The Evils of Feminine Gender (and Other Language Complaints)

SckizoBoy · Oct 21, 2013

Evil Moo said:
I find the whole language thing to be horribly inefficient in general. Give me a neural interface where I can communicate through an abstract stream of thought and I'd be far happier with the situation...

Ah, now, see... then we'd be debating Jean-Jacques Rousseau, insomuch that the reason we have language is so that we can vocalise concepts. Without language, using purely simulation of sensoral depictions and/or plain-up sensations, it's difficult to express emotion (desire/revulsion etc.) or more accurately intent of emotion except at the most abstract level. We need language in a sense to describe (to the extent of creation) of our own 'reality', after a fashion.

Consequently, here's a question: what came first - cognition of language; or vocalisation of language?

BitterLemon said:
snip

Ah, excellent, a Portuguese speaker... sorry if this is a completely stupid question, but how do you pronounce: 'João'? And how is that from 'John'?! XD

Zephyrean · Oct 21, 2013

lacktheknack said:
But states of being are even worse. It's hard enough when you want to express your gender-neutral or masculine disappointment with разочарованный, which is a mouthful in and of itself, but then you have a disappointed female, who is разочаровавшийся.

That's, like, super wrong, and yes, I registered to point it out. Both разочарованный and разочаровавшийся are masculine. The respective feminine forms are разочарованная and разочаровавшаяся. And then there are neuter forms разочарованное and разочаровавшеес&#1103 for use with neuter nouns (abstracts, collectives, and inanimates).

Now, a valid complaint would be the difference between the many forms of the damn adjective/participle hybrid that don't have anything to do with gender, like:
разочарованный - "that which expresses disappointment", of a person, a facial expression, a glance, a sigh, etc (adjust gender as necessary)
разочаровавший - "that which has disappointed"
разочаровавшийся - "one who has been disappointed", of an animate only
разочаровывающий - "that which is being disappointing"
разочаровывавший - "that which was being disappointing"
разочаровывающийся - "one who is currently being disappointed"
разочаровывавшийся - "one who had been gradually growing disappointed"

Go figure.

trollnystan · Oct 21, 2013

For me it's the Irish alphabet. It looks to be based on the Latin alphabet but the pronunciation is so far from it I am convinced that I'd have an easier time trying to learn it if it used a whole different alphabet instead. I've studied French, Spanish, Russian, Japanese, and Chinese - note: I don't actually know any of them - but Irish is the only one where I can't fucking hear what is being said. I can't differentiate between the different sounds at all; it all becomes one big garbled mess. I speak more Japanese that I do Irish.

I suppose if I actually sat in a classroom and learned it instead off of language tapes from the 80's I might have an easier time of it, but I learned several phrases in Chinese off of language tapes easily where I can't even say hello properly in Irish. How on earth does "Dia dhuit" become this?!: [link]http://www.omniglot.com/soundfiles/irish/hello1_ga.mp3[/link]

And that's one of the easier words! (Where the fuck did that G come from?!)

Welcome in is "Fáilte romhat isteach", said like THIS: [link]http://www.omniglot.com/soundfiles/irish/welcome3_ga.mp3[/link]

I JUST DON'T GET IT.

I will probably never learn which makes me sad. I'm half-Irish and I'd like to learn to say a least a few phrases without sounding like a complete tourist. SIGH.

Zen Bard · Oct 21, 2013

Hindi. I hate the fact I have to wobble my head from side to side just to speak it.

Oh it's a grammatical rule, folks.

It's a rule.

Actually, it's the possessive in Hindi (yours, mine, ours, etc).

There's a formal possessive, an informal possessive and an "intimate" possessive. Mixing them up has gotten me into some serious trouble.

Queen Michael · Oct 22, 2013

The problem with Swedish is that we have two different words for It," one being "den" and another being "det." It's impossible to know which one to use. For that reason, there's no clear consensus about game consoles, and if your Xbox is a "den" or a "det." It's kind of a pain.

