Annoyingly, English uses "th" for two rather different phonemes: þ ("thing") and ð ("this").
Icelandic maintains this useful distinction. I feel like English spelling would need at least half a dozen more letters to disambiguate. As it is, English is actually a not great choice for a global language because it's so unphonetic.
Every language has something dumb about it that makes it "not a great choice for a global language". English spelling is a nightmare, but the grammar isn't too bad, and most importantly, it has no gendered nouns.
While there are good things about Spanish, speaking as a native English speaker there are annoyances too. One big on compared to English is that English is seemingly more economical with syllables than Spanish for many common words e.g. Demasiado, todavia, many adverbs like recientemente.
Spanish does seem to be one if the better languages for gender of nouns in that fairly simple rules seem to correctly classify many but still not having a gender for table or chair is imho inherently better from a cognitive load standpoint. Likewise the agreement of article, gender and number is much simpler than, say, German.
English also wins with much simpler verb conjugation. The forms in Spanish are distinct enough that pronoun subjects are often dropped. I prefer "I speak" and "we speak" to "[yo] hablo" and "[nosotros/nosotras] hablamos". Again English is far more economical with syllables here.
Spanish object pronouns are a PITA because they're ambiguous to the point that you gave to add "a ella" to things.
I also find the number of accents used to be incredibly tedious but at least they don't seem to be critical and are consistent with the pronunciation.
Modern English also has only one second person form. Spanish has 3 or 4 (tu, usted, ustedes and Latin American Spanish doesn't seem to use the vosotros form that Spain does).
I also find the ordering of pronouns common in mainland European languages a PITA meaning objection pronouns before the verb, non-pronoun objects after.
English actually front weights important information pretty darn well from a linguistic standpoint but at least Spanish doesn't have anything silly like German's separable verbs or putting the verb last in Nebensatzen.
The interesting thing about English was that it lost a lot of the linguistic bullshit (basically) during the centuries wheer it wasn't the official language of England (French was), this being the transition from Old English (essentially a foreign language at this point) to Middle English (mostly comprehensible to Modern English speakers).
Spanish conjugations are not harder for me than saying the right English verb (do/does, was/were, am/are/is, has/have). Yes, conjugation adds a bit more to learn at the start but learning English spelling and irregular verbs took me years at school. And I'm still not sure when to use many of the English perfect tenses.
(Editing this comment because I made a conjugation mistake for the millionth time – "add" instead of "adds".)
I think Spanish speakers compensate for this by speaking quickly. Since Spanish has a simple and unambiguous syllable structure, this is perfectly possible. Contrast with Mandarin, which can be pretty terse but also requires precision in pronunciation.
Apparently the information density of most languages when spoken by native speakers is much the same, despite variations in verbosity.
I think those is more like ram/ewe, just words to signify specific objects having gender. But words themselves don't have grammatical gender, not like in Russian and German, where every noun is gendered and all (well, most) adjectives/verbs/etc. have to be modified to fit the gender of the noun. Presents tons of problems for localization, because a) you have to have 3 separate ways of saying the same and b) you can not say something like "user has logged in" without knowing the gender of the user, at least not if you want to sound grammatical.
Also the dispute this generates! You wouldn't believe how many friendships are torn apart over the question of whether it is "die Nutella" oder "das Nutella".
It is "die Nutella", just so we are clear!
My point is that, whenever you want to use a brand name like "Nutella" in a specific context and you're unsure about the gender, you can just use a compound word with a clearly defined gender instead.
On a semi-related note: in the Rhineland gendered articles are also used colloquially when talking about people: "Der Mark", "Die Steffi" and so on. I was born into this but I'm unsure how I feel about it after finding out it's actually non-standard in the rest of Germany.
Not at all. It's often something some people feel quite strongly about and disagree with each other about.
The gender is often derived from synonyms or etymologically related words. I'm guessing the reason it's "Der Computer" for example is that "Computer" works similarly to e.g. "Trockner" (drier) or "Rechner" (calculator, in fact often the German synonym for "Computer") and these are all male (as generally words ending in -er tend to be).
