Fun fact: The word "neuter" in german is "neutrum" which comes from the latin combination ne utrum. Ne utrum translates to "none of the other two". My latin teacher in germany told me that. Oh by the way latin also has 3 genders.
Whew... That's a relief... I was just a bit worried that these people were walking around thinking... That object is male... and that object is female... and that object got its balls cut off!!!
The Languages that derive from Proto-Indoeuropean language provide all in all 4 genders: "masculine", "feminine", "utrum" and "neuter". But no language uses all 4 genders. English has just one gender for nouns, which has no official name, but I think it is most similar to utrum. Italian has two genders (masculine and feminine). Swedish also has two genders, but they are utrum (mainly used for things that live, like men and women but also for animals, gods and ghosts) and neuter (for non-living things). German is an example for a language with 3 genders (masculine, feminine and neuter). Some African language even have more than 20 genders (Swahili has 22). But when a language has so many genders, you no longer call them "genders" but "noun classes". And I think that also for European languages the term "noun class" describes the concept of this feature much better than "gender", because the term "noun class" describes clearly, that it is a grammatical feature of nouns, not a property ob the objectes named by the nouns.
My native language (Faroese) has 3 genders (masculine, feminine and neuter) and my 2nd language (Danish) has 2 genders (common gender and neuter), and my 3rd language (English) has none. Things just got easier as I progressed through my language learning, lol.
You could technically say that there are hints of the 3 genders of Old English. He, she, and it refer to male beings, female beings and objects, respectfully. By contrast, Turkish has only one genderles pronoun "oh." The writer Orhan Pahmuk wrote that when he was a little kid, he thought that Allah was female. This was because in Turkish, there is only one genderless pronoun: "O." Therefore, there was no obvious sign what gender Allah was.
@@craftah Not if you’re a native speaker, no, but it can be quite difficult when you’re learning a new language, because the grammatical genders don’t always make sense, and the same words have different genders in different languages. For example, in German, a knife is neuter, a fork is feminine and a spoon is masculine, while in Faroese they are masculine, masculine and feminine. :)
@5:00 Persian also did away with gender at about the same time. It's completely genderless and highly simplified! It seems that when a language gets used by many different peoples to communicate with each other, it gets simplified along the way.
One of the many reasons I never bothered much with Esperanto: a fairly brief look showed it had agreeing adjectives etc., which seemed a _backward_ step for something supposed to be simplifying/unifying. (Also it seemed too close to Italian and Spanish to me - and, seemed to be little taken up anywhere.)
Interesting about the "blond" vs. "blonde" thing. It makes a lot more sense what you said here, but I work for companies here in the United States where we review other businesses, and the technical standard I was taught as an editor for reports is "blond" is an adjective, and "blonde" is the noun form. E.g. "She has blond hair" vs. "she is a blonde." However, most Americans don't know the difference and just use or the other for everything.
"Blond" is a French word and English is keeping its French grammar for whatever reasons. "Blonde" can be an adjective and is used of a girl or woman. For example, she has blonde hair. Inversely, blond is used of a boy or man. For instance, he is a blond.
In Finnish we have a lot of difficult weirdness, but some things are so logical it’s weird it’s not more common: 1) No gendered objects 2) not even he or she, just ”hän” for anyone 3) almost never any silent letters 4) every alphabet is always pronounced the same unique way. For example ”i” is always [i] (like english letter E), not context sensitive like english ”Titanic”
Finnish is relatively young as a written language so it doesn't have all this historical baggage that English does. Compare it to the Latin alphabet used for Turkish, which was developed in the 1920's and is also nearly completely phonetic like Finnish
I came from Hong Kong, Cantonese (Chinese) and English are the 2 languages I speak for most of my life, and none of them have grammatical genders. Imagine my face when I saw: Le La, Un Une when I started learning French. It was and still is such a nightmare
Languages are all about repetition, mimicking and unconscious memory. If you have a steady immersive learning of French then it comes in naturally (like walking, cycling, swimming, etc.). 5 year old French kids are fluent in French, so why not you ? Also what you need is an optimistic perspective, a will to learn French for a reason that stimulates you : the culture, arts including "bande dessinée" (comics), the cuisine, wines, fashion, the history, the musicality of the language, it's sofistication and "superiority", the French people, professional perspectives, a distinct and unique "French" view on the world, etc. Try to be (for a while) of the same mindset as the French : it may sound ridiculous but the French are genuinely persuaded that they live in the most beautiful country, that they have the best "art de vivre" and that they are the most civilised people on earth (with the most civilised language !). Of course if you are force-feeding yourself with the language then it becomes a nightmare... As an example I woud recommand you watch around 5 times (!!!) a French movie you really like and gradually repeat and (mimick!!!) dialog parts... Also the immersive part is important : you could spend a weekend eating french food, listening to French music, radio, news, reading in French, watching French movies, news, talking with French people, commenting in French UA-cam posts, etc. basically LIVING IN A FRENCH BUBBLE. Don't ask yourself too many questions, enjoy a glass of tasty French wine and let the French language slowly and pleasantly come up to you head...
