Yet Another Language Question

Factual Questions
1

Hi Straight Dope,

I’ve been wondering about this for a while now. It’s probably a dumb question, but I just had to know.

I speak Hebrew and Spanish, at a reasonably advanced level–not perfectly, though.

In my conversations with other speakers of these languages I often mess up masculine and feminine agreement, and am corrected. For example,

“sangre rojo” instead of “la sangre roja”
“fantasma espantosa” instead of “fantasma espantoso.”

Or in Hebrew, sometimes I mess up with words like “shanah” (year) which is a feminine word with a masculine plural ending “shanim.” I would say “shanot” instead, which is incorrect. (And don’t even get me started on Hebrew numbers, which can be very challenging. I mess them up all the time.)

My question to you all is threefold:

  1. Do native speakers of these languages (and others with similar grammatical rules) ever mess up masculine/feminine agreement?

  2. If not, would it be a similar parallel to asking native English speakers if they ever make mistakes like “I is happy” or “They was sad,” which really doesn’t happen often at all?

  3. How serious are errors like these taken if you are trying to converse with a native speaker? Do mistakes of this fashion imply poor education? If a native speaker himself/herself made an agreement mistake in a group of native speaking friends, how would they react?

Thanks,

Dave

2

I speak italian as my native second language and am very fluent in Spanish. There are rare times when the genders don’t maintain their gender across both languages and I do get confused.

3

I’m a native speaker of German (which has three genders, and totally arbitrary rules as to which noun takes which gender) and speak several Romance languages at various levels of command as second languages. My impression is that for the common everyday words, native speakers typically do not make mistakes, at least not beyond mere spluttering. The gender of nouns is firmly engrained in the minds of native speakers. Things are different, of course, when you come across a word that you don’t know and where you cannot deduce the gender on some other basis (e.g. because it’s a compound of two other words, in whcih case it takes the second word’s gender in German); in this case, you would have to learn and ideally memorise it at the first encounter. In this sense, I guess the analogies that you draw are quite good.

4

A friend of mine, a native speaker of Italian says that there are some nouns that have a different gender in her dialect than in the Roman. I conclude that gender is relatively fluid.

In English, less commonly used strong verbs tend to become weak (“dove” vs. “dived”, “cloven” vs. “cleft”) and gradually people use subjunctive less and less. So common forms seem stable, but less common ones not so much.

5

Over at wordorigins.org, a fairly serious language forum, there is a participant who discusses Hebrew/Spanish questions. I think his username is Lionello.

6

My Italian professor told me that when non-native speakers make gender mistakes, he could still understand them, but it made a noticeable difference in the mental effort it took to comprehend.

7

Spanish, Catalan.

Rarely, but it’s something that can happen by mistake at any age. We also have cases where we mix and match (apparent) genders on purpose, which from the point of view of trying to understand the whys and wherefores is much worse; the one coming to mind right now is using an academic/professional title in the neutral (which matches the masculine) with feminine adjectives or articles. Some people will refer to a female doctor as la médica, some as la médico. Both are understood and both “academical”, but the first one emphasizes her sex/gender and the second one her profession.

Many of us are likely to correct it simply because that’s the way the culture leans, but not because it’s ohmygodhowcouldyoumakesuchamistakeaaaaaah. There’s an assumption that people in general will want to speak “correctly”, that is, in whichever way makes it easier to be understood. When you encounter one of those people for whom it’s clearly not the case (that is, you correct them discreetely and they make a fuss about how dare you), you make a mental note.

My experience with German is that German speakers didn’t use to correct foreigners on misuse and mispronunciation; nowadays they do (and it’s very welcome, danke). At one point, I was working in Germany and Germanic Switzerland, in a five-nationalities team, and our German-speaking coworkers were surprised to hear the Indians, Spaniards and French correct each other’s English. They viewed it as rude because it “implied” that the English of the person being corrected was “bad” (no, it doesn’t imply it, it says it right out); we viewed it as rude to let someone go on making a mistake when it was simply due to not knowing better. As the Spanish programmer put it “we already know our English isn’t perfect and our German is bad! How are we going to get better if nobody helps us?”

8

Schnitte mentions that correct usage for common words just becomes ingrained; that is, you just memorize a bunch of words as if they are all ad hoc just from repeated usage. Hebrew has the added complexity, for non-native speakers, that the written language doesn’t (usually) have vowels. When you see a written word, consisting of only cnsnnts, how would you know how to say it? I asked a native Hebrew-speaking friend, and he didn’t understand what the problem was. You see the word, and you just know how to say it, based on its usage in the sentence. :confused:

That’s about how it is. You just memorize combinations of consonants that you commonly see, and recognize them as words that you know.