OTOH it's "Das Steak" (maybe because "Das Fleisch" or "Das Kotlett"?) and "Das Shirt" (maybe because "Das Hemd"?). The fallback generally seems to be "das", i.e. neuter, not male.
An example of something with inconsistent use is "Der Laptop" vs "Das Laptop". Presumably this is because "Der Laptop" is derived from "Der Desktop", which in turn is likely simply a shorthand for "Der Desktop-Rechner", making it male. Even the Duden (the closest thing to a "standard" dictionary in Germany) lists it as "der; auch das Laptop" (i.e. "der" seems to be somewhat more common but both are in use).
Not really. In Russian, it's usually follows what it feels intuitively closer to - i.e. if it ends with a vowel like "a", it's likely to be female - Coca-Cola, Nutella, Fanta, etc. If it ends in consonant, it'll be male. If it ends in "o", "e", etc. - probably neuter. Though there could be more complex cases - e.g. I'm not sure what gender would something like "Subaru" assume. Probably depends on implied noun - if it's a "company named Subaru" then probably female, because "company" is female, if it's a restaurant named "Subaru" (assuming such one exists and is not sued for trademark violation) then it's be male because "restaurant" is male. Some speakers would just avoid putting such words into a context where such decision needs to be taken (fortunately, Russian has no articles, so die/der/das is not an issue :) or attaches explicit native noun like "company" or "restaurant" to make it clear.
Some words are kind of gender-fluid too. E.g. a word meaning "hall" was female and neuter in past centuries, and now is male. The word for "coffee" is male in formal/educated speech and neuter is less-educated but (to my despair) rapidly gaining legitimacy speech. Russian is fun :)
For things like the user, you can always assume male, but as with other such assumptions, some people may object to it. In some cases, there is a built-in assumption that male includes female when gender is unknown, but in others it just means male and that's it.
It once was (and e.g. newspapers still generally only use the masculine form) but this is a very political question. At work we are ordered to use e.g. Bürger/-in (others use Bürgerin oder Bürger which is just both forms written out). Sometimes there is gender-neutral word (such as Lehrkraft instead of Lehrer) that is a good alternative.
You can technically construct a female-gendered noun for "user" in Russian as well - there's a generic construct for that - it just looks really awkward.
I see. My sense is that the Spanish one is actually used if you do know the user is female, but of course most software doesn't know the gender and defaults to masculine form.
German now has a number of competing, made up schemes to degender so that a minority of women can do an inner victory fistpump whenever they see the language pockmarked with their particular brand of degendering.
What they all missed was that German already had degendering built right in, the diminutive (something dearly missing from the English language) :
der Holzfäller -> das Holzfällerchen, der General -> das Generälchen, die Kanzlerin -> das Kanzlerchen, die Maid -> das Mädchen
Yeah I meant gender in articles, not words where it indicates actual gender of a person/animal (although too many of those can be annoying too, here in Germany I see signs where it has to say "Lehrer oder Lehrerin" or the equivalent everywhere because way more professions/nouns have gendered forms than in English).
That's silly. Gendered nouns seem difficult to you, as an English speaker, because you speak a language that doesn't have them, and not because they're inherently harder than any other language feature.
No, that's silly. Gendered nouns are no hassle whatsoever in your native language, but a major stumbling block in one you wish to learn later on, believe me.
Danish is my primary language. We are blessed with only two genders, not three as in German. As closely related as the two languages are, I really cannot make a useful gender mapping from one to the other. That's one - not the only, but definitely one - reason I shall never speak German with anything like the ease with which I've mastered English, even though being exposed to the former at a much younger age.
As an ignorant English speaker who has learned enough German to get by, I wonder:
- what utility do you think a language gains from gendered nouns?
- (more immediate to my experience) how do you know what gender a noun is? I assume there are "themes" that might inform you. But if you're unclear, how do you do find out? Is there a social cost to getting it wrong?
- how are new genders decided? I'm struggling to think of an example as "laptop" presumably has the same gender as "computer", but it must come up sometimes.
"el ordenador" vs. "la computadora" (both computers) would be a spanish example of a gender change for the same concept (former is more Spaniard, latter more Latin-American).
