Spanish, French, German, Russian, Arabic, Hebrew, and Swahili are “dying out”? News to me.
Since this thread pretty much diverged from the OP after the 4th or 5th post, I won’t feel too terrible with a minor hijack.
Reading Eva Luna’s post about the Tabasaran language made me wonder, why would a language evolve such a complex grammar? I have wondered that about other languages like Navajo which was so difficult to learn they used it as a code language in WW2. It would seem that something human-based like language would tend towards simplicity. I mean, why would the first cavemen inventing language say “I think the word for ‘stick’ should be masculine, but only if a man possesses it. If a girl possesses it, it’s feminine, and if it’s involved in motion it’s neuter. And on Fridays it’s always fridaline.” Which I don’t think any language is like that, but you get the idea.
It seems that languages start simple, become complex, become simple again only to become complex in a different way. John McWhorter in The Power of Babel (pg. 186) suggests that the various gender markers in Swahili began as separate words and then became gender-marking prefixes.
In re: Tabasaran: it is spoken almost entirely in the highland villages of Dagestan, and until the 1960s or so (when the Soviet governmnet encouraged the resettlement of highlanders to the plains and urban areas) its speakers generally lived their entire lives within a few miles of the villages where they were born. People who had contact with speakers of other languages (usually men, who would travel to neighboring areas to trade) would learn a broader contact language, such as Avar, Azeri, or later on, Russian. So there wouldn’t be much need for the language to evolve in a more widely comprehensible way. It only has 100,000 speakers according to the last census (1989), for crying out loud, and that number has only been reached because of the high birthrate among indigenous Caucasians.
If you want to be a big geek (like me) and read more, the best source I’ve found so far is Ronald Wixman’s * Language Aspects of Ethnic Patterns and Processes in the North Caucasus. * University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1980. Or my absolute favorite book on the North Caucasus: Yo’av Karny’s *Highlanders: A Journey to the Caucasus in Search of Memory.[/] (It just came out a couple of years ago in paperback; you can even find it at Borders.)
Well, if you think about it that way, most features of English grammar are antiquated and superfluous as well, in that you can easily find other languages that get along fine without them.
Japanese, for example, doesn’t have plural forms. Many languages don’t have definite and indefinite articles. And what do we need so many damn vowels for, anyway? English has about a dozen, while many other languages get by with four or five.
Heh heh.
-fh
Of this list, I believe only Arabic (and possibly Russian) are increasing in the percentage of the world population that speaks the language. The rest are declining, or at best holding steady.
I’d call fewer & fewer people each year speaking the language “dying out”.
The man is just one person, but the woman shares a name with the whole force. This corroborates the Tantric teaching that women are Shakti, the Feminine Force.
I see you are quite ignorant about math too. There are NOT fewer people speaking those languages. The absolute numbers are increasing. “Dissappearing” means the absolute numbers are approaching zero which is hardly the case with any of those languages. Learn some English and then some math.
To continue with the hijacking of this thread:
Another difference between English and inflected languages is that meaning in English is pretty dependent on word order. If you change the word order of an English sentence, you can change the meaning pretty radically.
In an inflected language, (where you can tell if a noun is the object of a preposition by its case ending, for example) word order in sentences isn’t so strict.
That´s hard to answer, but in my experience usually one gender will just “feel” right. Not very objective, I know… but then I don´t know the German grammar, I just use it 
Some are obvious, of course. Words ending in -tät or -ion are female (these are usually of Latin or Greek origin). If I don´t know the gender of a noun I usually compare it to similar words and use that gender. When in doubt, I use the neuter, but that´s something typically Austrian, as quite a few words take a neuter in Austria but female in Germany.
And to answer the OP: I have respect for anyone learning the German language and I know the genders are assigned pretty arbitrarily (actually, there are rules for it - but several hundred if I´m not mistaken, and no-one can be expected to learn them all), so I really don´t mind if someone gets them wrong, and I´ll only correct them if specifically asked to do so. My mother´s lived here for over 20 years and she still occasionally gets the genders wrong. No big deal.
Add to that the fact that Chinese has neither noun gender, verb tenses, or plural forms. I found learning Mandarin to be ridiculously easy for those reasons.
There is one snag though, the ubiquitous “measure words” that have little basis in rationality. If you ever need to count something, you have to remember which measure word goes with the noun you’re counting. There are dozens of them.
My post talked about “percentage of the world population that speaks the language”, not absolute numbers. I never used the terms “disappearing” nor “approaching zero”. I would expect that all of these languages are increasing in absolute numbers, just due to population growth, if nothing else. So I don’t think those numbers are very meaningful in showing a trend in language use, where percentage of the world population speaking the language would be more meaningful.
P.S. I believe I already know enough English and Math to get by, but thank you for your kind concern.
