Why do some languages use gendered nouns? It seems to just add more complexity for no benefit.

  • Droggelbecher@lemmy.world
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    9 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
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      9 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
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        9 months ago

        I’m just speculating, but I could imagine they personfied objects and maybe transfered gender to objects that way?

      • Diplomjodler@lemmy.world
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        9 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.

        • Skua@kbin.social
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          9 months ago

          These bits of grammar don’t always actually communicate any extra information about anything other than the grammar of the language you’re speaking, though. The “gender” of the thing in question can’t reliably be distinguished from grammar since even in the Indo-European languages where the noun classes are typically thought of as masculine or feminine, the word’s grammatical gender can contradict its actual gender. The Old English word for “woman”, back when English had grammatical gender, was masculine.

      • Droggelbecher@lemmy.world
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        9 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.

      • qaz@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        C++ is perhaps a great example of a language that has evolved over time without people putting a lot thought in it.