I would say that (at least in Spanish) gendered nouns mainly provide some redundancy that helps error-correct sentences, but apart from that and the occasional meaning subtleties that can carry, they are not very useful.
Many new nouns are nouned forms of verbs. In German there are a bunch of fixed suffixes for turning verbs into nouns, and they have their own fixed genders: "-er" (masculine), "-ion", "-ung", "-age" (feminine), "-en" (neutral).
For other words, speakers, over time, sort of converge on a consensus, which may only be regional. For example, in some regions "Cola" (the drink) is "die Cola" (female), in others it's "das Cola" (neutral).
Others... not sure. "Mobile phone" is "das Handy" (neutral), I guess from "das Telefon". I'm fairly sure "das Internet" came by analogy from "das Netz", which is the German word for "net".
I also speak English as a native language, but allow me to try to answer your questions:
> - what utility do you think a language gains from gendered nouns?
Not a whole lot, but a language doesn't gain much utility from English features like mandatory plural agreement or a/an distinction either. Even something like "his/her" and "he/she" distinction isn't necessarily and a lot of non-native speakers of English struggle with it. You can dream up some sentences that are clarified by the distinction, but in a different language you obviously just express the same idea differently.
Ultimately a committee sitting around asking if a feature has utility and should be added is not very close to the way languages actually form.
> how do you know what gender a noun is? I assume there are "themes" that might inform you. But if you're unclear, how do you do find out? Is there a social cost to getting it wrong?
Sure. If a Spanish word ends in a it's probably feminine unless it's of Greek origin. But there is also memorization involved. Getting the wrong gender on an inanimate object is a lot like any other non-native mistake; it's likely someone who is talking to you can figure out what you meant.
Again, having to just memorize some cases is common in languages. How do you know what preposition goes with which verb? It probably seems very natural to you, but there isn't much logical basis for a lot of them. In Spanish you dream "with" someone rather than "of" them. Someone who wants to speak native-sounding English has to spend a lot of time learning the right pairings (as well as stuff like which compound expressions should have the infinitive versus the gerund).
> - how are new genders decided? I'm struggling to think of an example as "laptop" presumably has the same gender as "computer", but it must come up sometimes.
It's not really like a group sits around deciding, but of course there's a lot of precedent with existing words that could inform you which answer is likely. Synonymous words can have different genders, so it's not really like, for instance, computing words are all masculine. In general if a totally new word is borrowed into Spanish it's more likely to be masculine (so, like, el kabuki, el ánime, etc.).
I speak Russian, which is gendered (masculine/feminine/neuter) as my native language.
> what utility do you think a language gains from gendered nouns?
None whatsoever. When speaking of things that don't have any meaningful gender, it makes things unnecessarily complicated. When speaking of things that do have physical gender, it often forces you to make assumptions about it even when it's completely irrelevant.
> ow do you know what gender a noun is? I assume there are "themes" that might inform you. But if you're unclear, how do you do find out?
In Russian, it mostly follows the spelling of the words - i.e. if a word ends with a certain vowel, it's feminine, except if ... etc.
Sometimes it doesn't work that way, mostly with loanwords. Some loanwords so obviously don't match any "genderizing" pattern, that they basically end up with neuter by default.
In other cases the historical form of the word did match a pattern, and was assigned a gender accordingly - and then changed (e.g. by re-loaning it in a more accurate spelling), and no longer fits. When that happens, people will use the more "appropriate" rather than the "right" gender in colloquial speech, and eventually it becomes the new standard, collecting the mismatch.
A good example of this is the Russian word "coffee". When it was first loaned back in 18th century, it was "kofiy" - and in Russian, that is definitely masculine. Eventually it got re-loaned as "kofe", which would normally be neuter; but the masculine gender assignment stayed from past spelling. In the dictionaries, that is - in practice treating the word as neuter became one of the common incorrect colloquialisms, just because it doesn't "look" masculine. Language purists fought this for several decades, and eventually lost: it's still nominally masculine, but neuter is considered an "accepted variant" in modern dictionaries.