BitterLemon · Oct 22, 2013

SckizoBoy said:
snip

It's not a silly question at all, the "ão" sound is specific to portuguese, so most foreigners just fake it with something similar. The closest you can get with english pronunciation would be "Jo-own", I guess. But it will sound a bit funny to native speakers... We pronounce "Jo" different too, so João is a big pronunciation test for english speakers.

Now, John and João... there's some similarity in the sound, a small one. I don't know from where those name translations come from. But if you think that João is different, it's because you never heard the translation for Willian: Guilherme. It's badly pronounced as something like "Gi-lermee". Never understood this one XD

A friend of mine have a japanese wife. She can't distinguish the "ão"(own) sound from "au" (aw) in portuguese, and can't make the sound either. She would often say "pau" (stick) when she wanted to say "pão" (bread). The thing is, "stick" is a common slang for dick here, so you can imagine how amusing was to see her walking around asking for dick. XD

If you want to make a portuguese speaker suffer (for revenge when they laught at you saying João), ask them to pronounce anything with "th". We can't make the sound right. We pronounce like a "D", or "T" and if try very much, sounds like we have a speech impediment or something, twirling our tongues around. Every english class here have the "th" day were everybody keeps trying to make the sound right and fail miserably, including the teacher. Anyting, someting, dis, dat...

lacktheknack · Oct 22, 2013

Zephyrean said:
lacktheknack said:

But states of being are even worse. It's hard enough when you want to express your gender-neutral or masculine disappointment with разочарованный, which is a mouthful in and of itself, but then you have a disappointed female, who is разочаровавшийся.

Click to expand...

That's, like, super wrong, and yes, I registered to point it out. Both разочарованный and разочаровавшийся are masculine. The respective feminine forms are разочарованная and разочаровавшаяся. And then there are neuter forms разочарованное and разочаровавшеес&#1103 for use with neuter nouns (abstracts, collectives, and inanimates).

Now, a valid complaint would be the difference between the many forms of the damn adjective/participle hybrid that don't have anything to do with gender, like:
разочарованный - "that which expresses disappointment", of a person, a facial expression, a glance, a sigh, etc (adjust gender as necessary)
разочаровавший - "that which has disappointed"
разочаровавшийся - "one who has been disappointed", of an animate only
разочаровывающий - "that which is being disappointing"
разочаровывавший - "that which was being disappointing"
разочаровывающийся - "one who is currently being disappointed"
разочаровывавшийся - "one who had been gradually growing disappointed"

Go figure.

This is what I get for learning from the internet. >_<

lacktheknack · Oct 22, 2013

Evil Moo said:
I find the whole language thing to be horribly inefficient in general. Give me a neural interface where I can communicate through an abstract stream of thought and I'd be far happier with the situation...

You don't think in words? Huh. I do. Neural stream would just be me talking without moving my lips.

Zen Bard said:
Hindi. I hate the fact I have to wobble my head from side to side just to speak it.

Oh it's a grammatical rule, folks.

It's a rule.

Actually, it's the possessive in Hindi (yours, mine, ours, etc).

There's a formal possessive, an informal possessive and an "intimate" possessive. Mixing them up has gotten me into some serious trouble.

You don't understand how many questions you've answered. Thanks!

IllumInaTIma · Oct 22, 2013

lacktheknack said:
Russian is hard, guys.

But states of being are even worse. It's hard enough when you want to express your gender-neutral or masculine disappointment with разочарованный, which is a mouthful in and of itself, but then you have a disappointed female, who is разочаровавшийся.

I'm really sorry buddy, but disappointed female is not разочаровавшийся. It's still male. Female counterpart would be разочаровавшаяся or разочарованная. Actually, Russian being my first language, I can't imagine how hard it would be learn it.

lacktheknack · Oct 22, 2013

IllumInaTIma said:
lacktheknack said:

Russian is hard, guys.

But states of being are even worse. It's hard enough when you want to express your gender-neutral or masculine disappointment with разочарованный, which is a mouthful in and of itself, but then you have a disappointed female, who is разочаровавшийся.

