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Carthag Tuek posted:Grammatical genders aren't genders, they're misnamed Nah. “Gender” has a long history of use in grammar. It’s the conflation with biological sex that is a problem, which served no purpose till the biological/sociological distinction was made in the twentieth century.
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Jun 18, 2020 00:34
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The genders are also switched between German/Portuguese, and it's always really really funny listening to a German person misgendering all the nouns.
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Jun 18, 2020 01:00
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Der Kyhe posted:But obviously the windows is feminine and door is masculine and cat is she and dog is he and... you'd really struggle to find a language that doesn't have at least a few obtuse or baffling aspects. it's because humans themselves are obtuse and baffling
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Jun 18, 2020 01:11
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redleader posted:you'd really struggle to find a language that doesn't have at least a few obtuse or baffling aspects. it's because humans themselves are obtuse and baffling Sinä ihan oikeasti haluat aloittaa keskustelun siitä miten teksti voi olla konstekstissa ihan mitä tahansa?  So you really want to talk about obtuse language constructs and contexts and stuff with people whose language has the same meaning for "put it into your mother" and "well then"? But anyway, I get your point.
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Jun 18, 2020 01:22
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redleader posted:you'd really struggle to find a language that doesn't have at least a few obtuse or baffling aspects. it's because humans themselves are obtuse and baffling You say that but some languages are so much worse than others. As a native English speaker, Italian was fairly reasonable with the occasional irregularity whereas French is a nightmare of irregular bullshit and unpronounced syllables. Like Italian has 4 word endings to French 20 and French still has more irregular nouns. Then some of the French ones are pronounced the same or not pronounced at all. Leviathan Song has a new favorite as of 02:00 on Jun 18, 2020 |
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Jun 18, 2020 01:53
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The French equivalent of a spelling bee is la dictée, in which a sentence is read, and anyone who writes it down correctly wins a prize. There aren't always winners.
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Jun 18, 2020 02:07
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i didn't say that there weren't degrees of obscurity and obtuseness between different languages, just that they're all going to have various weird sides and corners because humans aren't relentless logic machines.
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Jun 18, 2020 02:12
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ultrafilter posted:The French equivalent of a spelling bee is la dictée, in which a sentence is read, and anyone who writes it down correctly wins a prize. There aren't always winners. A sentence? loving lol a sentence. My grade school dictees were at least a full paragraph. Full page by high school, but I swapped to an english high school so no more loving dictee.
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Jun 18, 2020 02:15
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Tashilicious posted:A sentence? yeah my partner still has deep-seated hatred for belgian and french school dictées
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Jun 18, 2020 02:20
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Tree Goat posted:yeah my partner still has deep-seated hatred for belgian and french school dictées Some of the higher level ones, like the yearly nationalle or internationalle, are so loving obscure and bullshit that they essentially have a loving lecture on french grammar every year to explain the traps they set.
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Jun 18, 2020 02:28
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Tashilicious posted:Some of the higher level ones, like the yearly nationalle or internationalle, are so loving obscure and bullshit that they essentially have a loving lecture on french grammar every year to explain the traps they set. OH BOY AND DON'T EVEN GET STARTED ON IF YOU'RE FROM FRANCE IN QUEBEC, OR QUEBEC IN FRANCE, BECAUSE THE TWO OFFICE DE LA LANGUE FRANCAISE ARE AS LANGUAGE FASCIST AS EACH OTHER BUT IN DIFFERENT DIRECTIONS I love having to learn entirely new grammar rules for speaking the same language.
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Jun 18, 2020 02:29
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Tashilicious posted:Some of the higher level ones, like the yearly nationalle or internationalle, are so loving obscure and bullshit that they essentially have a loving lecture on french grammar every year to explain the traps they set. I think this must be what I was thinking about.
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Jun 18, 2020 02:35
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ultrafilter posted:I think this must be what I was thinking about. Those are also usually more than a sentence. It's a paragraph to a page, depending on age group. It has to be, because there's only so much linguistic fuckery you can do in a single sentence. No. It's more evil than that. I think it's a sign of national child abuse that this stuff is broadcast live on TV every year.
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Jun 18, 2020 02:39
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The Cheshire Cat posted:It's always funny when people do the whole "you ended a sentence with a preposition!" thing because I'm pretty sure there is no native english speaker that has ever NOT done that. The contortions you would have to do with some sentences sound so much less natural. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4XCZfkGF8k
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Jun 18, 2020 02:42
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Tashilicious posted:OH BOY AND DON'T EVEN GET STARTED ON IF YOU'RE FROM FRANCE IN QUEBEC, OR QUEBEC IN FRANCE, BECAUSE THE TWO OFFICE DE LA LANGUE FRANCAISE ARE AS LANGUAGE FASCIST AS EACH OTHER BUT IN DIFFERENT DIRECTIONS Eventually they will have to acknowledge that they are not the same language.
