What are some pros and cons of languages? (1 Viewer)

Ahsoka · 17 November 2024

velvet said:
Latin doesn't use word order, so in poetry and prose the words are all jumbled up. Gender markers make it wayyyyyyyy easier to tell if an adjective is substantive (basically a noun meaning in an adjective; 'boni' indicates nominative masc. plural so it means 'the good men') or attributive (adds to an existing noun). If there was no gender in Latin and everything else stayed the same then the poetry would be a big mess.

Does the differentiation of masculine vs feminine need to exist for that? Can’t you have an ending for nominative, another for accusative, and so on? To me it really just sounds like you’re saying that cases are useful, but cases and gender are different. For example, Korean adds 가, 이, or 께세 as their equivalent of the nominative case. The first two are separated just by what the last sound is, and the last is for politeness. None of it is gendered, but just as functional as a gendered Russian or Latin equivalent from what I see. As a Russian speaker, I definitely see no benefit of gendering cases, as long as the cases themselves are used, which for me means that Russian gendering doesn’t play any additional benefit not covered by the case system.

velvet · 17 November 2024

Ahsoka said:
Does the differentiation of masculine vs feminine need to exist for that? Can’t you have an ending for nominative, another for accusative, and so on? To me it really just sounds like you’re saying that cases are useful, but cases and gender are different. For example, Korean adds 가, 이, or 께세 as their equivalent of the nominative case. The first two are separated just by what the last sound is, and the last is for politeness. None of it is gendered, but just as functional as a gendered Russian or Latin equivalent from what I see. As a Russian speaker, I definitely see no benefit of gendering cases, as long as the cases themselves are used, which for me means that Russian gendering doesn’t play any additional benefit not covered by the case system.

Honestly, yes, especially the substantives that differs men and women, boni and bonae means two different things despite being the same (nom.) case and plural. Besides, if we lose gender, we lose meaning on words. dies in masc means a normal day whilst the feminine form means a festival day. Gender does matter and if people really wanted to stop using them they would.

Ahsoka · 17 November 2024

velvet said:
Honestly, yes, especially the substantives that differs men and women, boni and bonae means two different things despite being the same (nom.) case and plural. Besides, if we lose gender, we lose meaning on words. dies in masc means a normal day whilst the feminine form means a festival day. Gender does matter and if people really wanted to stop using them they would.

I don’t know Latin, so I can’t really disagree whether it has a difference in Latin specifically. From the gendered languages I have any knowledge of (Russian, Spanish, French, German) gender for inanimate objects is completely pointless from what I see. And some languages did lose gender, either completely or partially). There’s even a form of Russian in Alaska where gender only matters for living things, while anything non living is automatically masculine, as an example of a language that became gendered, but not like Latin or Spanish. And even in countries where gendered language is deeply rooted, there are people debating whether it’s a better idea to tend towards non gendered language in this day and time. But it also means that they have to massively alter the whole grammar structure, which is not easy at all. So just changing languages to not be gendered isn’t as simple as just wanting it, especially when you speak that language natively and have had a very long time to learn the genders of everything. But I still don’t see the purpose of gender in any gendered language I know anything about, aside from maybe art, but it’s also not required. English as an example of a language that lost its gender over time and can still create artwork praised worldwide with no issue. So gender as a concept of existing in languages overall seems to be often pointless, aside from maybe some exceptions, more specifically in indo European language.

velvet · 17 November 2024

Ahsoka said:
I don’t know Latin, so I can’t really disagree whether it has a difference in Latin specifically. From the gendered languages I have any knowledge of (Russian, Spanish, French, German) gender for inanimate objects is completely pointless from what I see. And some languages did lose gender, either completely or partially). There’s even a form of Russian in Alaska where gender only matters for living things, while anything non living is automatically masculine, as an example of a language that became gendered, but not like Latin or Spanish. And even in countries where gendered language is deeply rooted, there are people debating whether it’s a better idea to tend towards non gendered language in this day and time. But it also means that they have to massively alter the whole grammar structure, which is not easy at all. So just changing languages to not be gendered isn’t as simple as just wanting it, especially when you speak that language natively and have had a very long time to learn the genders of everything. But I still don’t see the purpose of gender in any gendered language I know anything about, aside from maybe art, but it’s also not required. English as an example of a language that lost its gender over time and can still create artwork praised worldwide with no issue. So gender as a concept of existing in languages overall seems to be often pointless, aside from maybe some exceptions, more specifically in indo European language.

I think we agree on the fact that gender can be dropped. But it's only going to be dropped when enough people agree to drop it. I still think gender makes things easier to read and listen to especially if there's no order and studying Latin has made me like the idea of grammatical gender since Cicero does not make things easy lol. They're just categories, nothing more nothing less.