Click to expand...

I'm really sorry buddy, but disappointed female is not разочаровавшийся. It's still male. Female counterpart would be разочаровавшаяся or разочарованная. Actually, Russian being my first language, I can't imagine how hard it would be learn it.

A couple people beat you to it.

The grammar, casing and gender are a bit arduous, since English has little to differentiate each situation with. What really gets me in Russian, though, is that every word this internet course throws at me is enormous.

It'll be good writing practice, I suppose.

cathou · Oct 22, 2013

in french we dont have a neutral gender, it's what i had the most difficulty with in English when i was first Learning it, because i was always saying she for a table, or he for a fridge...

the thing i always forget in English is to capitalise the I, because there's no logical reason for doing it...

KR4U55 · Oct 22, 2013

In spanish, like most romance languages, every noun is gendered and every verb has its own temporal use, whether it's first, second or third person and whether the subject is singular or plural. Some of them get pretty crazy for no reason.

A good example would be "EL aguila", male noun, literal translation for "the eagle". When it's plural it becomes a female noun "LAS aguilas". It's weird, man.

VanQ · Oct 22, 2013

I speak Japanese.
For me, a mixture of the limitation of the syllable system and the way kanji changes pronunciation between the kunyomi and onyomi systems was always a pain in the ass to learn.

An examle of the limitation of the syllables they use means you get a bunch of words say spell differently, pronunce the same but have totally different meanings.
感じ = kanji = feeling
漢字 = kanji = chinese character
幹事 = kanji = coordinator
監事 = kanji = manager
完治 = kanji = complete recovery

I could actually expand on this list further with just the pronunciation "kanji" but I think you get the point. When it comes to different readings of the same kanji, here's one example:

月 = tsuki, gatsu, getsu
出 = de, da, shutsu
日 = hi, nichi, ka

And you're expected to be able to read and write 1000-1200 of these buggers to be considered high school literate, that is they expect more of you to be university or newspaper literate.

It's a pain but it's okay though, the rest of the language makes so much sense and is so structured that it puts English to shame, it's just too bad they insist on using such an out of date writing system. It's efficient at so many things, but so inefficient at so many others.

Jeez, and here I came into this thread expecting to complain about something totally different because of that word in the title.
俺はまじで吃驚だったよね。

cathou · Oct 22, 2013

Jasper van Heycop said:
I can't pronounce the english "th" sound as in three. Which means i usually say tree (which gets confusing) or free (even more confusing).

you know what, apparently, i have the same exact trouble. (but i dont pronounce it like a Z, like people from France...) three and tree are the same for me. also, words starting with an h. in french the h dont get pronounced, so i guess it come from there for me. one of my coworker once asked me to say : "the air breeze into my hair" and it got out as "the hair breeze into my air"

anyway for me when i speak english there's no difference what so ever with air, hair, hare, heir, her, are...

Raikas · Oct 22, 2013

Abomination said:
This begs the question, is there a single language out there that doesn't have these problems? No gender descriptors, consistent rules and phonetic spelling?

The closest I can think of is Korean and that has the advantage of being a language that was designed by a King and fit for purpose.

Afrikaans and Haitian Creole are both fairly grammatically straight-forward - no genders, simplified verbs, all that learner-friendly stuff. And they have very phonetic spelling (which I think is probably true for most of the recently-codified languages).

aozgolo · Oct 22, 2013

I find Japanese to be the most abhorrent with it's honorifics system, it is definitely interesting but the thing I hate about it is how it by default implies familiarity and setting with a person and the general politeness involved, it's borderline a caste based system implied through language. It also suffers from the multi-gender pronouns but not nearly as much as certain European languages do.