> how are new genders decided? I'm struggling to think of an example as "laptop" presumably has the same gender as "computer", but it must come up sometime
For new words, by their spelling, as described above. So "laptop" is masculine because it ends with a consonant, for example.
Personal names are an exception to this stuff. As in, when a foreign name is used in a context where gender cannot be guessed, people will often apply the usual rules (and then often get it wrong). But once context is established, it's properly accounted for.
On the other hand, for place names, gender is automatically assigned by the usual rules. So to a Russian speaker, New York and Texas are masculine, while California and Florida are feminine.
My understanding is that proto-IndioEuropean had two genders: animate and inanimate which would have served a purpose. Later animate split into masculine/feminine. Some languages preserved all three, others dropped the inanimate (or it morphed into "neuter").
Over the last 20 years or so, the consensus has grown in Indo-European linguistics that Proto-Indo-European had only the animate/inanimate distinction mentioned above. After the Anatolian branch and possibly Tocharian split off from the other Indo-European languages, the remaining core of IE languages developed the three genders masculine, feminine, and neuter.
The idea that Lithuanian is extremely conservative from a PIE perspective is rather outdated. Lithuanian does preserve a number of features of what might be termed “Proto-Nuclear-Indo-European” (to use the terminology of Lundvist & Yates), but the insights from the Anatolian languages show that not all of these features can be reconstructed back to Proto-Indo-European itself.
What is interesting, neither Lithuanian, nor Latvian has neuter gender. While slavic languages, like Russian or Polish, do have. To be fair, old Prussian seem to have had neuter gender. But given Germanic influence, they likely adapted in later days. It'd be weird if IE had developed 3rd gender, then Baltic languages dropped it while other languages around them did keep it.
Got any links or literature on how that evolved according to the new school?
It isn't at all strange that the East Baltic languages developed (along with other PNIE languages) the neuter and then dropped it later. The very same happened in Albanian, Irish, and the Romance languages (except for Balkan Romance).
Any recent introduction to IE linguistics starting from Beekes' Comparative Indo-European Linguistics will discuss the neuter being an innovation after the Anatolian languages broke off. However, I would especially recommend the Handbook of Comparative and Historical Indo-European Linguistics that will be published by Mouton de Gruyter this September, as it will contain a state-of-the-art survey of the field by a number of prominent scholars. See Lundvist & Yates' chapter on Morphology in it (you can also download a preprint PDF of this chapter from Yates' papers on Academia.edu if you have an account there).
If the neutral gender was dropped, I'd expect to be at least some leftovers... Anyway, I'll try to get hold of that book once it's out. Looks like it'd be interesting read.
Gendered nouns are difficult even for those who has them in their native language (articles in German behave very strangely for example). There's usually no direct mappings between languages, there are exceptions etc.
Gendered nouns are incredibly difficult for non-native speakers (even if their native language contains gendered nouns) as they are completely arbitrary, just like the words themselves. So instead of remembering (word) a non-native now has to learn (gender, word) for every noun.
It's not the concept that is difficult, it's the extra piece of information that makes it more difficult.
Difficulty aside, gendered nouns make gender-neutral communication awkward. If you want to refer to a group in a gender-neutral way you have to refer to both the feminine plural and the masculine one, or invent some silly new forms.
What's so bad about gendered nouns? They are quite useful, especially when the language allows you to omit the noun and leave only a pronoun, or maybe the entire subject altogether.
How are gendered nouns useful? (I'm referring specifically to assigning genders to nouns that refer to objects that aren't intrinsically gendered.)
My native language is English, and I never have to remember whether a "keyboard" or a "rock" is masculine or feminine. I've studied a few other languages (French, German, Spanish) that do expect me to remember such things.
To be clear, I'm not trying to refute your statement that they're useful, just asking how. I'm interested in learning about a different perspective.
I'd imagine the use is that it sometimes makes pronouns more useful.
Substituting "he" and "she" for gendered articles:
"I have he keyboard and she rock. He is large and she is grey"
Without that, I'd have to repeat the "keyboard" and "rock".
