Re:The Awful German Language (1880)
by modernerd on Saturday October 06, 2018 @05:51AM
(#18154340)
There are homonyms in languages with genderless nouns too, such as English, but context usually makes it clear.
It's hard to imagine a real-world situation where “it's raining” would be confused with “it's calculating” when stripped of the gender, for example.
> Sometimes, when a follow-on sentence discusses previously introduced objects, gendered articles can clue you onto which objects are being discussed.
That's the best argument I've heard so far, but it's so rare to require gender for comprehension. It seems a push to burden a whole language with gendered nouns for this purpose.
It's hard to imagine a real-world situation where “it's raining” would be confused with “it's calculating” when stripped of the gender, for example.
> Sometimes, when a follow-on sentence discusses previously introduced objects, gendered articles can clue you onto which objects are being discussed.
That's the best argument I've heard so far, but it's so rare to require gender for comprehension. It seems a push to burden a whole language with gendered nouns for this purpose.