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Jun 18, 2020 04:20
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Coming from English, the German case system is also some fresh hell.  Verbs also have about nine different forms to English's three, and you have to learn them individually because they never follow the rules 100% clearly. Why does a language need two additional verb cases just for the formal AND informal imperative, when they aren't even necessary to distinguish the formal and informal registers? I will never know.
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Jun 18, 2020 06:12
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Red Bones posted:Coming from English, the German case system is also some fresh hell. A lot of this stuff is probably cruft from an older version of the language where it did make sense, but the thing that made it make sense was eventually dropped from the language (probably because it was too complicated so people just stopped bothering to use it). Like how English spelling is an inconsistent mess because we used to have more letters and accents that made pronunciation a lot clearer, but then we just dropped it all but kept the spelling sans-accent rather than changing it to be more clear with the letters we had left.
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Jun 18, 2020 06:15
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You guys like trains?
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Jun 18, 2020 06:26
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Was that made by a flat earther? Why don’t any of the east coast Eurasian stops connect to any of the west coast American stops?
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Jun 18, 2020 06:52
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Bobby Digital posted:You guys like trains? Dallas: on a line between Jacksonville and Atlanta
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Jun 18, 2020 07:01
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The biggest reason spelling in English is such a mess is that spelling was standardised over a long period which coincided with a linguistic shift where the pronounciation of almost everything was changed.
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Jun 18, 2020 07:27
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A cunning linguist once explained to me that basically, there are two common ways to quickly figure out the "role" of a word in a sentence, like is it the direct object, indirect object, subject, so on. The first way is by having a set order for these words in a sentence. The second way is to change the article based on what role a word takes. So, according to them, that's the basic choice: do you only have people learn a single set of articles but make the word order inflexible, or do you make the word order flexible but have people learn a gazillion articles? As for word gender, really the only advantage to that is that when you say something like "My book sits on the shelf and I like looking at it", in languages with gender, if 'book' happens to be feminine and 'shelf' happens to be masculine, you can say "My book sits on the shelf and I like looking at her" vs "My book sits on the shelf and I like looking at him", where the former means you like looking at the book and the latter means you like looking at the shelf, without ambiguity.
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Jun 18, 2020 07:39
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AnoHito posted:In German, "girl" is not a feminine noun. Anyone who could look at that and not scrap the concept of gendered nouns from the language altogether has clearly long since gone insane. That's because it's composed of a feminine noun meaning "unwed/virgin female" and a diminutive suffix. That suffix, whenever it is used, determines the gender of the compound word and adds an umlaut (or ¨) to to the first syllable) Magd + chen = Mädchen There doesn't seem to be a word just for "girl" that isn't somehow linked to her future status as a spouse.
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Jun 18, 2020 08:29
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Absurd Alhazred posted:Eventually they will have to acknowledge that they are not the same language. For the ultimate version of this, watch A Very Secret Service on Netflix (French: Au service de la France). The scene where the Quebecois try to get the French to help with their independence movement is hilarious, even with subtitles. One weird thing is that even in French, the Quebecois have a really obvious accent. And I don't speak more than enough French to get a hot chocolate half the time. (The other time I ended up with a ham sandwich, sooo....) Most Americans don't really realize that other languages have different accents, too.
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Jun 18, 2020 08:41
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My kids were watching the old Pokemon cartoon and there's a dude in it who speaks in a really thick Texan accent. I looked it up and it turns out that character speaks with a Kansai dialect, which is apparently kind of a Japanese redneck. So I learned a thing or two about Japanese dialects and internal bigotry.
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Jun 18, 2020 08:58
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Do not look up how the Ainu and Ryukyuan people have been treated.
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Jun 18, 2020 09:11
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MrUnderbridge posted:For the ultimate version of this, watch A Very Secret Service on Netflix (French: Au service de la France). The scene where the Quebecois try to get the French to help with their independence movement is hilarious, even with subtitles. One weird thing is that even in French, the Quebecois have a really obvious accent. And I don't speak more than enough French to get a hot chocolate half the time. (The other time I ended up with a ham sandwich, sooo....) I learned Indonesian from a Chinese woman so got really weird looks when I used speak it because I had a thick Chinese accent in Bahasa Indonesia despite being a white Australian.