The question of course is whether this is worth all that rote memorization (since no language I know is fully logical here - german's "Das Mädchen" - girls are apparently of neutral gender - being a particularly egregious example).
The case of «das Mädchen» is a mere historical curiosity and doesn't require the memorisation as long as long the person in question is acquainted with basics of the German noun formation, i.e. the "-chen" suffix in German, when added to a noun of masculine or feminine gender, unequivocally results in the "neutralisation" of the noun gender, as well as the "umlautisation" of the stressed vowel of the noun being gender bent, eg. der Hund + "-chen" -> das Hündchen. It's a very simple rule, really.
The thing about this, though, is that it only works if you get lucky and none of your nouns share a gender. I feel like that undermines the argument at least a bit.
I feel like I could come up with some examples if I had kept up with German after high school. I remember it being difficult for a year or two, then it seemed more helpful as we got into more complex language mechanics. In any case, German felt more consistent than English, and most of the words just felt right with one gender or another (and in speech you could usually get away with something between "the" and "duh" if you weren't sure about der/die/das).
They are generally going to sound good together because the word and the pronoun co-evolved. If they didn't sound good together, either the pronoun or the word would have changed. That isn't about the gender being right so much as just the sound, though.
There are other possibilities, but trying to apply logical rules seems pointless; the whole point of language -- what actually makes something a language -- is a completely arbitrary set of rules.
If you do that in German (i.e., "Ich habe eine Tastatur und einen Stein. Sie ist groß und er ist grau."), everyone would start slapping you with a style manual. It's just so unnecessarily contrived.
The major argument for keeping gendered nouns as they are in existing languages is that speakers would be uncomfortable with having their language changed by some standards body.
German isn't my mother tongue, but I think it's a form of diminutive, which often becomes neuter in Germanic languages, as for instance in Dutch.
I agree it feels silly to learn the gender of "sexless" words; but this case and the rule behind it are quite clear in the respective languages this occurs in. I guess it's not unlike English using neuter for animal pronouns, which feels strange to speakers of most Germanic languages.
I translate Italian 16th century dance manuals into English. There are many pronouns in dance descriptions, and having gender as an extra clue is very helpful when I'm trying to figure out what pronouns refer to.
Now, in English, the author might have used fewer pronouns if they were ambiguous... but I've seen a lot of ambiguous pronouns in English writing.
I don't think anyone is objecting to gendered pronouns (he, she, him, her) but rather gendered nouns in general. For example in french "night" and "baguette" are female whereas "book" and "chair" are male. It seems arbitrary and makes learning the language more difficult.
The nouns for heel, foot, and toe have gender. When I get to the end of a dance step mentioning all 3, and it says "and in the final beat you lift <pronoun>", I use the clue that the pronoun gender should match the noun gender to try to finger out what the antecedent is.
I speak two languages with gendered nouns, and I didn't find much specific usefulness for it. It's just something that is part of the package, so you go with it, and you can claim that provides more rich texture or such (though I'm not sure why knowing "table" is "male" and "government" is "female" really has any meaning, but maybe poets have one more tool to play with), but I'm not really sure it's that useful outside of using it for objects for which gender does make sense. But even then saying different word for "walked" depending on whether it was male or female walking doesn't really seem to me much of an advantage. It's just what it is.
Although it's actually more complicated, because there's more than one Russian translation, and this problem was tackled in different ways. Lermontov just did a straightforward translation, changing the implied meaning. Tutchev and Fet both changed the pine to another tree such that the word is male: cedar or oak (in the latter case, this also required changing the described environment in which it grows).
Just out of curiosity, which language are your examples from? I'm asking because my native language is Serbian and it also features "male" tables and "female" government.
What you find hard is mostly a function of what other language or languages you speak. People who speak languages without articles find articles extremely confusing in English and honestly I have a hard time articulating rules for when "the" or "a" would be appropriate.
Having a simple way to put it doesn't mean it's easy to do right.
My native language don't have anything like articles. I frequently misuse a/the in borderline cases. Or just omit the article completely..
