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Post by juju on Nov 17, 2015 22:11:54 GMT
For those of you whose first language isn't English, do you think it's weird that English doesn't have gendered nouns?
When learning another language I found the hardest thing was guessing the gender of inanimate objects - it all seems so random. Why is a telephone male but a television female?
Do you think it changes the way you see the world when you refer to things as either male or female?
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Post by JoeP on Nov 17, 2015 22:52:34 GMT
Finnish doesn't even have gendered pronouns. Ie there's no distinction between he and she. he = hän she = hän
(It does however have loads of variant forms. Including at least hänen häntä hänet hänessä hänestä häneen hänellä häneltä hänelle hänettä hänenä häneksi.)
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Post by jayme on Nov 17, 2015 23:22:46 GMT
*is suddenly glad they don't teach Finnish in school here*
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Post by tangent on Nov 18, 2015 1:19:34 GMT
Finnish doesn't even have gendered pronouns. Ie there's no distinction between he and she. he = hän she = hän (It does however have loads of variant forms. Including at least hänen häntä hänet hänessä hänestä häneen hänellä häneltä hänelle hänettä hänenä häneksi.) Kiitos I have now exhausted my knowledge of Finnish prior to this post.
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Post by Miisa on Nov 18, 2015 6:40:10 GMT
For the record, I have never, IIRC, used "hänettä".
I am pretty sure gendered pronouns influence how one thinks about things, even just from always having to know what gender someone is, when Finns don't care as much, or at all. I would imagine that gendered nouns would also colour your categorisation of the world, maybe even more.
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Post by Moose on Nov 18, 2015 21:14:49 GMT
Yes I remember Antti sometimes saying 'he' to refer to a woman and vice versa.
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Post by Alvamiga on Nov 19, 2015 9:18:05 GMT
The thing I find most baffling is using gendered pronouns for things that have a specific gender which is not the same as the designated one.
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Post by Kye on Nov 19, 2015 9:45:56 GMT
Like in French: un vagin!
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Post by Moose on Nov 19, 2015 18:12:13 GMT
lol I assume I can figure out what that means
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Post by Alvamiga on Nov 20, 2015 9:22:21 GMT
Heh! Didn't mean words like that, I meant, for example, animals, where they can have either gender, based on the specific animal, yet you still use the gender of the word, not the individual.
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Post by Sarah W. on Nov 20, 2015 15:20:02 GMT
This reminds me of The Awful German Language, by Mark Twain, which I'd highly recommend to anyone who likes a good laugh. I especially love the part called "The Tale of the Fishwife and its Sad Fate".
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Post by spaceflower on Nov 21, 2015 0:42:42 GMT
About pronouns, in Chinese they say the same about man, woman, animal, thing etc. "ta". Though they are spelt differently. The radical for "he-ta" is "man/human being", the radical for "she-ta" is "woman" and the radical for "it-ta" I have forgotten. But when people talk, the context tells what it is. Though therefore Chinese too mix up he/she.
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Post by Moose on Nov 26, 2015 0:35:43 GMT
Do you speak Chinese Spaceflower?
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Post by Mari on Nov 28, 2015 8:15:34 GMT
Neither Dutch nor Japanese is gendered. Dutch used to be, technically. We had a male the and female the. Female was for abstract things and ideas, male was for everything else. It was written the same so the difference was a technicality.
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Post by tangent on Nov 28, 2015 18:37:38 GMT
If it was written the same, how could it have been different? Was it pronounced differently?
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Post by Deleted on Nov 30, 2015 7:29:55 GMT
Frank has a lot of problems with the German gendered words. Things are either "der" (male), "die" (female) or "das" and there is not logic to it whatsoever. For example, a knife is "das", a fork "die" and a spoon "der". Frank doesn't bother trying which I can understand because it seems impossible to learn.
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Post by Miisa on Nov 30, 2015 16:34:30 GMT
Swedish also has two, though not really "gendered" as they don't refer to male or female, but still as illogial and you just have to learn them when you learn the word, as in "en stol" (a chair) and "ett bord" (a table).
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Post by spaceflower on Nov 30, 2015 23:20:41 GMT
Do you speak Chinese Spaceflower? No, that would be a huge exaggeration. But I've studied Chinese a long time ago.
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Post by spaceflower on Nov 30, 2015 23:41:05 GMT
Swedish also has two, though not really "gendered" as they don't refer to male or female, but still as illogial and you just have to learn them when you learn the word, as in "en stol" (a chair) and "ett bord" (a table). Things that now seem illogical usually have historical reasons. Before there were three genders, masculine, feminine and neutrum (det). Just like in German. For instance, "klocka" (clock, watch) was feminine, "åker" (field) was masculine but "skepp" (ship) was neutral. But then all nouns which had not clearly feminine of masculine meaning, changed to utrum gender, "den". So "det-"words" were always neutral (neutrum words), "den"-words were once feminine or masculine. You say "ett" for neutrum words, but "en" for feminine, masculine and utrum words. And there is no way to know this, you just have to learn the gender of the words by heart.
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