this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2024
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It's a rare example of English being simpler than other languages, so I'm curious if it's hard for a new speaker to keep the nouns straight without the extra clues.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago

Arabic speaker here and now that you mention it, the way sentences can get very long without a way to tell what the fourth "it" in the sentence refers to can be a bit of a pain, as is having to reword said sentences when writing to avoid ambiguity, but what you're thinking of there is declensions more than gendered nouns themselves. I mean gender doesn't hurt to have but it's the fact that in other European languages words change shape depending on their role in the sentence that's making the difference here.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I find the lack of capitalisation to be worse honestly. A lot of sentences where it is not clear at first whether something is a noun or not

[–] [email protected] 6 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago)

Capitalisation also makes skimming texts so much easier and faster since you can just jump from noun to noun until you find something relevant. I wish more languages would do it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 22 hours ago (2 children)
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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

English is missing quite a few grammatical features that are necessary for understanding of a German sentence. The genderedness (lolwat is that a word?) nouns helps recognise references, as does ~~declination~~ declension of nouns. German (as presumably other languages do) also uses a LOT more commas than English to structure sentences. So if you know what to look for, it can be very easy to parse even a complicated German sentence because everything has a signal attached telling you what it's doing in that sentence.

Obviously language can work perfectly fine without those features or English wouldn't exist. Still, there are frequently sentences in English that would have to be reworded quite heavily to lose their ambiguity, such as when there are several "it"s referenced and you have to take half a second to figure out which one is which. That's when I do sometimes miss my native language's features - but it's also when native English speakers struggle.

Edit: declination vs declension. Go away, I just woke up lol

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago

Some of them are, which is even more confusing.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 22 hours ago

I think it's just that one point where you have to accept things like that exist. Sometimes gendering slips out of your mind, but a lot of people let it slide.

[–] Etterra 3 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

Eh, gendered nouns are just an old holdover. At least English (usually) uses words to improve specificity. For example, "Pick up my medicine" as opposed to "pick up medicine." It seems redundant to some until suddenly you need to specify after the fact.

The more precise the language the fewer chances of miscommunication. A perfect language would be precise and unambiguous without deliberate effort (as opposed to laziness, slang, shorthand, etc.) which is probably completely impossible to craft, much less about.

[–] Windex007 5 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

I disagree that being perfectly unambiguous is a feature of a "perfect" language.

Ambiguity creates holes for us to fill, and some people don't realize how good it feels to fill those holes.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 22 hours ago

Out of German and English, I always found German to be better suited for factual texts (scientific papers and essays, news textbooks, encyclopedias etc.) because it's less ambiguous and English for more creative writing (novels, poems, opinion pieces, speeches etc.) because there is more scope for the imagination and the ambiguity leaves more room for double entendres, puns and other fun stuff. There are advantages to both.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

It was a bit confusing at first but I got used to it quickly, it's much simpler this way

[–] Canopyflyer 2 points 23 hours ago

English may not have gendered nouns, but it has plenty of other challenges.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 23 hours ago (2 children)

It was weird in the very beginning, but it's good and I love it!

Absolutely worth getting used to, way less headaches

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