@@RobWords while as a Spanish native speaker I am used to genders, and while learning French and Portuguese it wasn't that big of a deal even if the words that were a different gender than in Spanish confused me, I am starting to learn German soon, I hope the third gender does not mess me up.
@@patax144 I don't think it will. I learned German in my middle teens, and these were the hardest things about the language for me: verbs (several conjugations, as in Latin, plus very many irregular ones); case for nouns and adjectives (subject, object, possessive, dative); two forms of the adjective (strong and weak); a rigid word order (again, as in Latin). It meant a lot of rote learning, of declensions and conjugations. It was more like learning Latin than learning French--but at least with Latin I didn't have to attempt to speak it! That said, the language is very rich and has some beautiful poetry. I hope you will enjoy your studies!
Great video, I studied English, German and linguistics at a French Uni many moons ago, and still to this day I am fascinated by languages and their interaction throughout history, the forgotten links, the etymology of words etc. I have added this video to my favourites needless to say! Thank you for posting this.
I feel like I could have written this post because you have articulated exactly how I feel about language! It is so interesting and I wish I studied it at university.
English is, in some cases, quite similar to Plattdeutsch (Low German), which has been recognized as its own language, just like Frisian. Plattdeutsch just has one article for feminine and masculine words, as well: de. Sounds rather similar to "the", if you ask me. And if you have something neuter, then you just say "dat", quite similar to "that". But you can say "de" also, as far as I know. So it's "de Appel", "de Beer" and "dat/de Water". Just like "the apple", "the pear" and "the water" in English.
Frisian seems to always get the label of closest to English, but I always thought Low German gets overlooked in that regard. I've noticed in Dutch cognates with English words that have the "th" sound end up being a "d" so I assume this is often the case with Low German as well. Of course at one time I believe all the Germanic languages had the "th" (dental fricative) sound, now it's just reduced to English and Icelandic.
@@kbm2055 Low German certainly is closer to English than High German is to English, arguably even closer than Low German is to High German due to missing the vowel shift. And there are many Low German words which are "English" and not "German", like (Standard) German "wie", which is "as" in English, also is "as" (pronounced differently though) in Low German.
My grandparents spoke Low German and when I visited relatives in Germany I found their accents easy on my ears. When my grandparents spoke English they had Low German accents.
To my ears, people from Schleswig-Holstein, where the original Angles came from, speak German like English people do. Sometimes when I hear a British or American person speaking very good German, I can't distinguish them from residents of, say, Flensburg speaking their native tongue.
In Norwegian, particularly in "bokmål" (the Danish based written language) we're in the process of merging the masculine and feminine grammatical gender (neuter is not endangered). We tend to use the masculine indefinite article "en" for both masculine and feminine (traditionally using "ei") while still using the appropriate definite suffixes "-en" for masculine and "-a" for feminine, but this is also slowly merging to just "-en". But there's a new trend were the feminine article and suffix is used for any gender as a sort of diminutive instead. So we might end up with two genders common gender and neuter like has happened in some other Scandinavian dialects, but with the feminine markers retained with a new grammatical function.
I was going to say, isn't this how Swedish is? I'm currently learning Swedish and learned that they used to have male/female and now have common and neuter genders... neither of which says "gender" to me, but maybe there is just no other good term.