No, but you did say
It is not “fewer and fewer people” speaking those languages as the absolute numbers are increasing. And, BTW, I believe in the USA the percentage of people who speak English as their primary language is decreasing and Spanish is gaining ground.
To be fair, I haven’t seen any recent data (since the 1989 All-Soviet Census), but given current demographic and political trends in the FSU, it wouldn’t surprise me if fewer and fewer people started to claim Russian as their primary language. The birthrate among ethnic Slavs is below replacement rate IIRC since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and these days Caucasians and Central Asians, who have much higher birthrates, are less and less likely to claim Russian as their primary language.
I have no clue about the structure of Caucasian and Central Asian languages, except that many of the major ones in terms of number of speakers (Kazakh, Uzbek, Turkmen, Azeri) are Turkic. What this all means in the end for the prevalence of issues of number, gender, and case in the FSU, I have no idea. Maybe Jomo Mojo will stop by and put in his $.02 (how many rubles/manat/som is that these days?).
Hanayatori: caput is neuter.
hazel-rah: English needs a large number of vowels because of its vocabulary. Consider bit, bat, bite, bait, bet, beet, boot, but, and boat. Nine minimal pairs of the form bVt, differing only in the vowel. So we need at least those nine vowels just to be able to tell those nine words apart. Many of the CVC three-letter words in English have more than four or five minimal pairs for each combination of consonants. English needs to have a lot of vowels because it has a lot of short words – languages with only four or five vowels have entirely different styles of vocabulary, with many longer words.
sailor: But does Spanish really have six genders, with different articles, different pronouns, and different methods of agreement with adjectives? Saying that Spanish has six genders seems rather prescriptionist, much like some English grammaticians who contend that English has three cases (nominative, accusative and genitive). English doesn’t really have three cases, or even three genders, just because it has “I/me/my” and “he/him/his” (for case) and “he/she/it” (for gender).
Hanayatori: caput is neuter.
hazel-rah: English needs a large number of vowels because of its vocabulary. Consider bit, bat, bite, bait, bet, beet, boot, but, and boat. Nine minimal pairs of the form bVt, differing only in the vowel. So we need at least those nine vowels just to be able to tell those nine words apart. Many of the CVC three-letter words in English have more than four or five minimal pairs for each combination of consonants. English needs to have a lot of vowels because it has a lot of short words – languages with only four or five vowels have entirely different styles of vocabulary, with many longer words.
sailor: But does Spanish really have six genders, with different articles, different pronouns, and different methods of agreement with adjectives? Saying that Spanish has six genders seems rather prescriptionist, much like some English grammaticians who contend that English has three cases (nominative, accusative and genitive). English doesn’t really have three cases, or even three genders, just because it has “I/me/my” and “he/him/his” (for case) and “he/she/it” (for gender).
To try to translate a little Spanish para Google:
comes out to
Which just looks odd to me. I’m guessing that the epiceno gender (epiceno is a word Google cannot translate) applies to animal names the gender of which is defined by the gender of the actual animal in question (so a female finch would be refered to in the feminine).
Which makes sense.
is rendered as
which is self-explanatory.
Keep in mind that I do not speak Spanish. I’m relying on Google and the translational abilities of my fellow Dopers (hint hint) to grok these sentences.
I learned about this while riding on a train with a Japanese friend. The train stopped, the conductor made an announcement, and my friend explained that there had been an accident and that there was a death. But since there is no plural form, she explained, she would have to wait to find out if it was one person who had been run over, or more.
To try to translate a little Spanish para Google:
quote:
Epiceno: Género de los nombres de animales que con una misma terminación y artículo designan al macho y a la hembra: el jilguero, la codorniz.
Non-google = Epicene: Class of animal names that designates the male and the female with the same termination and article: the finch, the quail.
Google actually got “periodista” exactly right.
Well, yes and no. I wuill try to explain as best I understand it to be. Femenino, masculino, neutro need no explanation as they are similar to English and do have all the different articles etc. So we now have común, epiceno, ambiguo.
Común: Those words where their gender is defined by the article. i.e.: the masculine and feminine forms are identical: el periodista (the male reporter), la periodista (the female reporter). Strictly speaking the word “periodista” is neither masculine or feminine per se but depending on the article.
epiceno, is the gender used when animals of both sexes take the same gender and you add “male” or “female” if you need to distinguish them. El gorrión hembra (the female sparrow) is masculine. I guess you could say it is not a separate “gender” but just that both sexes take the same masculine or feminine gender.
Ambiguo: not defined: those nouns which can take masculine or feminine indistinctly like mar (sea) or puente (bridge).
But yeah, it is probably pretty academic and only schoolchildren would know this. I bet not one adult person in a hundred would know the six genders. I certainly had to look it up.