Re:The Swedish phoneme notorious for having a dedicated IPA ...
by DFHippie on Wednesday November 20, 2019 @08:16PM
(#21590529)
In which case it's probably better to say it has an animate/inanimate distinction. I was told by someone interested in historical linguistics that Indo-European first developed an animate/inanimate noun class system and then the animate class developed a feminine subset.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Re:The Swedish phoneme notorious for having a dedicated IPA ...
by einr on Thursday November 21, 2019 @04:12AM
(#21592515)
In which case it's probably better to say it has an animate/inanimate distinction.
No, this is not accurate, neither historically nor according to modern usage. Animate objects tend towards utrum but plenty of inanimate objects are utrum too and there are no hard rules or mnemonics you can use to divine which is which.
It's "ett tåg" ("a train") but "en bil" ("a car"), "ett äpple" ("an apple") but "en banan" ("a banana"), "ett barn" (a child) but "en vuxen" (an adult). This is entirely arbitrary and non-obvious to non-native speakers and if you're learning Swedish, you just straight up have to learn which is which for every word.
Re:The Swedish phoneme notorious for having a dedicated IPA ...
by henrikschroder on Thursday November 21, 2019 @10:49AM
(#21595302)
The biggest mindfuck about utrum/neutrum is that it exists in Danish and Norwegian as well, but the categorization is not 100% the same, some nouns are utrum in one language and neutrum in the other. So there's different arbitrary rules, and if you go from one of the Scandinavian languages to the other, you just have to learn the ones that aren't the same.
For example, "a friendship" is "et venskab" in Danish, but "en vänskap" in Swedish.