this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2024
94 points (96.1% liked)

Ask Lemmy

27134 readers
2109 users here now

A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions

Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try [email protected]


Rules: (interactive)


1) Be nice and; have funDoxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them


2) All posts must end with a '?'This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?


3) No spamPlease do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.


4) NSFW is okay, within reasonJust remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected]. NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].


5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions. If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.


Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.

Partnered Communities:

Tech Support

No Stupid Questions

You Should Know

Reddit

Jokes

Ask Ouija


Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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.

(page 2) 39 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 days 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 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days 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 4 days ago (2 children)
load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Not at all, it makes it simpler, in many cases you don't even need it or is even simpler to convey the gender in other ways

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 days ago

Some of them are, which is even more confusing.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days 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] 3 points 4 days ago

in my language nouns aren't gensered either so it was pretty easy

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days 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 4 days 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 4 days 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 4 days 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 4 days ago

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

[–] Canopyflyer 2 points 4 days ago

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

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

Absolutely worth getting used to, way less headaches

[–] calamitycastle 3 points 4 days ago (1 children)

*way fewer headaches

(Sorry)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago

Appreciated :D

[–] [email protected] -2 points 4 days ago

It's not, why would that even be a good thing? Get rid of adding identifies to objects like a 6yo.

load more comments
view more: ‹ prev next ›