• Xusontha@ls.buckodr.ink
    99·
    9 months ago

    If you read read as read and not read, you have to re-read read as read so you can read read correctly so it can then make sense

        • max_adam@lemm.ee
          4·
          9 months ago

          And the people that try to force it by replacing the el/ella(ellos/ellas) with Elle(Elles), and for gendered words the a/o at the end of words with the letter E

      • leftzero@lemmy.ml
        324·
        9 months ago

        Grammatical gender ≠ biological gender ≠ gender identity. 🤷‍♂️

          • Gabu@lemmy.world
            166·
            9 months ago

            It does, but I think you don’t understand what grammatical gender is.

              • Gabu@lemmy.world
                192·
                9 months ago

                Grammatical gender has nothing to do with social gender, it’s just a simple way to communicate that there are classes of words which belong together. Some languages have gender pairs (e.g. Masculine and Feminine words), and some languages have more genders (e.g. Latin’s Masculine, Feminine and Neutral). Some others yet have a mix of genders still in use and active, still in use exclusively for historical reasons, and completely unused (e.g. Portuguese has active use of Masculine/Feminine, but Neutral gender is only present as an inherited holdover.).

                That’s why @leftzero did answer the question - insofar as to state the question was incomplete to begin with. What does it mean to “deal with non-binaries” when a language isn’t binary in its gender?

                As a curiosity, the Portuguese word for “a person” is always feminine (“uma pessoa”), but for “a citizen” can be either masculine or feminine (“uma cidadã”/“um cidadão”). This is very common, and greatly illustrates how grammatical gender is largely disconnected from social gender. For an example on neutral gender, “president” takes a gendered article but is never masculine nor feminine (“um/uma presidente”).

            • BlanketsWithSmallpox@lemmy.world
              84·
              9 months ago

              I love how you had negative karma because people want to use linguistics as some jab against how inclusive you are rather than just understand gendered language. Surprisingly LatinX is still gaining popularity!

              Even better is people asking the difference when you’re essentially asking for a doctorate thesis in etymological linguistics in a comment on Lemmy lol.

              For some very light reading:

              https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_type_of_grammatical_genders

      • Knusper@feddit.de
        101·
        9 months ago

        Gendered languages can also have a neutral gender. For example, in German masculine/feminine/neutral ‘the’ is: der/die/das

        But yeah, as others said, these don’t have much to do with the gender identity. For example:

        • the person → die Person (feminine)
        • the girl → das Mädchen (objectifying women neutral)
      • KSP Atlas@sopuli.xyz
        2·
        9 months ago

        In polish i havent really heard of a specific way, while polish has a neutral gender, it doesn’t feel like it makes sense with people, same way you don’t call NB people “it” in english, “ona była miła” (she was kind) feels better than “ono biło miłe” (it was kind)

    • Gabu@lemmy.world
      41·
      9 months ago

      Word classes become really obvious really quickly, despite being largely impossible to communicate as an understandable rule during teaching. I.e. the more you speak a gendered language, the easier it becomes to get the gender of a word right, even if you were never exposed to said word before.

    • Kalothar@lemmy.ca
      8·
      9 months ago

      I mean we kind of get it, but i would guess it would be no more than a native Italian speaker understanding how to use irregular verbs and all their tenses properly.

      Source: am learning Italian, get wildly confused every now and then haha.

    • captainlezbian@lemmy.worldEnglish
      26·
      9 months ago

      “Do you even follow the rules”

      “No but if you break them in a way that doesn’t feel intentional we’ll laugh at you”

    • hstde@feddit.de
      16·
      9 months ago

      “Well take the rules of all the languages of the ones that conquered England and you get a pretty good idea. Oh and drop the grammatical gender, we don’t do that anymore.”

  • leftzero@lemmy.ml
    38·
    9 months ago

    It’s easier to understand when you look at English history and realize that English is essentially three different languages (old Saxon, Norse, and Norman) badly put together (a great example of this being meats having different names than the animals they come from, since the people farming said animals spoke Saxon, but the people eating them spoke Norman), with plenty of Latin, Greek, French, and other languages sprinkled on top, all written with a limited alphabet that’s incapable of properly reflecting the pronunciation of those languages’ words.

