I know a lot of languages have some aspects that probably seem a bit strange to non-native speakers…in the case of gendered words is there a point other than “just the way its always been” that explains it a bit better?

I don’t have gendered words in my native language, and from the outside looking in I’m not sure what gendered words actually provide in terms of context? Is there more to it that I’m not quite following?

  • fiat_lux
    7•1 year ago

    It creates an additional connection between the parts of speech you intend to be conceptually linked.

    Eg. “He kicked the ball at the park - it was huge!” Was the ball huge or the park? If ‘ball’ and ‘park’ have different genders in your language, then it’s easier to know immediately what ‘it’ represents.

    This allows for greater freedom to majorly rearrange a sentence and still be understood. It also helps poetry and LLMs, incidentally, when you can just throw words around and people know which adjective goes with which noun, etc. Not that Chinese poetry ever cared much about that, but that’s a different topic.

    Why is it related to gender? I guess they just picked something to relate the new system to the people around them, like picking colours to represent emotions. It’s a clunky 3 category system, but if you’re creating enough ambiguity in your sentences that 3 additional categories of differentiation can’t help with… well. Then you have other conjugation systems you can implement. Looking at you, Finnish. Or you can go the English route and get really strict about your word order.

      • fiat_lux
        4•1 year ago

        Then you still have the same issue, but it occurs as maybe a 1/3 chance (where 3 is the genders for Latin, other systems have more/less) instead of as a 100% chance in languages that assign connections based only on word order.

        It’s obviously not a perfect solution, but it does significantly reduce ambiguity in phrase construction for languages which use it. And it’s (often) of sufficiently limited complexity that it doesn’t cause too much cognitive overload for most people during a conversation.