Is grammatical gender the most pointless linguistic feature?

east asian languages don't have grammatical gender. the chart is correct.

It really should be called grammatical genre. But English is amess with its borrowings so...

>most pointless linguistic feature
>grammatical gender
That's not declension.

Japanese has gendered pronouns attached to sex. Filipino does not.

>Japanese has gendered pronouns attached to sex
That's not grammatical gender.

Then why is England and Scotland red? English has no grammatical gender.

1. japanese doesn't actually have true pronouns
1.a. even if they had only gendered pronouns, that doesn't effect the grammar
2. no other noun is gendered unless the literal word for man or woman is put in it
2.a. no verbs or adjectives have gendered inflections
2.b. this is the same as every east asian language

english has vestigal gender inflection as a remnant of frankish and french

actor/actress is an example, where doctor is a counterexample.

(OP)

>tried to learn a language
> can't understand grammatical gender ,
>"muh it's thier fault"

go learn fucking crybaby
There, i fixed it for you

Why do we need this?

>user doesn't understand the chart
>user speaks filipino
>user doesn't understand grammar
ITS ALL STARTING TO MAKE SENSE

maybe Veeky Forums needs flags

It's beyond retarded

For you faggots who speak gendered languages look up Bantu noun classes

That's how dumb you look to us

It's the flip trannies I bet.

bantu noun classes evolved because wandering niggers in the jungle needed a system to classify referents based on use among hundreds of lil' blood tribes that might stab each other if they said the wrong thing.

indo-european languages are highly synthetic and needed a mechanism to cut down on noise, and so they developed genders.

it's a little different

what language do you even speak, anyway? your post is Veeky Forums incarnate

Chart is still plain wrong though, Flips dont even have gendered pronouns.

Measure words are pretty pointless as well.

Maybe it's accounting for the Spanish loan words?

Declensions > syntax-based grammar.

it's not determined by pronouns, it's determined by inflection you fucking little brown sexy tranny creampie machine REEEEE

learningtagalog.com/grammar/nouns/gender.html

(it's probably the spanish influence. they mgiht be specifically referencing filipino instead of tagalog)

Flip here: we just use loanwords and attach them to our native grammar structure.
>Spanish.
La mesa. (the table)
El libro. (the book)
>Filipino
Ang mesa
Ang libro

measure words tend to occur in highly analytic languages with bounded morphemes

I really feel like a lot of these questions would be solved by tiny little (HEY RETARD) bubbles next to trouble spots in text books. not calling you a retard. the state of education is despicable, is all

No fuck off.

"Whom" will die out in our lifetime. The English language, too, should declare independence from the rest of Europe.

>wants to get rid of whom
hey thanks for turning my languae into newspeak, jackass

I bet you think it's good that they teach hunger games in high school instead of shakespeare or joyce

No you retarded anglo subhuman

>I'll bring my friends!

Ok! (It's a bunch of female but he doesn't know and comes unprepared)

When someone says "I'll bring my friends" this could be fucking anyone.

Yes it's retarded as fuck

>I'll bring a friend

>male or female????

Retarded anglos

>I'll bring my friends!

>Rich friends or poor friends?
>Cool friends or nerd friends?
>Friends I know or friends I don't?

Retarded humans.

You're conflating using grammatical gender to express natural gender with it's other purpose of being useless. A chair isn't a woman, it just is called feminine because feminine nouns also refer to feminine people or animals.
How is declension pointless? It's extremely useful since it just directly states what grammatical case it is.
Whom is retarded because it's one of the last remaining features of previous declension after English long parted with it.

Esperanto solves this by having a specific prefix for referring to females. Another example of how good of a language it is.

btw does anyone know why this pepe is brown with a buzz cut?

I'm not sure why declension for pronouns is inappropriate. it makes language a lot more clear. the inconsistency is really only hard for ESL people

Who isn't really a normal pronoun and there's no need to say whom over who in any situation.

there's no need to make the I/me distinction, but if you can't, I'll still think you're a retard.

stop acting like mao zedong and trying to rape our language, you fuckhead

the only people who can't do these things are 80 iq idiots. I hardly think we should rearrange our society to cater to people who eat paint

>there's no need to make the I/me distinction
Fug you're right. All we really need is a distinction between the normative and the genitive pronouns, shit, we could do that just by adding an 's. The accusative case is useless when the object always follow the verb.
>stop acting like mao zedong
Interesting you say that. I can easily see English becoming an analytic language very soon.

