I am just curious; what languages are there that do not have noun/adjective agreements?
I can think of the following:
Norwegian
Danish
English
And when I mean no agreement, I esentially mean that there is nothing like the German language or the Romance languages where one must decide which ending(s) to put after the noun and the adjective.
Do Norwegian and Danish have masculine and feminine words? I am studying Swedish and it has those. Since I am studying French I can guess what the gender of a word is and usually be correct. Still a pain though. All words should be neutral, like in English!
Yes, Danish and Norwegian are essentially like Swedish. Danish and Norwegian are closer than say Danish and Swedish, or Norwegian and Swedish. However, Norwegian serves as a lingua franca because when Swedes cannot understand Danish, they try Norwegian, and when Danes cannot understand Swedish, they try Norwegian.
All Scandinavian languages (minus Icelandic and Faeroese) have two genders (although Norwegian can have three):
Norwegian = en or ei and et
Danish = en and et
Swedish = an(???) and ett
One last post before I am off to bed.
Does anyone know of any Germanic languages/dialects that do not have much agreement between noun and adjective; for example, languages that have an equal amount or less amount of agreement that English and its dialects (Scots, Ullans, etc) have.
As Californian said in previous posts :
>All words should be neutral, like in English! <
Neutres ? Certainement pas ! L'anglais a sa propre vision du monde, l'espagnol, le portugais, l'italien et le français ont la leur.
L'accord en genre et en nombre, ça fait partie de ma langue et je le garde !
Clark, Norweigian DOES NOT serve as any lingua franca. It's the first time I ever heard about that although I'm a native speaker of Swedish. If a Swede speaks with a Dane and they can't understand each other they'll try to speak their own language more slowly and to articulate their words. Almost no Swedish speaker, nor Dane, is able to speak Norweigian so it would be impossible for us to use it as a lingua franca... :-)
to Clark
Farsi doesn't have noun/adjective agreements.
The adjective does not agree with the noun in number and gender.
we say : a little boy, little boys like in English not like in French.
what's more we don't have distinction between genders. There is one pronoun to indicate she or he. So you can never guess if someone told you : I went to movie theatre with my friend if it's a she or a he.
Mats, hmm, I should not have said "lingua franca." But I have heard from a lot of people, a Swede even, and they have all said that Norwegian is the middle ground of the Scandinavian languages (except Icelandic and Faroese). What I should have said is that Norwegian is easier for Danes and Swedes to understand than if a Dane had to listen to a Swede or a Swede to a Dane.
Right, you should have said that :-) Now you are quite right. I, as a native Swedish speaker, find Norweigian much easier to understand than Danish. This is indeed quite stange since Swedish and Danish are actually closer to each other than either is to Norweigian...
But in the South of Sweden, don't they sound more Danish?
When I was at elementary school, french teachers learn us to conjugate noun with their gender. At that time , I didn't know what "gender" is.
After that, I first discovered what sex is at 11, hehe ! Then I think how ludicrous it is because things have no sex.
I remember a teacher telling me about the French language when I was in the 7th grade. At that point in my life, language was so foreign to me (besides English). I mean, I literally could not grasp the concept of a language that had a different grammar than mine. When this teacher told me that words in French were feminine or masculine, I totally did not understand at all!