illogicality and languages

Guest   Wed Feb 13, 2008 5:23 pm GMT
<<Since when gender is an illogical thing? >>

Why is it a logical thing to classify nouns into genders or whatever. Why not classify verbs the same way. For example, you could have:

- verbs of existence or association (be, exist, consist of, etc.)
- verbs of motion (come, go, etc.)
- verbs for state changes (become, change, melt, etc.)
- verbs of happening (occur, happen, take place, etc.)
- verbs of transaction (give, take, transfer, etc.)
- etc., etc.

You could then inflect adverbs and perhaps prepositions to agree with the class of the modified verb. This all seems unnecessary (and illogical) to me. I suppose many languages already have this feature.
Guest   Wed Feb 13, 2008 5:59 pm GMT
<<It's too bad English didn't get rid the that funny 's' ending when it had the chance. I think it'd be much nicer if every word in English were completely uninflected. In other words, no plurals, no verb endings, no -er, -est on adjectives, no inflected verb tenses, no 's for possessives, etc. Why have something like 'sink', 'sank', 'sunk', 'sunken' to indicate tense, when we can get along just fine with the (irregular) verb 'set', 'set', 'set'. Apparently, there's no real need for inflected tenses in English. >>

I hope this is satirical.

<It's too bad English didn't get rid the that funny 's' ending when it had the chance.>
When did it ever have the chance? WHat are you TAlking about?

<Why have something like 'sink', 'sank', 'sunk', 'sunken' to indicate tense, when we can get along just fine with the (irregular) verb 'set', 'set', 'set'.>
Oh, "the boat sink" --that real nice. Tell me what that sentence mean?
Guest   Wed Feb 13, 2008 6:05 pm GMT
English DOES have grammatical gender:

Masculine Nouns--
man
father
brother
son
all nouns referred to as "he"

Feminine Nouns--
mother
woman
sister
aunt
all nouns referred to as "she"

Neuter Nouns--
all nouns referred to as "it"

Just because English doesn't have separate forms for "the"--actually, wait a minute--check this out:

Masculine--
the

Feminine--
the

Neuter--
the

Plural (all genders)--
the

There. Satisfied?
Guest   Wed Feb 13, 2008 6:07 pm GMT
...cont.

I know this isn't the definition of "grammatical" gender, but where does it state that grammatical gender has to show disctinctly different forms? What if all forms coalesce into a single form?
Guest   Wed Feb 13, 2008 6:08 pm GMT
The role of grammatical genders is that articles and adjectives must agree with the gender of the noun . Since "the" and adjectives don't change, English lacks grammatical genders.
Guest   Wed Feb 13, 2008 6:13 pm GMT
<<When did it ever have the chance? WHat are you TAlking about?>>

When they got rid of -en (or whatever it was on the 3rd person plural) and adopted '-s' rather than '-eth' for the singular, they could just as easily have dropped the '-eth' and '-s' altogether.

Actually, they could have dropped the -s at any point during the process of simplifying the Old English grammar.
Guest   Wed Feb 13, 2008 6:17 pm GMT
<<I know this isn't the definition of "grammatical" gender, but where does it state that grammatical gender has to show disctinctly different forms? What if all forms coalesce into a single form? >>

Using this argument, you could say that English still has the dual number, and the dual and plural forms are identical in all cases.
Guest   Wed Feb 13, 2008 6:28 pm GMT
<<Oh, "the boat sink" --that real nice. Tell me what that sentence mean? >>

It's probably the past tense in that sentence.

How about:

"Saturday, they set the table at 5PM." (presumably past tense)

"[On] Saturdays, they set the table at 5PM." (presumably present tense)
guest   Wed Feb 13, 2008 6:30 pm GMT
<<When they got rid of -en (or whatever it was on the 3rd person plural) and adopted '-s' rather than '-eth' for the singular, they could just as easily have dropped the '-eth' and '-s' altogether. >>

-en weakened to -e, and then remained a feature of spelling after final -e ceased to be pronounced. It was dropped altogether when unneeded to affect pronunciation (it remains in words like "fare", "take" because it affects the letter "a")

-s was not adopted in favor of -eth.
Both forms existed in Old English: -es in the Northern dialects, and -(e)th in the Southern. -es is related to the Scandinavian -er ending of present indicative verbs (Jag har, hann komer), also an extension of their third person singular.

In Shakespeare's time, both forms existed side by side, with -(e)s finally winning out. No adoption occurred. -es is easier to pronounce than -eth and -s sometimes doesn't require an extra syllable.

<Using this argument, you could say that English still has the dual number, and the dual and plural forms are identical in all cases. >

It does, as does all languages.
The problem here is semantics. We seem to be confusing concepts with forms. For instance, English still has a dative case, however, it just doesn't have a *distinct form* indicating a dative case. Does this then mean that the dative case no longer exists in Modern English? Heck No. "I gave *dad* the book" --"dad" is dative. Now, does it differ in form from nominative "dad" as in "Dad is great"--No.
guest   Wed Feb 13, 2008 6:33 pm GMT
<<When they got rid of -en (or whatever it was on the 3rd person plural) and adopted '-s' rather than '-eth' for the singular, they could just as easily have dropped the '-eth' and '-s' altogether.
>>

You make it sound like some group of people got together and decided 'from now on, we're not gonna use -en anymore' which is NOT what happened.

The loss of -en and -eth happened as a result of natural processes in language, as stated above, by forms either becoming unstressed> unvoiced, or by selection between two compteing forms.
Guest   Wed Feb 13, 2008 6:37 pm GMT
<<It does, as does all languages.
>>

that should be "as do all languages"
Guest   Wed Feb 13, 2008 6:45 pm GMT
Shouldn't it be "as all languages do" ?
guest   Wed Feb 13, 2008 6:55 pm GMT
<<Shouldn't it be "as all languages do" ? >>

No. It can be either. There are many ways to say the same thing.
guest   Wed Feb 13, 2008 6:57 pm GMT
It's called "poetic license...?"...
Guest   Wed Feb 13, 2008 7:15 pm GMT
I heard that Arabic has words which can mean one thing or just the opposite, what do you know about this?