Yet gender is super easy in my language! Each noun has gendered suffix. Once you know the word, you know it's gender. Or once you know the gender, you know the suffix... :)
Can't come up with anything on the spot. But sometimes I see text I wrote and think why I put "a" or "the" instead of vice versa. Sometimes it's just not clear enough wether this item is specific enough or not.
On the other hand, I omit article completely more frequently than using a wrong one. I find I have to consciously think if I should use an article and which article should I use. When I write/talk quickly without double checking, shit happens. Even after using English a lot for 2 decades, articles is just a foreign feature that I have to use consciously.
Sorry, I'm coming up short. But the theme, I think, is that there are a lot of cases where that sense of specificity isn't quite obvious to a learner, combined with the fact that in some cases the right choice is no article.
It's a significant bit just like the ones that form the letters: la tour, le tour, entirely different words that have their most famous examples within visual range once a year.
It's really easy, because "keyboard" is "teclado" which ends with o (so it's masculine) while "rock" is "roca" which ends with a (so it's feminine). :)
And there are, of course, counter-examples: el águila, el ala. I believe the rule should just be "it sounds right", as to say "la águila" is well, a third 'a' in there, two or them consecutive, and is just harder to even pronounce.
Yes, yes, but this example is so well trod that it immediately popped into your mind, and, what's more, try to think of a sentence where you might honestly be confused about whether "pound" or "book" was meant.
I can certainly imagine a French learner being confused about which gender goes with which noun. Before you say that this is ingrained in French speakers, so are unphonetic English orthography, Chinese tones and ideographs, and other linguistic sticking points ingrained in the native speakers of those languages.
French has quite a few words that break the apparent gender rules: un musée, un lycée, un mille (meaning "mile"; the homograph meaning "thousand" is feminine but usually doesn't take an article), le mort (dead person) vs. la mort (death), etc. All adding to the shit you gotta memorize. If you don't, your meaning will still come across but you'll sound "off".
(I don't even think I remember all my Vandertramp verbs...)
Well my whole point is that it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to talk about whether one language is or isn't appropriate as an international one because the idea that one is just objectively harder than another doesn't really hold.
Port is always masculine though, it only means port/harbour.
But it's not that important, gender does add some redundancy and some error-correction to a language. It's not necessary (as shown by English) but it has some use.
That only happens with a handful of words: those that 1) are feminine and 2) their first syllable begins with an "a" and 3) their first syllable is stressed.
It's similar to English which uses "an" instead of "a", but it happens very very very rarely.
(Needless to say, "águila" and "ala" ARE feminine nouns, what's changing here is the determiner so the two a's don't clash, not the gender of the nouns)
English lets you omit the noun and only use a pronoun. Colloquial English lets you omit the subject sometimes, too. And it doesn't have official gendered pronouns.
This sentence is short. It is short.
"What did you do today?"
"Rode bike"
Sometimes we even use genders for nouns even though it's not official:
The ship sank. She sank.
Compared to German:
The dog jumped on the table and bit the man.
Aww shit there are three "the"s in there... if I'm speaking, I can just slur through it and say "d'Hund" or "d'Tisch" but that doesn't work when I'm writing... okay let's try to get through this.
Der Hund sprang auf... Hmm, well "the table" is Der Tisch, but hang on, I have to figure out what case this is... ah, accusative! den Tisch und biss Ah fuck, "the man" is "der Mann" but what case is this... I don't even care anymore... d'Mann. Nailed it.
It's not like anyone is going to say "he jumped on him and bit him", so the genders serve absolutely no purpose.
Mmmh, but in German you can say "Der Hund sprang auf den Tisch und biss ihn". This kind of ambiguity can be a lot of fun. (It can also be confusing, I admit. But it can be fun, too.)
EDIT: Well, in English you can say "The dog jumped on the table and bit him", but it is not ambiguous. ;-/ The ambiguity in German is not due to gendered pronouns, but due to the gender of table/Tisch. :-|
the benefit of languages with cases is that you can switch the order of the sentence without changing the meaning. In those languages I can say "the dog bit the person" and "the (accusative) person bit the (nominative) dog" and it would not change the meaning of the sentence but it would allow me to emphasize one object more.