*OLD ENGLISH

Because esperantists are incredibly militant

some people think liason or articles are too hard.

any time someone complains who isn't ESL I think they should probably just be gassed, desu

grammar is a perfect idiot detector that's built into language.

in fact, of the few constructed languages alive, they always start off simple, but inevitably become more complex because without grammar rules shit's fucking unclear. people also just invent grammar rules on purpose in order to confuse stupid people and show off how much smarter they are. this literally happened with bahasa indonesia and it only took 10 years.

you can't just gut grammar you don't like.

So the pepe is a reference to ISIS?
Do you mean French liaison? If so that's not a grammar rule, it's just because Frenchfags care about have a pretty sounding language and be removed with minimal ambiguity. How are articles hard? They pretty simple and signify a grammatical concept, although are unnecessary.
>grammar is a perfect idiot detector that's built into language.
Languages do not evolve intelligently. Sometimes there are simply unnecessary, meaningless parts.
>you can't just gut grammar you don't like
Sure you can. English dialects and creoles appear all the time that does just that. Language evolves for the needs and desires of the speakers. People got tired of conjugating verbs so now we're just stuck with a couple instead of the many of other Western European languages.

english has liason too. if you don't notice it...

>meaningless
that's the ENTIRE point of them. intelligence is the ability to do arbitrary work.

I'll tell you a mental task that is't very arbitrary: eating. but cows can do it.

>getting rid of grammar
>sure you can
you just ignored my fcking relevant example of why you fucking CANT

you probably don't understand the history of constructed languages though. they fail to meet the needs of communication every single time.

by mandating simpler vocaublary and simpler grammar you're just forcing smart people to speak on the same level as idiots.

seriously, read about the history of bahasa indonesia.

>Mirativity, initially proposed by Scott DeLancey, is a grammatical category in a language, independent of evidentiality, that encodes the speaker's surprise or the unpreparedness of their mind.

>that's the ENTIRE point of them. intelligence is the ability to do arbitrary work.
The point of language is to communicate, grammar is an integral part of that. If the point of language is just being an autist about rules then you're speaking something autistic like Lojban,
>you just ignored my fcking relevant example of why you fucking CANT
You can get rid of certain parts of grammar, not all of it obviously. I can conflate I and me simply into me and because of the way English is I can do that and be perfectly understood; if I did that with a language like Latin with a free word order, then I wouldn't be understood, because English isn't Latin.
>you probably don't understand the history of constructed languages though. they fail to meet the needs of communication every single time.
That's not true at all. I could speak to you in Esperanto right now and beyond my limited vocabulary, I'd have no problem expressing myself.
>by mandating simpler vocaublary and simpler grammar you're just forcing smart people to speak on the same level as idiots.
No one said anything about eliminating words or changing ways you can express yourself. It's about standardizing certain things. If Mandarin started developing into a fusional language it'd make sense to standardize anything that formerly belong to its more analytic past.

language is as much a tool of peacocking as it is about communication. if you haven't figured that out, you're beyond saving.

if you intentionally hobble expressive potential in a language, people WILL find ways around it. in french people literally speak backwards just to show how cool they are, and in bahasa indonesia people needed to invent referent particles and declensions because the grammra was too fucking free to the point it as incomprehensible. the took it further and now bahasa indonesia has dozens of regional dialects with MORE complicated grammar than their regional languages.

you NEED to put grammar into a language otherwise it become incomprehensible.

it's the entire reason east asian languages have bounded phonemes.

mandarin was standardized, and there were rules behind it. you might note that in doing so they did NOT make it simpler outside of the character set.

>language is as much a tool of peacocking as it is about communication
Yet if I started talking in Early Modern English thou would callest me a faggote. Have verbose prose is nice but it's for literature, not for communication. When people care more about communication than seeming smart and being anal about rules, language changes.
>if you intentionally hobble expressive potential in a language, people WILL find ways around it
And simplifying and regularizing grammar to be standard with the rest of the language isn't doing that. You're not bitching about us no longer speaking Middle English.
>because the grammra was too fucking free to the point it as incomprehensible
Sounds like the grammar didn't serve the purpose of communication so they changed it. If you were in Indonesia would you be bitching about those changes, saying it's not proper Bahasa?
>you NEED to put grammar into a language otherwise it become incomprehensible.
I'm not saying remove grammar, I'm saying standardizing it doesn't change anything except make it easier for people to learn and to communicate.
>mandarin was standardized
I'm talking about a hypothetical future Mandarin that has undergone extensive language change.

jesus christ this board is awful

I'm done talking to you. if you're not intentionally trying to be an idiot I feel sorry for you

You seem upset user. Are you alright? Surely a retarded argument about language isn't whats making you upset.

Is Bahasa really that complicated?

> English has no gender
He / she
Dog / bitch
Bull / cow
Cock / hen
Etc. Etc.

