31–40 of 258 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps “Weib” An outdated,today slightly pejorative, word for “Frau” But to me the term “das Fischerweib” doesn’t sound familiar either, so I am not sure
"Fischerweib" could work. Doesn't sound familiar to me either, but it's a valid compound word at least...
One of the Twain's famous examples that language is full of exceptions and hard to learn is that the word for girl is neuter. However, that shows that he didn't understand things all that well. Or the message was more important than the facts. While in general gender does indeed not follow much logic and needs to be learned by heart it's not true for this class of words. For derived words the gender is determined by…
This is logical: "Mädchen" is a diminutive (as the prefix -chen shows). Diminutives are always neuter.
"Mäd[g]dchen" thus simply means "little maid [Magd: maid]".
> Every noun has a gender, and there is no sense or system in distribution; so the gender of each must be learned separately and by heart. There is no other way. To do this one has to have a memory like a memorandum-book. And yet, every German speaker seems to be able to remember this, without evidence of them being better at memorization than others? As usual, it's easy to forget how hard things are for others when…
Could you tell something or give a link about that Swedish fourth gender? You made me interested when you wrote about it but I can't find anything about it on the Internet. E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_in_Danish_and_Swedish mentions only 3 genders, and says that in modern Swedish two of those have merged so now there are only 2?
In English, the indefinite article is either a/an, depending on the vowel sound of the noun. In Swedish it's either en/ett, depending on the gender. Examples:
en mus - a mouse
ett hus - a house
But the grammatical gender carries and modifies more things like the definite article (den/det) and every adjective.
den musen - that mouse
det huset - that house
en grå mus - a grey mouse
ett grått hus - a grey house
Unsurprisingly, there are many articles published about "The Awful English Language" , such as: [1], [2], [3] Some examples from [2]: Let's face it -- English is a crazy language. Besides the above, there is no egg in eggplant, nor ham in hamburger; neither apple nor pine in pineapple. English muffins weren't invented in England or French fries in France. Sweetmeats are candies while sweetbreads, which aren't sweet,…
They used to be round!
> Every noun has a gender, and there is no sense or system in distribution; so the gender of each must be learned separately and by heart. There is no other way. To do this one has to have a memory like a memorandum-book. And yet, every German speaker seems to be able to remember this, without evidence of them being better at memorization than others? As usual, it's easy to forget how hard things are for others when…
Could you tell something or give a link about that Swedish fourth gender? You made me interested when you wrote about it but I can't find anything about it on the Internet. E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_in_Danish_and_Swedish mentions only 3 genders, and says that in modern Swedish two of those have merged so now there are only 2?
> As a solution some feminists in Sweden have proposed to add a third class of gender-neutral pronouns for people.
Uh, no, we borrowed it straight up from our neighbours in Finland, because Finnish doesn't have gendered third-person pronouns!
As an added bonus, "hen" slots in perfectly among the other two pronouns (han/hon), it follows broad vowel rules for gender, and it's perfectly understandable even if you've never seen the word used before.
One of the Twain's famous examples that language is full of exceptions and hard to learn is that the word for girl is neuter. However, that shows that he didn't understand things all that well. Or the message was more important than the facts. While in general gender does indeed not follow much logic and needs to be learned by heart it's not true for this class of words. For derived words the gender is determined by…
I think your argument is somewhat invalidated by your last sentence: the world for girl is generally seen as a standalone word, and so it seems odd. Of course there is reason why is it so, but that is true for all oddities in every language: they made sense originally but as the new thing became the norm the origin of it is lost.
That’s the thing: language also change the way you see things. Native English people might find it strange for the reason you mention, but German people can find it normal, because it is a diminutive following the usual rules. It is not a “standalone word”: it is a root and a suffix.
It is not an oddity at all within the framework of the language (which has its share of irregularities already).
This has always been a favorite. I also enjoyed this one about Chinese, which my wife sent me recently: http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html
> Every noun has a gender, and there is no sense or system in distribution; so the gender of each must be learned separately and by heart. There is no other way. To do this one has to have a memory like a memorandum-book. And yet, every German speaker seems to be able to remember this, without evidence of them being better at memorization than others? As usual, it's easy to forget how hard things are for others when…
Exactly. You most often cannot guess the gender of a noun in quite a lot of languages (German, Spanish, French, etc), but most of the time you also cannot guess how an English word is pronounced without having heard it before (and made the connection with the spelling, which is sometimes very tricky).