General Language Thread

There's also "on". Does that count as neutral?

In French? Yes, it is neutral,

"On" has several functions − impersonal third person pronoun, plural first person pronoun in casual speech, or a sarcastic replacement for the second person in some cases − but in its first function it’s gender-neutral yes, which translates to masculine accords. Though I’ve noticed that "tu" is increasingly used as the impersonal pronoun these days, like in English.

As for "iel"… I have no idea. >.> I suppose you keep neutral masculine accords?

It’s interesting, but I wonder where that comes from. Is there a historical reason Arabic needs to specify we’re talking about 2 people or things specifically, and not 3 or 4?

Edited by Lyendith on Mar 29th 2023 at 4:23:09 PM

Most of the ancient languages had a dual pronoun at some point apparently (Including English) but most of the languages lose it with time and keep only the singular and plural.

Classical Arabic and Hebrew are among the few that still use it, I suspect this is due to the religious texts (Like the Quran) that help this archaic forms survive to this day.

As for why it was used in the first place, it is is that it served to describe things that come in pairs in the human body (eyes, lips, nostrils, ears, arms...etc.).But I am not an expert.

The other Wiki has an article about the languages that still use the dual form.

English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_(grammatical_number)

French https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duel_(grammaire)

The problem with a language like French is that you can't simply swap out a pronoun for a neutral one, because the noun and verb endings still contain that information. You'd need a neutral word ending as well, which would be a much bigger change.

And that's quite a tall order, because pronouns are among the least changeable parts of a language. They tend to be very stable over time, which is why it makes sense to create a new pronoun that preferably already fits in the existing grammatical structure, or else keeps things simple, so that it is easier to absorb in daily use.

In today’s episode of "gender issues", when translating How to Keep a Mummy, I spent several chapters calling a character "she" (because of a misleading comment from one of the characters) before the text clarified that he was a little boy… 14 chapters later, forcing me to go back and change all the pronouns. Thankfully the translated chapters hadn’t come out yet.

Though I suspect the author changed his mind midway through, it’s just that it’s a lot easier to keep gender unspecified in Japanese, even unconsciously.

Edited by Lyendith on Apr 15th 2023 at 8:56:03 PM

Yeah, I had something like that happen to me too. Sometimes it is just a matter of awkward writing.

Have you seen some attribute of a certain language that you feel it is kind of standard but you find it weird that it is absent in another language?

For example, to me, I find it so weird that English doesn't distinguish between you in singular and plural. Things on how language evolves, but I have always found that weird since all languages I have some passing knowledge of makes that distinction.

I've always found gendered pronouns weird. Like, why do we need different pronouns for different gendered people or objects?

I always found languages that do not rely on "Subject-Verb-Object" word order hard to wrap my head around.

Edited by DeMarquis on Apr 19th 2023 at 11:04:14 AM

Maybe young people are doing the opposite question that you do: Why we have gendered pronouns in the first place?

This is goes double for languages like Spanish and Portuguese, which took many of their grammar from Arabic, a language that really enforce this.

Edited by luisedgarf on Apr 19th 2023 at 10:05:09 AM

You mean like "the ball was kicked by the boy", with the order being Object-Verb-Subject?

I agree, as my native language does not have gendered pronouns, and the pronoun 'she/her' was coined when people started translating western books.

My native language's word order is subject-object-verb, so "the boy the ball kicked"

Object-subject-verb aka "The ball by the boy was kicked" seems to be the rarest order, followed by Obect-verb-subject aka "The ball was kicked by the boy".

No, that would be more properly "The ball kicks the boy".

And, come on guys, having gendered pronouns for the two major groupings of human beings, males and females, isn't that weird to have.

Edited by Redmess on Apr 20th 2023 at 12:50:07 PM

Unless you are German where every native speaker just knows the genus of a word by intuition alone and can't formulate universal rules for the poor souls who try to learn the language.

It also creates cyclic problems like a word's gender can be deducted by its pronunciation, but how a word is pronounced depends on it's gender, so you will have to remember at least one when learning any new word.

As a German I find it weird that no other language capitalizes its nouns.

Yeah, that one seems very specific to German. Not even Dutch does it.

I remember reading an edition (or was a study excerpt?) of Robinson Crusoe where the nouns were capitalized… Never saw that with any other English text though.

As for strange features, I wonder if any other language has a specific word for "counter-negations"?

"T’as fait la vaisselle ?" (Did you do the dishes?)
"Oui." (Yes.)

"T’as pas fait la vaisselle." (You didn’t do the dishes.)
"Si." (Yes I did.)

I never heard of "Si" in French.

And some authors use capitalization for effect, though it isn't needed grammatically. That's just authorial flair, basically.

Sounds like the stereotypical Victorian (?) Emphasize EVERYTHING 'start essentially anything even mildly important with a capital letter' trope in (like I said, typically older, Victorian style (?)) English writing.

Not sure about other non-German European languages, but English did capitalise its nouns when the moveable type first arrived from continental Europe at the turn of the 17th century. It fell out of style towards the end of the 18th century, though IIRC it stuck around for a while longer in the US.

This was also around the time that European languages standardised their decimal separators, by the way. For centuries, there was no standard way of writing down decimals in Afro-Eurasia, and everyone who wrote down a math treatise basically wrote their decimals in their own way. Then in the 1660s, two European mathematicians invented integral calculus independently of one another: Isaac Newton in England and Gottfried Leibniz in Saxony. Newton used the point (.) as his decimal separator and the comma (,) as his thousand separator, while Leibniz did it the other way around. Continental treatises and textbooks adopted Leibniz's notation, while the ones across the British Isles adopted Newton's, and the two styles later spread to the parts of the world colonised or otherwise influenced by various European nations.

And speaking of the lack T-V distinction and other ways that English diverged from other Germanic languages: I learned recently that Middle English used the familiar Germanic word haye for the shark, which was also referred to as the dogfish. The term "shark" apparently originated from the Dutch schurk (scoundrel) and was used in that context (think "landshark") before adopting its present meaning.

Classical Arabic has one: بلى

Edited by jawal on Apr 20th 2023 at 2:08:58 PM

The Dutch word for shark is also "haai".

"No, that would be more properly "The ball kicks the boy"."

Right, except that the people who say it that way are not imagining a ball kicking a boy, they are imagining a boy kicking a ball, even as they say it the other way around.

And yes, I'm aware that the word order is completely arbitrary.

You can also use Verb-subject-object as -again- classical and Biblical Hebrew. (modern Hebrew is generally Subject-Verb-Object like English).

Edited by jawal on Apr 20th 2023 at 3:07:04 PM