They make a language harder to learn and increase it's cognitive profile, especially for newer speakers.
I'll also make the contentious claim that they are clearly visible as being kinda sexist to progressively-oriented native speakers of languages that don't have them. Of course, if you honestly follow that train of thought, it doesn't stop at having gendered pronouns for inanimate objects. See https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.htm...
If they appear to be sexist to progressively oriented speakers of languages without gender, the problem isn’t the language, but the ignorance of the progressively oriented speakers of languages without gender.
The masculinity or femininity of a table ought not be controversional except among those who are eager for things about which to be offended. It would seem there are certain groups of people that seem to derive pleasure from being offended. It might also seem, to speakers of languages with gender, that these so-called progressives are being regressive by imposing their linguistic ideology upon others.
Of course I support sex equality for humans, but really sometimes so-called progressives venture into Newspeak territory or at the very least, absurdity. “Womyn” is another example of similar nonsense.
There have been many, many failed attempts at introducing phonetic/phonemic/simplified spelling systems for English. It’s a surprisingly hard problem both technically and socially.
For starters, we probably can’t split “th” into “þ” and “ð” because of words like “with”, where “wiþ” and “wið” are in free variation; even words like “thank”, which you might expect to be uniformly “þank”, show up as “ðank” in some dialects, sometimes also in free variation.
English consonants are pretty consistent across dialects, with a few rare exceptions (like [x] in Scottish “loch”), but the vowels are all over the place phonetically. Even attempts to represent them phonemically (e.g. the 24 Standard Lexical Sets[1]) aren’t perfect across dialects because of the presence of different vowel mergers & splits, as well as one-off exceptions.
I think that the fact that English uses a small alphabet and no diacritical marks (except for a few loan words) and hence cannot closely specify pronunciation is a strength not a weakness. It makes English inclusive and usable by people with widely (or wildly) varying accents and dialects.
Bizarrely, in English, the most common vowel sound has no single glyph to represent that sound. Among the many variations of sounds that vowels can make, all of them can be pronounced as 'ə' (schwa) in certain circumstances. This is part of what makes English orthography a nightmare and then pronunciation of written words difficult.
As an example: "banana" has two different vowel sounds, 'ə' and 'æ' (in American English at least). If English allowed for 'ə' it could be spelled bənanə.
Other words with schwa:
amazing - əmazing
tenacious - tənacious
replicate - repləcate
percolate - percəlate
supply - səpply
Not all spoken Englishes might agree with all of these, but every English variant uses the sound.
> As it is, English is actually a not great choice for a global language because it's so unphonetic.
English would be a more-useful global language — in that it'd be easier for non-native speakers to learn and use it — if we pedants who secretly look down on anything less than "proper" spelling and grammar (and I'm embarrassed to be one of them) would get over ourselves and accept simpler, easier forms as they naturally arise.
EXAMPLE: Less vs. fewer — it's disconcerting to read or hear, e.g., less and less people when the supposedly-correct form is fewer and fewer people; there's no logical reason that the former shouldn't do double duty, as it does in math.
EXAMPLE: Who vs. whom.
EXAMPLE: It's vs. its.
EXAMPLE: Different forms for the subjunctive — e.g., if I was a carpenter (supposedly-incorrect) vs. if I were a carpenter.
As a foreign speaker, I find some of your examples curious, because for them it would actually make it harder for me to deal with English if we went with those suggestions. Reason being that some of these words reflect similar semantic changes in my language, and losing them would feel unnatural. "Who" vs "whom" is a good example.
"It's" vs "its" is also bothersome, but for a different reason - this probably has to do with learning English in a way that emphasized formal sentence structure, rather than just the way it sounds. But I think that's not all that uncommon for non-native speakers. When I studied in college in New Zealand, I once had a chance to converse with our ethics teacher (native Kiwi) one on one, where she remarked on my spelling in a recent essay. From there she quickly went on to a general rant about how immigrants are much better than natives at spelling, citing "its" vs "it's" as one of the examples - according to her, she had never seen a non-native speaker substitute one for the other inappropriately.