    It doesn’t help, though ,that at some point the English alphabet got simplified with things like ō becoming things like oo, without taking into account that things like oo were already being used to represent different sounds, or that at one point over a period of a few decades in the middle ages for some reason all English speakers seemed to decide to randomly switch around the pronunciation of all their vowels without changing how they wrote them (!?), or that, while all languages borrow words from others, unlike most others English for some reason doesn’t bother to adapt their orthography or grammar (a French or Catalan speaker will have no problem understanding why façade is written like that and pronounced fassade instead of fackade, for instance, but I’m sure most English speakers won’t be so lucky, especially if they write it facade… and then you’ve got things like fiancé, or the plural of radius being radii, and so on)… and you end up with the oos in book, blood, door, and boot all being pronounced differently… and, for some reason (probably the borrowing one), the one in brooch being pronounced a particular fifth different way… 🤷‍♂️

    • MrScottyTay@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      5·
      9 months ago

      Book and blood have the same oo’s for me by the way. I’m from the north east. But I understand southerners will say book differently. So not only is everything you said is true we also have a crazy amount of local differences across the country with very short distances between them at times.

      • KSP Atlas@sopuli.xyz
        1·
        9 months ago

        I tried seeing how id pronounce it if they were the same and i feel like it was roughly /ɜ/, what is it for you

      • wieson@lemmy.world
        8·
        9 months ago

        Norse is old Norwegian/Danish kinda.

        Norman is old French.

        The Normans were northmen (aka Scandinavians) that were allowed to settle in the Normandy (north west France). (They were the ruling class, the inhabitants from before continued to live there).They then adopted the French language.

    • Ben Matthews@sopuli.xyz
      2·
      9 months ago

      I explain to people here that - in modern terms - it’s mixture of french, dutch, and welsh - you forgot the celtic /gaelic root (whatever you want to call it).

      • leftzero@lemmy.ml
        1·
        9 months ago

        Yeah, I sort of forgot the Angle part of Anglo-Saxon, didn’t I…?

        (Plus, there was probably quite a bit of Latin already there before the Norse and the Norman, at least south of Hadrian’s wall, though far from enough to make Old English a Romance language… all in all English has a very complex history.)

  • Pantherina@feddit.de
    22·
    9 months ago

    touch and though really show the fucking weirdness of English best.

    I hate that its the world language. Where did Esperanto go. Its an actually made up language, composed or many ones, easy to learn.

    Language sucks. The history of English, German, damn Norwegian, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, are all so damn weird. And we literally live a few days by bike apart from each other.

    Why do there need to be multiple languages really? Its such a barrier.

    If everyone would just learn esperanto, we could focus on learning something actually useful, like signing (gesture language). Then we have two languages we can talk with about everyone in the world.

    • Longpork_afficianado@lemmy.nz
      152·
      9 months ago

      Everyone learning esperanto is a bigger ask than overhauling the spelling of what is already an internationally spoken language.

      • Gabu@lemmy.world
        96·
        9 months ago

        It really isn’t. You’re thinking about it as an anglophone, but everybody else already has to go through the effort of learning a new language - it doesn’t matter if it’s English or Esperanto. The real issue is in porting over everything to a completely different set of rules.

        • Longpork_afficianado@lemmy.nz
          121·
          9 months ago

          If no-one spoke english as a second language right now, that would be true. As it stands though, hundreds of millions have already learned english, and our global communications and trade infrastructure is based around it. Switching to a new language would mean everyone who currently speaks english needs to learn an additional language.

          If we could start from scratch then a constructed language like esperanto would make more sense than using any natural language, but if we want to make a change to the system that already exists, then reforming the spelling and grammar of the language currently in use makes more sense practically.

          • Pantherina@feddit.de
            41·
            9 months ago

            Fixing english is not possible.

            German could be fixed, just remove pronouns and all the stupid rules that make no sense.

            But english makes no sense, half the words would need to be pronounced differently.

    • Ben Matthews@sopuli.xyz
      2·
      9 months ago

      Esperanto’s nice but a century old and reflects some biases of that time. If advocating auxlangs, I’d prefer one that aims for a more global balance of vocabulary sources, for example Lidepla, Globasa…

    • TurtleTourPartyEnglish
      2·
      9 months ago

      Banquet is not nearly parquet, Which exactly rhymes with khaki.

      These words do not rhyme in American English (par-kay and kak-ee). Which makes things even more challenging for English learners.

      • aksdb@feddit.de
        1·
        9 months ago

        Aber auch nur, wenn man sauber Hochdeutsch spricht.

        Auch lustig für Fremdsprachler: “für sich” und “Pfirsich”