361–370 of 377 posts
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Hardly. See https://la.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaius_Iulius_Caesar
Latin wikipedia isn't exactly an ancient source. Without bothering to read the article, why do you think it has a subhead of "Fontes_de_vita_C._Iulii_Caesaris_praecipui"?
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Latin wikipedia isn't exactly an ancient source. Without bothering to read the article, why do you think it has a subhead of "Fontes_de_vita_C._Iulii_Caesaris_praecipui"?
I'll take this cum cranulo salis.
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I'll take this cum cranulo salis.
You think "cum granulo salis" is evidence for G being an original part of the Latin alphabet, while not being evidence that U was an original part of the Latin alphabet?
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You think "cum granulo salis" is evidence for G being an original part of the Latin alphabet, while not being evidence that U was an original part of the Latin alphabet?
Sure, G wasn't "originally" part of the Latin alphabet—until they invented that letter.
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I speak two languages with gendered nouns, and I didn't find much specific usefulness for it. It's just something that is part of the package, so you go with it, and you can claim that provides more rich texture or such (though I'm not sure why knowing "table" is "male" and "government" is "female" really has any meaning, but maybe poets have one more tool to play with), but I'm not really sure it's that useful outsi…
Just out of curiosity, which language are your examples from? I'm asking because my native language is Serbian and it also features "male" tables and "female" government.
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I think those is more like ram/ewe, just words to signify specific objects having gender. But words themselves don't have grammatical gender, not like in Russian and German, where every noun is gendered and all (well, most) adjectives/verbs/etc. have to be modified to fit the gender of the noun. Presents tons of problems for localization, because a) you have to have 3 separate ways of saying the same and b) you can n…
I assume Russian and German are like French and Spanish, where the standard practice is just to use the masculine version if the gender is unknown.
Some words are kind of gender-fluid too. E.g. a word meaning "hall" was female and neuter in past centuries, and now is male. The word for "coffee" is male in formal/educated speech and neuter is less-educated but (to my despair) rapidly gaining legitimacy speech. Russian is fun :)
For things like the user, you can always assume male, but as with other such assumptions, some people may object to it. In some cases, there is a built-in assumption that male includes female when gender is unknown, but in others it just means male and that's it.
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What do you think makes G different from J and U in that regard?
Timing. Where do you think G slots in the timeline, relative to the Latin classics?
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Well, ok. I'm not a native English speaker, so I suppose "rather" wasn't the right word. Maybe "notably different"?
"Rather" appears to be a fine word choice for your intended meaning. I'm objecting to your intended meaning (as far as I can perceive it): - [θ] and [ð] are objectively similar sounds, differing only in voicing. - The argument is not even very good that /θ/ and /ð/ are different phonemes in English -- they contrast only in the pair of words teeth/teethe, and one of those words is fairly rare. If you, as a foreign spe…
The variations around "th" is one of the things I remember finding particularly difficult when learning English pronounciation, so my comment came from there.
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Der Nutella-Brotaufstrich. Two can play this game. There is no sane answer. Except for rules of thumbs like "Romance-sounding word ending in -a is probably female".
My point is that, whenever you want to use a brand name like "Nutella" in a specific context and you're unsure about the gender, you can just use a compound word with a clearly defined gender instead.
On a semi-related note: in the Rhineland gendered articles are also used colloquially when talking about people: "Der Mark", "Die Steffi" and so on. I was born into this but I'm unsure how I feel about it after finding out it's actually non-standard in the rest of Germany.