On the other hand, "if I were" never made any sense to me, and is one of the more common mistakes I still make, even after 8 years of speaking and writing English 99% of the time.
Those are all examples of problems learners hit only when they've successfully learned English. By the time a non-native speaker has to worry about subjunctive or less vs. fewer, they've already reached a level of proficiency that allows them to communicate fluently despite an occasional grammatical gaffe.
Before reaching that level, however, they have to deal with truly maddening stuff like how to pronounce word like "read" or "tear" or "close", or why it's "an interesting little book" instead of "a little interesting book", or why you can see a movie but you're not "seeing TV", or the fact that both "thir-tee" and "thir-dee" mean 30.
I don't think it is a given that languages naturally evolve to become simpler and only narrow-minded people are holding them back.
Languages evolve to suit the needs of their speakers. If people find themselves without words to describe something succinctly, languages will evolve to become more expressive.
I think compound nouns (as used in German) are a good example of this. They make the language more complex and harder to learn, but allow speakers to capture what exactly an object is or how it relates to others by slapping multiple nouns onto each other.
English can do compound words, except with spaces between the words. This is better: is clear where the boundaries are. When the word combination is used frequently, it may become a single word, like pushchair.
Yes, the spaces make it easier to distinguish the individual components, but on the flip side it makes it much harder to figure out where the compound group ends. Even your examples illustrate that.
Different languages have evolved according to different, sometimes diametrical opposite goals. As a consequence, somethings are easier to express in some languages than in others. That's the beauty.
The group ends at the verb. I expect there can be ambiguity sometimes, but I don't see it in the example.
I'm learning Danish, and regularly have trouble working out where compound words should be divided. I can't see any benefit compared to separating the words with hyphens or spaces. The pronunciation would be the same.
@TulliusCicero: the only true genderless language is Persian. There is no he, she, it even. There is no way to hear if someone is man or woman without a precise context or asking "Man or Women?", which I often hear Iranians ask in Conversations.
There certainly are. To their point, quite a few of the languages on that list with no grammatical gender are of a similar ancestor language as Persian.
Interestingly, it's an easy language & script to learn. In terms of what someone referred to as a "good global language" for universal ease of learning, it provides a great base.
We absolutely do notice the difference. One is voiced, the other one is voiceless. The way you articulate them is different as a result, even though there are obvious similarities as well.
I actually don't think the distinction between "thing" and "this" was pointed out when I learned English in elementary school in Germany.
They were just ambiguously referred to as the English "Tee Aitch", which doesn't help anyone.
Note they did point out the different pronunciations for each word but it was pretty much along the lines "they're the same thing but sometimes sound differently".
A number of other languages maintain that distinction as well. For example, θ versus δ in Greek, and th versus dd in Welsh. But when it comes to confusing aspects of English orthography, the list is much longer than that...
English spelling, especially for words of germanic or romance origin, is actually pretty consistent if you think of the spelling reflecting meaning rather than sound. As accents vary quite bit, not trying to be phonetic is a plus imho.
"Rather different" phonemes? There is no room for them to be more similar to each other without coinciding. And they contrast in only a single minimal pair, one element of which is incredibly rare.
"Rather" appears to be a fine word choice for your intended meaning. I'm objecting to your intended meaning (as far as I can perceive it):
- [θ] and [ð] are objectively similar sounds, differing only in voicing.
- The argument is not even very good that /θ/ and /ð/ are different phonemes in English -- they contrast only in the pair of words teeth/teethe, and one of those words is fairly rare. If you, as a foreign speaker, pick the wrong one of those sounds, you have 100% odds of being correctly understood as a "guy with a foreign accent". Even if you get confused between s/z (compare "visible"), you're very likely to be understood, but with θ/ð there is literally no chance of confusion.
Thanks for the reply! I appreciate the clarification.
The variations around "th" is one of the things I remember finding particularly difficult when learning English pronounciation, so my comment came from there.
Icelandic maintains this useful distinction. I feel like English spelling would need at least half a dozen more letters to disambiguate. As it is, English is actually a not great choice for a global language because it's so unphonetic.