@@EricaGamet yes, in Swedish masculine and feminine is completely merged into common gender. (in most dialects at least, could be some where it isn't. After all we have dialects in Norway retaining a full case system, so why not)
And yes, grammatical gender has nothing to do with social gender or biological sex. It's just called that since the grammatical phenomenon of "gender" in Latin happened to have two genders associated loosely with biological sex. And they named the phenomenon.
I'm English but I'm learning Bokmål, and I was super happy when I learned that you can treat feminine words like masculine, its much easier for me to learn this, because remembering all of the genders is so confusing! They are especially foreign to me because we dont have them! If I'm being honest I still dont see the point in genders, it just adds unnecessary confusion in my opinion, but I've only been learning for about 8 months so what do I know?
For anyone that doesn't know, the letter at the beginning of the word "þæt" is called a thorn and makes a "th" sound. In a lot of old manuscripts and printed texts it looks like the letter "y", so the word "þe" (i.e., "the") looks like "ye"-this led to famous phrases like "ye olde" and others. Thanks for the cool video!
Mind blown. Not about the gendered language (although that's cool), but about blond/blonde. As a Canadian, I assumed one was the British spelling and the other American, because... well, so many other words have that. :D
Likewise. I'm British and thought the same thing. I picked up a smattering of German whilst in Germany with the British army, mainly to pursue my hobby at the time of RC modelling. I could make myself understood, but was very much aware of my language shortcomings. I found the native Germans were very sympathetic to my pathetic attempts and were very helpful. Most Germans do speak english anyway, but seemed to regard an Englishman attempting to speak to them in their language as a compliment. After all, most English men EXPECT 'Johny foreigner' to speak english because it's regarded as the international language.
Yes, blond/blonde is standard Yank usage - but unfortunately too many of us Americans are ignorant of the proper usage 😕 Owen Wilson is blond, and Scarlett Johansson is blonde.
I had a bit of a hard time learning German because of the gender mismatches between it and my native language. I never realized how learning English was actually so simple before starting to study German. German feels like learning English with the difficulty slider cranked to 11.
German is actually simple, once you have studied and got used to French genders and the word order. Unlike English it is logical and doesn't have umpteen different pronunciations for the same letter groups, we have umpteen ways to pronounce "-ough" for example
@@Neil070 can I complain about German word order? Ok, good XD The "logical" word order imo would be "subject, verb(s), object, complement". That way you answer "who did what, to whom, and how". You add the words from the most important to the least important. Now, in German, when you have two verbs in a sentence, you can't simply add the complement in the end, you have to think beforehand! I mean, who does that? Do Germans always know every sentence before they say it?
The subject is not necessarily the most important part of the sentence, and this is perfectly reflected in the German V2 word order (verb as the second topic of the sentence). Thus you can put the object in front if you want to stress it. "Den Mann sah ich nicht, aber die Frau" - "The man I did not see, but the woman". What do you mean by "two verbs"? Composite forms like "habe gesehen" (have seen)? In this case, the "habe" occupies the V2 position, and the other parts of the composition are appended ("Ich habe den Mann nicht gesehen"). Of course, you have the verb in mind when you start speaking.
You referred to blond/blonde at 4:53 as an exception in English. It's not an exception. It's a part of a special rule where borrowed words (in this case, from French) are used as in their source language until the time comes when they're fully assimilated into English. Some other examples of French-borrowed inflected nouns or adjectives are fiancé/fiancée, divorcé/divorcée, and né/née. In all cases, pronounced the same, but written differently.
The English word "naive" started as one of these. It was borrowed from French also - naïf (masculine), naïve (feminine). Eventually its French origin began to fade from collective memory, and now "naive" (without the dieresis) is the most common form of the word in English, at least in the US, where I'm from (I'm not sure about elsewhere). I can say, for example, that my brother is naive about his kids' behavior when he isn't around, and it wouldn't be incorrect - except for the fact that I don't have a brother.
