Re:The capital sharp S in now part of the official German or...
by emodendroket on Tuesday July 04, 2017 @07:54AM
(#14695281)
I also speak English as a native language, but allow me to try to answer your questions:
> - what utility do you think a language gains from gendered nouns?
Not a whole lot, but a language doesn't gain much utility from English features like mandatory plural agreement or a/an distinction either. Even something like "his/her" and "he/she" distinction isn't necessarily and a lot of non-native speakers of English struggle with it. You can dream up some sentences that are clarified by the distinction, but in a different language you obviously just express the same idea differently.
Ultimately a committee sitting around asking if a feature has utility and should be added is not very close to the way languages actually form.
> how do you know what gender a noun is? I assume there are "themes" that might inform you. But if you're unclear, how do you do find out? Is there a social cost to getting it wrong?
Sure. If a Spanish word ends in a it's probably feminine unless it's of Greek origin. But there is also memorization involved. Getting the wrong gender on an inanimate object is a lot like any other non-native mistake; it's likely someone who is talking to you can figure out what you meant.
Again, having to just memorize some cases is common in languages. How do you know what preposition goes with which verb? It probably seems very natural to you, but there isn't much logical basis for a lot of them. In Spanish you dream "with" someone rather than "of" them. Someone who wants to speak native-sounding English has to spend a lot of time learning the right pairings (as well as stuff like which compound expressions should have the infinitive versus the gerund).
> - how are new genders decided? I'm struggling to think of an example as "laptop" presumably has the same gender as "computer", but it must come up sometimes.
It's not really like a group sits around deciding, but of course there's a lot of precedent with existing words that could inform you which answer is likely. Synonymous words can have different genders, so it's not really like, for instance, computing words are all masculine. In general if a totally new word is borrowed into Spanish it's more likely to be masculine (so, like, el kabuki, el ánime, etc.).
> - what utility do you think a language gains from gendered nouns?
Not a whole lot, but a language doesn't gain much utility from English features like mandatory plural agreement or a/an distinction either. Even something like "his/her" and "he/she" distinction isn't necessarily and a lot of non-native speakers of English struggle with it. You can dream up some sentences that are clarified by the distinction, but in a different language you obviously just express the same idea differently.
Ultimately a committee sitting around asking if a feature has utility and should be added is not very close to the way languages actually form.
> how do you know what gender a noun is? I assume there are "themes" that might inform you. But if you're unclear, how do you do find out? Is there a social cost to getting it wrong?
Sure. If a Spanish word ends in a it's probably feminine unless it's of Greek origin. But there is also memorization involved. Getting the wrong gender on an inanimate object is a lot like any other non-native mistake; it's likely someone who is talking to you can figure out what you meant.
Again, having to just memorize some cases is common in languages. How do you know what preposition goes with which verb? It probably seems very natural to you, but there isn't much logical basis for a lot of them. In Spanish you dream "with" someone rather than "of" them. Someone who wants to speak native-sounding English has to spend a lot of time learning the right pairings (as well as stuff like which compound expressions should have the infinitive versus the gerund).
> - how are new genders decided? I'm struggling to think of an example as "laptop" presumably has the same gender as "computer", but it must come up sometimes.
It's not really like a group sits around deciding, but of course there's a lot of precedent with existing words that could inform you which answer is likely. Synonymous words can have different genders, so it's not really like, for instance, computing words are all masculine. In general if a totally new word is borrowed into Spanish it's more likely to be masculine (so, like, el kabuki, el ánime, etc.).