Why do some languages use gendered nouns? It seems to just add more complexity for no benefit.
It probably seems extra complexity for you, if your language does not use it. For native speakers it is just natural and not using it would be at least weird.
We could ask the same question about articles . Those 'the' and 'a', why use them? It only makes English language harder to use! 'Apple is apple' why add another meaningless word?
Of course after learning and using English for years I see the meaning of 'a' and 'the' and thy feel quite natural for me to (though sometimes they still make little sense to me – all the fights whether 'The' can be used with some proper name or not). The point is: a lot of features of a foreign language will fill alien and unnecessary.
Maybe more on topic, that is how/why gendered words work in Polish: noun gender is usually linked to how it ends (but do not confuse that with suffixes of grammatical cases). Virtually all Polish women names end with 'a', so any other noun ending in 'a' sounds feminine and would be used in similar way. And sometimes it just 'rhymes' – like in 'to jabkło' ('this apple' – neuter), 'ta gruszka' ('this pear' – feminine), 'ten banan' ('this banana' – masculine). Of course thing get much more complicated than that (like in every language, just in different parts of the language).
People were just talking in the way that it was convenient for them. And thousands years later scholars called this feature of particular set of languages 'gender' because words used seem to be related to genders.
Droggelbecher@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Because languages aren’t constructed, they ‘evolved’ naturally from humans communicating with one another for many generations. As such, they aren’t intended to be as simple as possible. They aren’t intended in the first place. They’ve grown over time with no regard for whether the rules makes sense because nobody designed those rules, they just happened.
TheGreenGolem@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 months ago
Okay, thank you. Anyway: is here somebody who actually knows WHY this happened? What was the underlying cause for our ansestors to start using it? What were they trying to achieve or solve? (UNINTENTIONALLY, okay, we got it.)
gigachad@feddit.de 8 months ago
I’m just speculating, but I could imagine they personfied objects and maybe transfered gender to objects that way?
aesc@lemmy.sdf.org 8 months ago
We don’t have a lot of records of what speakers of the Proto-Indo-European language were thinking because they lived c. 4500-2500 BC and didn’t have their own writing. I think the for the earliest writing we have of an Indo-European language gendered nouns had already been invented.
CoggyMcFee@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I can say that having gendered nouns does add a little bit more information to communication. Like if we are talking about a man and a woman and we’re using pronouns, then “he spoke to her” is unambiguous as to who is doing what. Likewise, if all nouns have a gender, you encounter more situations where the gender adds some extra context and leads to marginally less ambiguity. So if you’re at a bakery and there are two adjacent items behind the counter, one with masculine gender and one with feminine gender, and you point and say “can I have her please”, there is no need for the baker to ask if you mean this one or that one, they know based on gender.
Not saying this makes gender “worth it”, but in an emergent system, small things like this might have given it enough of a foothold to exist.
Diplomjodler3@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Being able to communicate complex concepts made it easier for them to work together. Once the hominids became apex predators, their main adversaries were other hominids. Again, in that case, the better you can communicate, the better your chances for survival are.
snooggums@midwest.social 8 months ago
Most things humans do are to solve things, but how they do that is a mix of trying to solve the thing and humans just latching on to random stuff and it sticking around. Especially when it comes to language.
jeena@jemmy.jeena.net 8 months ago
Esperanto is designed, and so is C++.
Droggelbecher@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I thought this was a discussion about languages people speak.
Esperanto is an interesting case though but it wasn’t designed to be as simple as a language can be (since that is highly subjective). It was designed to have as many similarities as possible to major European language in order to make it easier for speakers of those European languages to learn.
Hyperreality@kbin.social 8 months ago
How do you say "I'm very lonely" in C++?
qaz@lemmy.world 8 months ago
C++ is perhaps a great example of a language that has evolved over time without people putting a lot thought in it.
ccunning@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Got ‘em!