Maybe for people who has English as native language don't see this, but for me, for example, English is almost another latin language. You have so many words I can understand, not because I studied English, but because is almost the same, or sometimes is exactly the same word in my language. In your comment there are many words I recognize very easily. Referred, exception, part, special, case, used, language, time, assimilated, examples, adjectives, pronounced, differently. All these words are almost the same in Portuguese.
@@davidbio1 English is descended in a general way from Latin, yes. Our technical terms are pulled pretty much straight from Latin or Greek. Our everyday stuff is Latin-influenced also, but not quite as clearly as in the Romance languages (Italian, Spanish-Portuguese-Romanian, French etc.). Because Great Britain (where English was formed) was conquered and ruled in whole or in part by the Romans, but also by the Vikings and by Viking descendants such as the Normans. Therefore, we often have two common words for things, one from the Romance thread and the other from Germanic.
@@davidbio1 The base words are Germanic (Anglo-Saxon), and the more subtle complex words are Romance (Norman French), add in a different branch of Germanic (from the Vikings), Latin and Greek for technical stuff, a bit of modern French and other European languages, and words from the countries we colonised, and then mash it altogether, simplify the grammar, randomise the spelling and pronunciation, and add a lot of idioms, word-play and slang, and you've got English. What's interesting is that we often have pairs of words with slightly different meanings from Anglo-Saxon and French - the differences often reflect the Anglo-Saxons being ruled by the Norman French, so peasants farmed cows and sheep, and the gentry consumed beef and mutton.
Im shocked this channel doesn’t have more subscribers. You explain things in such a clear concise way which is also fun to watch. And your videos are super high quality. Good work man!
I agree, but not everybody is a languages nut like we here appear to be. It seems that most of us also have abilities with several languages, hence the multilingual comments written, read and responded to in whatever language seems the most suitable, and we are therefore in a minority because of that too.
The most confusing thing for me when learning German, was how “die” (feminine) turns to “der” (masculine) in dative! Spanish has el and la, but those remain the same, no matter what case you use. German is on a whole other level! 😂
We have genders and plurals, but no cases in Spanish. The hardest bit for English speaking learners is the Spanish conjugation, but again many languages have proper conjugation. English is quite an easy language to learn quickly enough to understand and make yourself understood in normal basic life: no genders and very simple conjugation in all tenses. The best bit of Spanish is how the rules have very few exceptions and the language itself is quite helpful once one puts some effort into learning those rules. Also, we don't bother with ridiculously confusing vowels: 5 vowels, 5 sounds, always the same. As simple as that.
@@shaunmckenzie5509 I guess that taste needs to be respected, but bad manners like calling another language "very ugly", not really. Personally, and many also agree with me, I find that a limited number of vowels, such as in Italian and Spanish, not only sound nicer and clearer but will also make it easier to learn. Also less spitting than German or English speakers, and easier to understand as not tons of mute letters as in French.
@@shaunmckenzie5509 There, there, finally learning to at least hold insults! Your social skills are improving, you are welcome. The main difference with Italian is the hard "J" sound and that comes from Arabic, 8 centuries of invasion leave their mark. But then also with Celtic and Germanic languages, of which we have dents too.
I don't quite agree with that description. It's not that "feminine" articles turn "masculine" in German, it's that none of the definite articles are unique to a specific combination of gender/case/number. Logically, you might expect 24 distinct article variants: 3 genders × 4 cases × 2 numbers (singular, plural) = 24. But in reality there are only 6 different definite articles in German, each occurring in multiple positions of the full table: der (6), die (8), das (2), des (2), dem (2), den (4). Sure, "die" is the article for feminine/nominative/singular, but it is also used for feminine/accusative/singular as well as nominative and accusative plural for all three genders. Similarly, "der" is the article for masculine/nominative/singular, but it is also used for feminine/genitive/singular and feminine/dative/singular as well as genitive plural for all three genders. (Is it a good system? No. Does it make sense? Also no. But hey, it's how the language works.) At least in the plural table you get some simplification, but in the opposite way compared to Spanish: Instead of articles staying the same across cases, German plural articles stay the same across genders. For example, "den" is the dative plural article regardless of whether the noun is masculine, feminine, or neuter.