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Jun 18, 2020 09:53
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Serperoth posted:I believe Greek has it but I don't remember off the top of my head if and when we ever learned it formally or just instinct. And I recall learning about order of stuff for German, but that was ZAO, Zeit, Art, Ort (time, means, place) for things like "I will go tomorrow by bus to work" or something, rather than adjectives themselves. It's for sentence order, it would actually properly be "tomorrow I go by bus to work" or "Morgen fahre ich mit dem Bus zur Arbeit" with morgen being Zeit, mit dem Bus being Art, and zu der Arbeit for Platz. It's also for more than German, and even applies in English sometimes! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time%96manner%96place
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Jun 18, 2020 10:10
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The Cheshire Cat posted:The thing that's most confusing about it is that for every single noun, someone had to decide what gender it was. Like some french person at some point had to say "yes, tables are women, obviously". Is this the reason stuff like cars and boats are often referred to as female? I.e "Here's my new car. She drives great"
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Jun 18, 2020 12:24
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AFewBricksShy posted:Is this the reason stuff like cars and boats are often referred to as female? Because your car is full of seamen.
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Jun 18, 2020 12:30
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Der Kyhe posted:Sinä ihan oikeasti haluat aloittaa keskustelun siitä miten teksti voi olla konstekstissa ihan mitä tahansa?
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Jun 18, 2020 12:36
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Bobby Digital posted:You guys like trains? 
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Jun 18, 2020 13:35
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Red Bones posted:Coming from English, the German case system is also some fresh hell.
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Jun 18, 2020 13:51
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Bobby Digital posted:You guys like trains? I saw that on Twitter this morning and got all mad. I started to collect some numbers for a response and got as far as Spain/Portugal having 11 stops and India having 4, before flipping the table and realising that I would be wasting my time. Never mind the whole "Africa under construction" racism...
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Jun 18, 2020 14:05
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Platystemon posted:Dallas: on a line between Jacksonville and Atlanta Holy poo poo i didnt even see that Mexico City to Miami to jacksonville to dallas to st louis e: no it goes dallas to ATLANTA houston to pheonix to denver to san diego SAN JOSE TO SACRAMENTO TO SAN FRAN and why the heck doesnt the seattle terminus just go up to vancouver you know what I bet you 5 bucks this was made to troll people like me Watermelon Daiquiri has a new favorite as of 14:26 on Jun 18, 2020 |
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Jun 18, 2020 14:22
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Is that supposed to be the snowpiercer track or something?
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Jun 18, 2020 14:27
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Kennel posted:Because your car is full of seamen. Oh, come on, seamen are stored in the... balls?
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Jun 18, 2020 14:30
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Carbon dioxide posted:A cunning linguist once explained to me that basically, there are two common ways to quickly figure out the "role" of a word in a sentence, like is it the direct object, indirect object, subject, so on. That doesn't even include a third common way, which is to get rid of articles altogether and use noun declensions to designate roles, which is how Slavic languages do it. Subject, indirect object, direct object, etc., are distinguished by giving nouns different endings, there are no articles at all, and word order is irrelevant (though there are still natural-sounding and unnatural-sounding word orders). So in Russian, for example, Я читаю книгу (Ya chitayu knigu, I am reading a book) distinguishes that I am reading the book instead of the book somehow reading me by adding the accusative -у (-u) ending to the word книга (kniga, book) to show that it's the direct object of the sentence while keeping Я (Ya, I) in the nominative form to show that I am the subject of the sentence. If I instead wrote that sentence as Я книгу читаю (I a book am reading) or Книгу читаю я (A book reading am I) it would still make sense in Russian because even though the word order is muddled, the noun declensions remain the same so it's still apparent that I am the subject of the sentence and the book is the object of the sentence. But if I wrote it as Меня читает книга instead (Menya chitaet kniga, I am being read by a book), placing the pronoun I in the accusative form Меня instead of the nominative form Я, conjugating the verb читать in the third-person singular читает instead of the first-person singular читаю, and declining the noun книга in the nominative form книга instead of the accusative form книгу, then the meaning of the sentence changes completely even though the word order (I, to read, book) stays the same as when I originally wrote it as Я читаю книгу.
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Jun 18, 2020 14:42
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https://twitter.com/shreyabasu003/status/1273478142951403521?s=21
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Jun 18, 2020 14:43
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vyelkin posted:That doesn't even include a third common way, which is to get rid of articles altogether and use noun declensions to designate roles, which is how Slavic languages do it. Subject, indirect object, direct object, etc., are distinguished by giving nouns different endings, there are no articles at all, and word order is irrelevant (though there are still natural-sounding and unnatural-sounding word orders). This is basically the same as loving with the articles, just placing it as part of the word instead of outside. Still cool though. Similarly, Finnish uses (mostly) case endings where English and friends uses prepositions. So "talossa" instead of "in the house", where -ssa means "in". Definiteness is not a thing in Finnish, so there is no "the". As for grammatical gender, Swahili has 20+ of them for some reason. Needless to say, they aren't strongly related to social genders. The fact that Indo European (and Semitic) genders are is just a happy* coincidence. *Not actually happy, frustrating more like it.
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Jun 18, 2020 15:01
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