9

That’s how English works, Senegoid, except in English it applies to both vowels and consonants. I felt terrible about my difficulties figuring out how words are pronounced from how they are written, until I realized that native English speakers have the same problem. You just don’t realize that you’re tracking pronunciation and spelling as paired items because you’ve been doing it all your life.

10

There are nouns in Russian that are commonly assigned incorrect gender by native speakers (“кофе” - coffee - in Russian is masculine, but a lot of native speakers incorrectly assign neutral gender to it).

11

In Hebrew, word formation is very strict, and there is really (AFAIU) only one way to “vowelize” a particular word. Unless it is a foreign word.

12

For some native English speakers, these “mistakes” are part of their dialect.

13

That’s the same reaction I have when my clients (I’m an immigration lawyer) say “he” when they mean “she”. I understand what they mean, but it does throw me for a moment.

14

When a native speaker hears someone mixing up masculine and feminine bits of his language, it is perfectly understandable, but it is similar to the OP’s example of “I is happy”.
It does not hinder comprehension, but it does affect your view of the person.
You can still carry on a conversation with the person, but you would not want that person to, say, be your lawyer, or make a sales presentation for your company.

[QUOTE=Senegoid;18121845.]
Hebrew has the added complexity that the written language doesn’t have vowels. You see the word, and you just know how to say it:confused:
[/QUOTE]

English has a similar problem. Try this exercise:

  1. Say out loud “mint, hint, tint, lint”.
  2. Now say “pint”.
    For a native, “you just know how to say it”. :confused: For a foreign speaker, it ain’t so easy-peasy.
15

To add to what has been said, in French, yes. However, native speakers do not make the same sort of mistakes non-native speakers do. Here are two lists, compiled by the government of Quebec:
Masculine nouns that are often mistakenly used in the feminine.
Feminine nouns that a are often mistakenly used in the masculine.

One of the things is that these lists are specific to Quebec. Some of the words in there are sometimes used in the wrong gender by some people there, but I have a hard time imagining a European speaker making the same mistake. So, dialect plays a role. (That said, there are a few words in those lists that are iffy. I’ve never, ever heard anybody mistakenly use “escalier” or “été” in the feminine, for instance.)

Beyond this, though, looking at the lists, it’s obvious that many of the words have “hidden” genders. In French, gender can be obscured by the plural. Take the word “rail,” for instance. It’s a word that’s almost never used in the singular, and almost never used with an adjective. It’s almost always, “des rails” or “les rails,” which could be masculine or feminine. The word is masculine, but it rhymes with other words that are feminine: “caille,” “maille,” “faille,” “paille,” etc. Hence, some native speakers do trip and say “une rail” instead of “un rail,” because it sounds “right.”

It’s this “sounds right” that non-native speakers have a hard time getting. Native speakers synthesise the concept of gender through exposure. As a result, we have an instinctive feeling for what gender an unknown word should be, even though the rules aren’t explicitly clear.

Of course, it wouldn’t be French without some rules that make no sense whatsoever. Why in heaven isn’t “mausolée” feminine, despite the very feminine silent “e”? “Amour” is masculine, no native speaker would get this wrong, and yet… “nos amours mortes” is perfectly correct.

If a native speaker makes these sorts of mistakes, it will indeed say something about them. If I hear someone say “je mange une sandwich,” I won’t think much about it – it’s relatively common usage in Quebec. If, on the other hand, I hear someone say “une grosse incendie,” I might be more likely to think they didn’t do so well in school. If, however, I hear “un beau mausolée,” I might be inclined to think I’m dealing with a pedant showing off.

16

Isn’t the OP asking specifically about adjectives not agreeing with the gender of the noun? Eg writing “Les vaches vert” instead of “Les vaches vertes”, and not pronouncing the ‘t’ accordingly? I can barely speak French and would seldom if ever notice that the wrong gender was used for the noun in speech, but when reading French I do notice instinctively if the adjective does not agree with the noun, and it does feel like when someone gets an apostrophe wrong in English.

17

There’s no other possible meaning to “getting the gender wrong,” though. Articles, nouns and adjectives must agree. It would be a very, very elementary mistake to say “le feuille blanche.” It would be a learner’s mistake to say: “le feuille blanc.” It would be a native speaker’s mistake to say: “la pétale blanche.”

18

Except that the OP doesn’t use the phrase “get the gender wrong”. They use the word “agreement” more than once, hence my question, which still stands.

19

There’s no difference. The only possible mistake you can make with regards to gender is one of agreement.

20

And “agreement” can cover a few different things - when I was learning French the word was almost invariably used to mean adjectives, not articles. This is why I was suggesting that the question might be more specific than the responders in this thread have realised. I might be wrong, but unless you’ve been in private communication with them, only the OP can confirm one way or the other.