I am hooked after just two explanations! You are showing just how fascinating the history of language is! Love your style of explanation. If you had been my teacher at school I just might have learned to speak a second language.
as a hungarian, i really appreciate that english also doesnt have object genders (tho it has gender pronouns which give you guys quite a trouble nowadays), and although i speak german quite alright, i really dont know the gender articles. I totally gave up on french not in small part because of the gendered objects. Recently im very enthusiastic about japanese, beacuse it not only doesnt have genders for objects, theres also no plural form of nouns, and also you dont need to inflect verbs to match the person, so its great!
As aTurkish person speaking a god blessing non-gender language, I appreciated the non-genderless of English more, when I began learning French and German later in my life. In Turkish we also do not have "he-she-it" we just have a simple "o" and "onlar" as "they" in plural.
And only two irregular verbs in the entire language. I seriously preferred learning 2000 kanji over having to deal with irregular verbs, noun cases, gender, articles, verb agreement, and all that crap
In traditional Westcountry dialects, countable objects like a newspaper or a stone can be referred to as "he" or "him" and mass nouns like sand or water are referred to as "it". I don't know whether this is a relic of the gender system or a later development after gramatical gender was lost, but I used to hear it regularly when I was a boy; "Pass 'im 'ere, youngun."
My neighbour, who has lived in the West Country all his life, does exactly that. A plant in his garden is 'im and the coal, for he still has a weekly delivery, is 'it'. It doesn't seem to bear any relationship to the gender in other Germanic languages. For example in modern German 'plant' is 'die Pflanze' (feminine). So what I read about the male /female genders in Dutch being rolled into a common gender rings true for English as commonly spoken in the West Country.
Fascinating as ever! Other Germanic languages are also in the process of losing their grammatical gender- in Dutch, Danish and Swedish they still use neuter but masculine and feminine have merged into 'common' gender. Perhaps a similar thing happened in England in the Middle Ages. When I was studying Spanish and German at the same time, I had a similar feeling when it comes to the genders of objects not matching up. In German you say 'der Tisch' (masculine) for a table and 'la mesa' (feminine) in Spanish, I can see a situation where the English simply gave up with gender once Norman French had been introduced.
I like it that in Dutch we call common gender, commuun genus (dutchified Latin) or zijdig (sided) and neuter is called onzijdig (non-sided). But what I think is strange, it was also in the video, that diminutives are always neuter. In Dutch we ‘de man’ (the man, common gender) en ‘het mannetje’ (the little man, neuter) and ‘de vrouw’ (the woman, common gender) and ‘het vrouwtje’ (the little woman, neuter). The strange thing is that if we did the same as in English (they don’t use or don’t have a diminutive) and use the little man, literally ‘de kleine man’ in Dutch, it doesn’t change to neuter, it stays common gender. This in contrary to ‘het mannetje’ which is neuter. So in English it is in both cases the little man while in Dutch we can use ‘het mannetje’ en ‘de kleine man’ which have different genders.
Another example: “sun” is masculine in Spanish (el sol) and feminine in German (die Sonne), while “moon” is feminine in Spanish (la luna) and masculine in German (der Mond). Apparently, in Arabic, like German, “sun”(الشمس - ash-shams) is feminine, while “moon” (القمر - al-qamar) is masculine.
@@romanr.301 I agree with the Arabic and Deutsch, as women are constant in their presence and shining warmth, as it were, men (look down, lads) are constantly changing, including from full to...insomma, è evidente vero? ; )
In Danish the “gender” is between et and en. It’s not technically called Gender and it isn’t assigned to be masculine or feminine, but it works the same way.
English lost all its genders in a similar process that leads vulgar latin to lose its neuter gender (that's why all romance languages, except for Romanian, have only 2 genders). The reason is very simple: Phonological change. Genders are usually marked in the end of the words. As soon as the native speakers of some language start to reduce the words and eat the end of them (something very common in English), genders are lost. So, for exemple, in Spanish is, in general, the vowel "a" that indicates the feminine gender, while the vowel "o" usually indicates the masculine gender. Chica alta (tall girl) Chico alto (tall boy) If, for some phonological evolution, Spanish native speakers start to reduce vowels in Spanish and end up eliminating the final vowels in the words, then there won't be any distinction between both genders, so no genders anymore. Chic alt That's also the reason English and the Romance languages lost their cases.