> Friend
> boyfriend
> girlfriend

Not grammatical gender. Anglophones don't mark groups nouns into certain categories and apply different rules to those categories.

He said "grammatical gender", not "has no words pertaining gender".

Not according to the standardized language, which is incomprehensible, so one one uses it.

Every island was forced to make the best of it, so they started implementing jungle rules into it taken from local languages, like user above's example of above of having 15 different noun clasifications. A lot of it was just done so that smart people could show off. But now every island has its own language again. It's fucked.

>clitoris
Well, the clitoris is homologous to the penis, look up the embryology of them.

Can you give me some concrete examples of such new variations?

You're the biggest idiot of all.

Could anyone actually tell me what purpose gender serves?

I can see it being useful for homophones, akin to tones or stress (male oogabooga is dog, female oogabooga is chair), but not much else. But then I'm only an American after all.

As a Finn i dont even understand the reason for gender pronouns. Knowning someones gender is such useless information most of the time that i have to wonder why it even needs to be said constantly.

No.

It prevents autismos like trannies and whatever homofaggots are calling themselves now in the west.

You're right imo. It'd make more sense if there were a set of 3rd person pronouns that refers to different people being referenced, e.g. one pronoun refers to the first person referenced, the second refers to the second, etc. Kinda like how you can differentiate between two people by saying "he" and "she" but not between two guys or two girls.

I don't know of any language that has this idea.

While that sounds really autistic I think Malagasy has a really complex system of relation or something like that.

>mfw Polish has five genders

there are languages in Africa where words end with certain phonemes based on whatever you can eat a thing or not

No, I don't mean relation, I just mean pronouns that basically mean "that guy" "the other guy" and "the other, other guy" and so on. Basically just a way to say which guy of a few you're referring to.

I've had a few Spanish-speaking friends tell me that it's largely just a matter of helping sentences 'flow,' sort of? Not in its origin or intent, mind you, but in its actual function.

There should be something like a genus for each geometrical form.

"The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog"
then becomes
"roundthe tetrahedronquick roundbrown cuboidfox jumps over roundthe planarlazy dodecahedrondog."

That sounds like an immensely useful way to pass on knowledge. You would immediately know what you could or couldn't eat in the wilderness based upon something as universally carried down and used as language.
That just sounds autistic. No different that other gender systems with a bunch of genders, I guess.

top kek nigga

Aww, shucks. I thought you were referring to my geometrical forms idea, when the Veeky Forums-X desktop notification said:
>That sounds like an immensely useful way to pass on knowledge. You would immediately know what you could [...]

topkek

I don't see how that could pass on anything other than an autistic knowledge of different shapes.

Well i often find english bothersome for its inablity to distinguish genders, it such a useful piece of information : " a friend is coming over ", because i don't know the gender i can't say " when is he coming ? " or " is she hot ? " beause i have first to ask for this piece of information. Same thing with animals.

Also i'm pretty sure gendered languages influence our world view and how we think/perceive stuff. For example in romance languages the moon is feminine and the sun masculine, it makes sense for me : The moon is shy, pale and small while the sun is bigger, powerful, and brilliant overall.
But in german the moon is male and the sun female, and so my german friend ( and i have to precise female because there's no word for " female friend " ) completely disagreed : the sun is motherly, nourishing, etc.. while y engish friend ( female aswell ) called my language mysoginist;
And she might have a point, romance countries might be a more prone to machism because some traits are in our languages inherently feminine and other inherently masculine, and germanic languages and therefore countries who have an other kind of association and where things can be neutral, a-gendered, are probably more easily convinced by feminism

What about Francophonic countries? Aren't quite a lot of modern feminist thinkers from France, Algeria, and so on?

You're, French, right?

>Well i often find english bothersome for its inablity to distinguish genders, it such a useful piece of information : " a friend is coming over ", because i don't know the gender i can't say " when is he coming ? " or " is she hot ? " beause i have first to ask for this piece of information. Same thing with animals
You're just dumb; obviously what confuses you is lack of information provided, not language ability. Clearly in this case the person that has a friend doesn't feel that their gender is important to note, which is probably a same-gendered person. In any case, English covers this by using 'they' as the genderless singular pronoun if you don't intend on determining gender.
However, you miss the humor of asking "is she hot" anyway without that information. Language is so much more complex than writing a scientific study that eliminates all context for the sake of autism. Funny that English became the singular tongue of scientific publications anyway.

It's to help tie adjectives, demonstratives, determiners, etc to the noun they modify.

Imagine English had grammatical gender, fox was feminine, and dog was masculine, and the feminine with marked with -a and masculine with -o.