ERaptor · Oct 22, 2013

Heh, im actually glad German is something we get taught from the get go here in Switzerland. Just to clarify, there are multiple "main" languages in Switzerland, with German being the most common, followed by french and italian, and then a little percentage also speaks Romansh (Do _NOT_ get me started on that one.). What gets me going, is the fact that Swiss-German (And it's sub-forms) isnt a language in itself, its just a dialect of "Alemannic". This wouldnt be a big deal, almost everything is written in standard German for easier understanding anyway, but it means that we are _forced_ to talk German a lot, be it in school or in other situations. It reinforces a notion where a lot of people that move here dont even bother learning Swiss-German, and instead insist that we swap over to talking german. It also gets annoying if im asked what language i speak natively, and when i answer "Swiss-German" some stupid smart@$$ goes "Thats not a REAL language, you talk GERMAN." <- read that in the nerdiest arrogant-@$sshole voice you can, and you'll get the idea.

Also, written English. I will probably never stop doing capitalization errors. Im so used to capitalize nouns, that i just_cant_stop. I have my first DnD Session with an english group this evening. I dont want to imagine how they react to my horrible grammar.

kurokotetsu · Oct 22, 2013

KR4U55 said:
In spanish, like most romance languages, every noun is gendered and every verb has its own temporal use, whether it's first, second or third person and whether the subject is singular or plural. Some of them get pretty crazy for no reason.

A good example would be "EL aguila", male noun, literal translation for "the eagle". When it's plural it becomes a female noun "LAS aguilas". It's weird, man.

Actually that is quite simple. "Águila" is actually femenine all the time, "águila calva", but there is a very specific rule about that. Unlike French and Catalan, Spanish does not cut short words (not even articles), officially so instead of having "l'águila" it would be "la águila", but is Spanish having "la a-" sounds wierd. So there is a simple rule. If your femenine word starts with an a, it uses "el" in singular. That is all. "Águila" and "água" remain femenine for all pourposes (adjectives will be femenine) but the article, where "el" is used. It is actually quite simple.

Well, I consider myself quite decent at elarning, but there are a few things that I just keep making mistakes.

WHile I understand that French use "liasson" when speaking, I just keep forgetting. It is a pain to recall that every time (well almost) that there is a vowel in the next word you you do pronounce the s or other otehrwise silent letters at the end of the previous word.

I'm also not very goo at remembering stresses in Catalan and French (even in Spanish I have problmes). When it is open, close or circumflex (well that last one has some consistency if you know ethymology) just falls inot deaf ears to me. French is all memory and Catalan has very subtle pronunciation differences which I can't tell usually.

Knaji reading in Japanese. My visual memory isn't that good, so I'm not good at memorizong kanji, but there are little to no rules as how you pick the readings. I really can't for the life of me to find a pattern to know when it is shita, oriru, moto, ka or any other of the ten readings it has. Damn, you need a lot of context and other lexicon to read a single kanji.

SckizoBoy · Oct 22, 2013

BitterLemon said:
It's not a silly question at all, the "ão" sound is specific to portuguese, so most foreigners just fake it with something similar. The closest you can get with english pronunciation would be "Jo-own", I guess. But it will sound a bit funny to native speakers... We pronounce "Jo" different too, so João is a big pronunciation test for english speakers.

I'll probably forget in a few days' time, but thanks nonetheless, because I keep reading articles about the old Portuguese monarchy (middle-ages and stuff) and I'm in Spanish pronunciation mode going 'Ho-ow'?! XD

Now, John and João... there's some similarity in the sound, a small one. I don't know from where those name translations come from. But if you think that João is different, it's because you never heard the translation for Willian: Guilherme. It's badly pronounced as something like "Gi-lermee". Never understood this one XD

I guess it's the same as for most Romance languages, because it's Guillermo (gwi-yehr-mo) in Spanish and Guillame (gi-yaw-m) in French. But I think that dates back to Gallic days when the name was 'Hwillam' or something like that, and dialectic divergence took it to its extremes of hardening the first syllable or removing the sound altogether. *shrug*

The Evils of Feminine Gender (and Other Language Complaints)

SckizoBoy

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Zephyrean

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trollnystan

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Zen Bard

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