneducated (or badly in command of the language).
BTW, and programmers will love this: this situation means that when counting things of disparate types, you need to typecast!
Funny (to me, anyway) story: my wife was simultaneously telling off one of our sons, nicknamed "O", and one of our dogs, also nicknamed "O". Since they don't share the same classifier, she cast their classifier to the made-up-on-the-spot classifier "O" so it would both be factually and grammatically correct.
Yeah, it's weird, Thai and Khmer are very similar, and share some words, but also very different. Khmer isn't tonal, and has really simplified grammar.
They used to share an alphabet, too, but the Thai opted to simplify it (westernise it) while the Khmer opted to keep their original alphabet. Written Khmer is hard for us westerners to deal with because of this. They have lots of vowels and consonants that we don't have (I always struggle with the consonant between 'b' and 'p', because it doesn't seem like there should be any room for another consonant in there).
But English has a consonant between 'b' and 'p' ('pʰ' in IPA) as well. Just consider the difference between 'ban', 'span' and 'pan'. The 'p' in 'span' is not as forceful as the 'p' in 'pan', and they're actually different consonants.
To continue with my coding analogy... German is like Java (huge, sprawling, full of conceptsextendedwaypastthepointofsanity), English is like C++ (mashed together out of two different languages and made to work, mostly), Khmer is like Go (favouring simplicity over expressiveness).
It does rely a lot on context. If you don't share a context with your listener, it's easy to get confused. Given the cultural gap with the West, it can mean that you're fluent in Khmer, but still miss a lot of the meaning because you don't share the same cultural context. Essentially culture-wide in-jokes.
But then, I had to explain British rhyming slang to my German gf the other day, and she thought it was crazy. I guess there's nothing that unusual about culture-wide in-jokes.
It's the “agency of societies” that helped English lose its gendered nouns. One theory is that Old English society found them useless because there was overlap between endings, causing noun ending inflection to “collapse” into a single neutral form, which started in the North of England and progressed to the South.[1]
Societal changes are already influencing gendered nouns in Germany[2]. Some dialects of German (Niederdeutsch) also use de instead of der/die.
I'm a British national living in Austria. I've spoken with Austrian natives about the difficulty of learning German noun genders who admit that it feels increasingly old fashioned to them. The local dialect here slurs some noun endings so it's almost ambiguous, just as Old English once did.
There's no place for reinforcement of gender stereotypes via language (it is hard to find gender-neutral phrases in German - you are either a male programmer or a female one). Two languages that gender the same noun differently also have societies that use a different class of adjective (feminine vs masculine) for the word.[1]
To me it seems entirely reasonable to call gendered nouns “useless”, and to see them as a burden on a language and a society.
> "I've spoken with Austrian natives [...] who admit that it feels increasingly old fashioned to them. "
I can guarantee you, that your sample of Austrian natives is not representative of the majority of native speakers. Not even remotely. As a native speaker you will barely notice it, unless foreigners remind you of it.
> "To me it seems entirely reasonable to call gendered nouns “useless”, and to see them as a burden on a language and a society."
I can hardly imagine a force strong enough to change the way people speak to such a fundamental degree, as would be the removal of noun genders in German.
Advocating such force comes with a stench: It may have more todo with projecting power over the people you interact with and less with interacting itself. Which is why proponents of gender-neutral language in German often fail to not come across as snobbish. Which is why the only people in German speaking countries that speak gender-neutral are politicians or ideologues in academia.
Thanks for sharing - it's good to hear other opinions on this, and it's very likely the group of five or so people I was speaking to are not representative.
Thanks for taking my response the way you did and not as an insult (honestly, you're a rare exception these days on HN for not just downvote and leave as soon as the topic touches politics)!
>I can guarantee you, that your sample of Austrian natives is not representative of the majority of native speakers. Not even remotely.
Agreed. I find it hard to imagine how something can possibly sound old fashioned when there is no more modern alternative.
My German may not be perfect, but I have never heard anyone fudge definite articles in a way that makes them indistinguishable from each other (or drop them altogether).
> I find it hard to imagine how something can possibly sound old fashioned when there is no more modern alternative.
Exactly. Who'd be insulted by the moon being male in German and the sun being female? The sun, men or the moon?
Languages represent a form of continuous application of voluntary cooperation. Which is why almost no native speaker will think of his words he uses as an insult (either to a gender or that gendered word) but as a means to deliver information.
Using gender-neutral German in every day interactions will automatically make you come across affected. It is a linguistic Clinton-Thumb.
"Whenever the subject comes up, someone is sure to bring up […] Shaw's ghoti-- a word which illustrates only Shaw's wiseacre ignorance. English spelling may be a nightmare, but it does have rules, and by those rules, ghoti can only be pronounced like goatee."
In English, the writing has become detached from the writing to the point where it is not possible to write a word upon hearing it the first time or to pronounce it upon reading it.
Fixed how? By revising the orthography to accurately reflect pronunciation? (If so, whose?) Some English words have major variations in pronunciation in different regions (of the world, or indeed just of England). Should the revised spellings differ between regions?
Such a weird perspective on language and on the agency of societies. There are tons of "useless" things in any language. For instance, why not get rid of all the tenses in English? Do we really need the past progressive?
To make English spelling more "logical" (so people need to remember less useless information!), we should again look to Mark Twain:
> Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld. (http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/twain.htm)