Speaking only for myself, it’s generally easier and sometimes lacking.
Example: Spanish has a grammatical form called “impersonal”, with no true equivalent in English; any of the forms which can be used as impersonals in English have other usages and this leads to a lot of confusion which French or Spanish impersonals don’t suffer from. How many times has someone in these boards said “when you (generic you)…” or similar? How many times have we not added that parenthesis and someone has gone and taken it personally? With a form that’s always impersonal, that kind of confusion doesn’t happen.
Those “additional bits” are difficult to learn if you’ve never encountered a similar structure before, but they wouldn’t be used if they weren’t considered useful. Who decides if they’re useful? The speakers of whichever language includes them. I’m thinking of a post where someone said to think of the declensions in Hungarian as postpositions: instead of using prepositions like English, Hungarian makes that function by sticking different endings onto words. I grew up with prepositions and didn’t encounter declensions until I was 15, so to me thinking of “just stick the preposition at the end” is easier than thinking of declensions; if I’d grown up speaking Latin or Hungarian, declensions would come naturally and I might find it a pain to remember all those prepositions.
As for grammatical gender and quoting RAE (re. the current law about domestic violence being named “de violencia de género”, “about gender violence”): “in Spanish, people do not have gender, words do; gender is a grammatical concept”. The entry for género doesn’t include any reference to either sociology or sex.
These days of gender equality, there is a movement, led by feminists but with general support, to remove gender specific nouns. Thus we no longer have actresses, firemen or policemen. Nurses who are men are not male nurses and we do not have stewards and stewardesses or waiters and wiatresses.
This gives rise to the problem that the use of *they *after a singular noun is still anathema to many people, especially in formal contexts. It does still look strange to me, but is preferable to the ugly he/she alternative, since *he *can no longer be assumed to include she
*If you’re allergic to nuts, be sure to let the chef know before *they prepare your meal
If you’re allergic to nuts, be sure to let the chef know before he/she prepares your meal
Latching on to just this point of the post (with its concerning a “pet peeve” of mine): the “generic you” business irritates me, because in English we do have, for this specific job at any rate, an “impersonal form”. For this purpose – referencing “somebody” or “a person” with the aim of making a generalisation – English has one of the uses of the word “one”. As in “when one goes out hunting”, or whatever.
For some reason, though, English speakers / writers seem to have decided that using “one” in this way appears pompous / stilted / upper-class-ish-ly affected; so have mostly dropped this usage in favour of – often confusingly – employing “you”. Seems to me, truly a pity that because this foolish prejudice has somehow shown up, people have decided to make life in this respect, more difficult. As Nava notes: as well as in Spanish, this “impersonal” provision exists in French – which has in the “somebody / a person” role, the word “on”; and German similarly has the word “man”. And English could still have this capacity, if only…
Not only that, but not every language calls its grammatical genders “masculine” and “feminine”. For some it may be, for example, “animate” and “inanimate”. Some languages even have four or more genders, so obviously they have no direct relationship to biological gender.
Thinking about the possibilities of different genders, English “countable” and “uncountable” nouns are a type of gender (hopefully none of our real linguists will hit me). They’re two different categories of nouns which get different treatment in certain situations and which must be matched with different sets of words - but it’s not as if people go through life fretting over tables being countable and furniture being uncountable.
I have always had a theory that there is a tradeoff in languages between those relying heavily on grammatical rules (like gender, case, number, verb inflection, etc) and those relying on word order.
In sort of mathematical terms, if you think of a sentence as a set of unknowns, then to be able to specify the meaning of the sentence, you need a certain number of constraints to be able to find the ‘solution’. (apologies to real mathematicians and linguists for bastardising both of their disciplines :rolleyes:) Having grammar rules allows you to make sense of the sentence, and if you don’t have that, then you would need to have strict rules regulating word order. Latin and german are great examples of the former, and english of the latter.
English use of prepositions is incredibly complex. Inflected languages have very few prepositions, and they are easy to use. Try explaining to a non-native speaker the difference between being “In the hospital,” and “At the hospital.”
If you are allergic to nut, be sure to inform the chef before your meal is prepared.
I speak (or can read) several inflected languages myself, and haven’t noticed that prepositions are fewer in number or easier to use. Might you be thinking instead of agglutinative languages? What you say about prepositions fits perfectly with, say, Hungarian, but not with German, French, Icelandic, Russian, etc.
yeah, the prepositions in French kill me, especially the ‘à’ or ‘de’ plus infinitive. Half the time even the french speakers I ask have to think about it before answering…
This is right on. Generally speaking, languages that have a lot of agreement rules have very free word order. Latin is a case in point. It uses word order basically for focus and nuance and agreement rules to disentangle the meaning. English cannot do that. Yes, there is topicalization (e.g. That book, I gave it to my children to read.) but that is almost the only way we can vary the order. So we use auxiliaries and aspects to convey shades of meaning. One thing non-native speakers don’t easily get is the use of the progressive aspect.
From my feeble knowledge of German, it combines a relatively fixed word order with a fairly elaborate inflection. This is the mark of a language in transition. A thousand years ago, even before 1066 and all that, Engish–or Anglo-Saxon–was losing a lot of inflection and moving to a more fixed word order.
Of course. It would be grammatical gender even if you (systematically) referred to boats as “he”/“him” or as “it”. Whenever you divide up the nouns in a language into classes according to how they agree with inflections, pronouns, etc., you have grammatical gender. Exactly which nouns go in which class is irrelevant.
This old languagelog post suggests that french speakers can’t even agree on the gender of nouns in french which is intriguing. I wonder if anyone ever followed up on it.
Out of curiosity, how odd would it sound, to a speaker of a gendered language, to use the wrong gender; for example saying “Le Chaise” instead of “La Chaise”?
French Canadians are used to it, but of course they notice it.
Gender is somewhat fluid. I know someone who was born in and partly grew up (until her family moved to Montreal) a town about 100 miles from Rome. She says that there are quite a number of nouns whose gender in her dialect is different from that of Rome.
What I find interesting is that French speakers, hearing a made-up noun, will usually have a strong intuition of what its gender “should” be. Oh, and there is one (at least) exception to the rule that nouns ending in “ion” are feminine in French.
Depends a lot on the situation: it’s a lot worse when the error includes inventing new words or when the mismatch leads to using a word which means a completely different thing.
Ex: some people think it’s hilarious ha-ha to say buenos díos instead of buenos días, but “díos” isn’t a word; they’re running roughshod over grammar and vocabulary both and being arrogant we’re-not-in-the-Pits about it. Buenos Dios is as bad: the “correction” is matched in gender, mismatched in number and meaning.
On the other hand, a foreigner or a child getting the matches or verb conjugations or something like that not quite perfect is fine so long as we all understand each other and it’s not done for the single purpose of being a jackass. People may correct it occasionally but it’s nowhere near “aaaargh my ears”.
Personally, I find gendered nouns (other than those that actually identify things by gender) to be unnecessarily confusing. But it’s not like English doesn’t have plenty of its own unnecessarily confusing rules.
They’re still used (infrequently) in law; the male administrator of a will is an executor, while his female counterpart is an executrix. The administrators of an estate where the decedent died intestate (without a will) are the administrator/administratrix (though my state got rid of the -trix endings from its statutes sometime after 1966).