Found your channel yesterday...the how to read French one. I'm really enjoying watching these, you present them so well. I've always been interested in language and it's origins. I speak Italian, Greek and terrible French. Words are fascinating and there is so much here I didn't know. Thank you, I'll keep watching.
Reading Stephen King's "It" in Spanish (many, many years back, this may have changed in the meantime), the first time "it" is mentioned, there is a lenthy footnote on gramatical differences in English and Spanish to explain the use of "eso" in the book for lack of a neuter personal pronoun in Spanish. The title of the book was still "it" though
LMAO! Thanks for the explanation. I live in Chile and laughed my arse off when trying to figure out what the title _should_ be in Spanish when the remake came out. "Lo" or "Eso." sound ridiculous.
I have heard a theory that the reason English grammar became greatly simplified was a direct result of the Norman conquest. The Normans couldn't be bothered to learn Old English, but they still needed to communicate with their subjects, so a creole or pidgin English emerged that was simpler for both to learn, and the "new" English eventually replaced the old one. Am I right or was the eventual loss of genders in English unrelated to William the Conqueror?
Yep. Look at Afrikaans which creolised from a huge number of languages thanks to Dutch settlers, Malay and Indian slaves, Bushmen and others integrating into the same society. Afrikaans is incredibly easy to learn and has a very efficient grammar system. For example, it only has one form of 'to be'.
Yes, Anglo-Norman is the actual language used then, however old english already had oddities from the german mother tongue of the anglo saxons, its a northern german language, but it seems to have picked up odities from the people the anglo saxons killed, the native britons of England, and then merged with Anglo-norman.. for example, the video says there is no gender, but "it" is the neuter gender, and English has that. A language with no neuter gender refers to everything as "leave him/her on the table" not "leave it on the table", some languages have no "it"
Theory I like is that the creolization happened, but it was due to interaction between Old English and Old Norse... the genders didn't quite match up between the two (a given word might be masculine in one and feminine in the other), so they just got rid of the whole schmeer.
This simplification of the grammar is a blessing for everyone who learns English as a foreign language. On the other hand the Norman conquest also brought many French words into English, increasing the vocabulary significantly. The basic vocabulary of English you need to learn is quite big. E.g. when referring to the animal suus scrofa domesticus English uses "pig", "swine" and "hog" in parallel for no real reason. To make it even more confusing when it is going to be eaten it becomes "pork" (from French). And secondly, with these changes in the spoken language and the Norman-French influence, the spelling of English became a complete mess. English spelling almost lacks any logic, for many words you have to memorize both, the pronounciation and the spelling. This is why spelling contests exist in English speaking countries. In most languages (Spanish, Italian, Hungarian, Slavic languages ...) such a contest would be completely pointless as the spelling strictly mirrors the pronounciation.
Fascinating stuff. Love the series. I only speak two languages English and Profane. Profane does away with many parts of speech like adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions and interjections and really only retains nouns and verbs. Sometimes it is best to be simple to get your message across.
These profane words have often been referred to as Language enhancers As for me - having learned five languages by age five and adding other later - I can comfortably curse in ten languages if need be - however I refrain from cursing where possible. The advantage to speaking two or more languages = even when one in not fluent - is listening to the conversations of others - particularly when these people don't know or suspect that someone around then understands the language - A is said in Spanish Pared tiene oidos
When I worked in Saudi Arabia with my small team of TCNs, I felt it was my duty to instruct them in art of speaking english colourfully. To wit 'fxxxxxxg this!' and 'fxxxxxxg that!' and 'txsspxt!' and 'wxxxxr!' etc. I like to think I had enhanced their chances when applying for their next employment during interviews. A likely scenario springs to mind .... Interviewer - "Do you speak english?" Applicant - "Fxxxxxg right, I do, cxxt!"
@@Blurb777 It's not completely unheard of. Kids are ridiculously good at picking up languages through exposure, certainly good enough to pick up at least the basics of multiple language if there is a wide and consistent variety of languages.