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog becomes:

Thea quicka browna fox jumps over theo lazyo dog.

Now say, you wanted to move lazy to the front of the sentence, maybe or meter or emphasis. You could still tell its saying the dog is lazy because it agrees in gender.

Lazyo thea quicka browna fox jumps over theo dog.

With only 2 or 3 genders there's still lots of room for confusion, but most older Indo-European languages also had to agree in number and case, making it less ambiguous.

On the extreme end there's Bantu languages, like Swahili which has 14 genders and also marks the gender of the subject and object on the verb, allowing them to have completely free word order without any cases.

>Clearly in this case the person that has a friend doesn't feel that their gender is important to note,
"Clearly"? I'd say that that's one possibility, but it certainly isn't "clearly" the case. Maybe he was just short on time and it was more important for him to note that the person is a friend, rather than someone fuggable.

>English covers this by using 'they' as the genderless singular pronoun if you don't intend on determining gender.
Can you give an example?

>However, you miss the humor of asking "is she hot" anyway without that information.
You're missing the point that other languages could've included that information easily. In French and Italian, for example, if he said that a friend was coming over, he'd know which gender the friend has.

>Funny that English became the singular tongue of scientific publications anyway.
Which most likely has more to do with the sociology of modern science, rather than the compatibility of science and the English language.

>try to have a discussion with you
>in every post act like an autistic faggot calling people idiots and retards while everyone else simply replying to your posts
>get blown the fuck out at the end and can't respond
Loving
Every
Laugh

Do you guys with grammatical gendered languages have words with more than one accepted gender?
In Danish we have two genders, for example:
En kat - A cat
Et hus - A house
Then there is the word hamster.
Et hamster, sounds wrong to me, but plenty of people are saying that rather than en hamster.

Yeah in french we do, even if most of the population use the same gender because otherwise as you said it sounds "wrong"

So does this mean gender isn't all that important after all?

Basically most of the words derived from the third declension in Latin have developed into two-gendered words in Romance languages, because most of third declension's words were neuter gender. Eventually neuter gender dissappeared and speakers often used masculine or femenine gender for those words. Some words simply adopted a single-gendered form depending on the common use of the speakers. For instance, in Spanish, the word for bridge is "puente", used as a masculine; while in Galician (ponte) is a femenine word. And it produces some grammatical incongruences like "el puente/la fuente": both words should have the same gender but in fact they don't.

However there are still some words that can be used in both genders like "mar" (sea), "azúcar" (sugar), etc.

Why do anglos get so triggered by grammatical genders? Its weird, I like to think this is an american kid throwing an autistic fit because he failed Spanish at school.

Clitoris and árbol are male sounding words. Silla and batalla are female sounding words. You just won't understand if you're not native and not used to it.

specially since they use that retarded she/he thing for no reason and only in the 3rd person

Never heard "la azúcar".

>azúcar. Puede ser masculino o femenino, el azúcar, la azúcar. Es más general usarlo como masculino: azúcar refinado, azúcar moreno.

educacion.ufm.edu/se-dice-el-azucar-o-la-azucar/

>Basically most of the words derived from the third declension in Latin have developed into two-gendered words in Romance languages, because most of third declension's words were neuter gender
Most third declension words weren't neuter, it's just that the masculine and feminine were identical, so you couldn't tell a word's gender just by its shape, which caused a lot of confusion in daughter languages.

>For instance, in Spanish, the word for bridge is "puente", used as a masculine; while in Galician (ponte) is a femenine word. And it produces some grammatical incongruences like "el puente/la fuente": both words should have the same gender but in fact they don't.

Puente used to be femenine in spanish as well, you can read the Lazarillo for a famous example.

Un dragée
Une tentacule
Un échappatoire
Un oasis

The only reason it isn't clear to you is because you're humongously autistic. There are pretty clear signifiers as to the gender of the friend as the person to whom you are replying had already stated. In any event this point is practically moot because the ambiguity can be easily alleviated simply by asking "are they a boy or a girl?"

>are they a boy or a girl?
>why are you interested user, I though you had a gf?
>nah I just want to use the proper pronoun

>Is grammatical gender the most pointless linguistic feature?

Linguistic features don't exist because we deem them pointless.

They probably had some reason to be there in proto-variants of most languages; maybe verbs inflected differently in very ancient languages depending on whether you actually were talking to or if you were a woman, versus a man or an object, but that these effects have gradually disappeared, and the only thing that is left is the superficial.

That said, in many languages, like my own, grammatical gender is mostly intuitive. A girl is feminine, and a boy is masculine for example, and a tree is definitely neuter.

>That said, in many languages, like my own
What language is that?