As a native Spanish speaker myself, having realized English objects are non-gendered was something that relieved me. When I studied French, the whole gender assignment towards objects was super natural, but just like the apple example, Spanish and French disagree with some other examples, such as account (compte: Feminine in Spanish, masculine in French) or vehicle (voiture: Masculine in Spanish, feminine in French). In times of doubt, I just look it up and that's it. 😊
As a native French speaker learning Spanish ATM, the difference in gender doesn't bother me when the words are completely different (la voiture, el coche) but when they're similar it really messes with my brain (la vidéo, el video / la couleur, el color / etc.) haha!
When I was in the US Army stationed in Germany, I was told to say "duh" if I didn't know which article to use because the Germans would know what I meant. What you didn't cover in here is that depending on the part of speech or tense, those basic der, die and das, would morph into several other articles, such as dem and den, among others (been years and I can't remember them all).
In German, my mother tongue, it must be most confusing for those about to learn German, that feminine article "die" becomes "der" (exactely the masculine form) when used in the Dativ case: "Die Schule" ["the school"] becomes "in der Schule" ["at school"] / "Ich gehe zur (zu der) Schule" ["I'm going to school"] .
@@michaelwurthner8505 I studied German in high school for two years (before transferring to a school that only offered Spanish as a foreign language option). I found articles the most confusing part of the language. I had less trouble years later studying Russian in university, and Cyrillic is much different from just adding on some umlauts or an Eszett. I enjoyed studying foreign languages, but have never become fluent. it's difficult when there's no one to practice on.
German doubles up on the genders by making you also modify adjectives based on the gender, case, and whether you're using an indefinite article, a definite article, or no article at all. There are three tables of adjective endings you need to memorize. It's a nightmare.
In Portuguese, due to the difficulty of communication between Europe and South America in the XX century, many recently imported words were adopted in different ways, for example in Portugal 'a console' became 'uma consola', in the feminine, but in Brazil it became 'um console', in the masculine.
Wow, I had no idea the English language used to have genders. Thank you for the very informative and also entertaining video! As a side note, Romanian also has 3 genders. The neutral noun is masculine when it is singular, but feminine as a plural.
So glad YT recommended this channel! I have so often wondered about weird plurals in the English language and about when it stopped using genders. Rob explains things so clearly and precisely - with a brilliant touch of humour thrown in! I live in Italy so am very familiar with masculine/feminine and asking permission to give someone the "tu" (or the "thou" 😆). Thank you for the great education and entertainment 👏👏
I recall my freshman year German class, our teacher, a native English speaker but someone fluent in German, pointed out the way that we use gender for ships in English. She also pointed out child/children and goose/geese to point out how irregular plurals work for the majority of German nouns.
It’s funny coz I’m a native English speaker but always find it strange when people gender a ship, or inanimate object. Learning German though you quickly get used to it
I read that with the collision of Norse and Anglo-Saxon cultures there was a simplification of grammar as the languages were melding and changing each other.
Yup! I used to blame the Normans, but by late Old English, a lot of grammatical simplification was already underway due to Norse influence. This includes the case system and even verb endings. Normans were more responsible for the change in vocabulary to Latinate words and the extinction or narrowing of native Anglo-saxon words.
Thank you for bringing Old Norse into the history of Old English! Sometimes teachers/writers skip straight from Old English into OE + Norman French and ignore the couple of centuries when English inhabitants and Danish or Norwegian newcomers interacted. A couple of points: first, for Americans, blond/blonde spelling is a little different. Adjective (for men or women) is blond; noun for women only is a blonde, whereas a man would be a blond (not often used). Second, in Old English, the personal pronouns for the third person (he, it, they) began with "h," but the endings made it clear which word was which. But when the various endings began to blur into one, probably because of the influence of Old Norse (as this video says) and then of Norman French, confusion arose, and English borrowed "th" for the plural (they, them, their) from Old Norse and "sh" for the subjective form of the feminine singular (she)--but "her" was retained, possibly because it wasn't too like "him: or "his." Quite commonsensical! Where the "sh" came from is not clear; probably not directly from "seo." Finally, "Man" in Old English basically meant "human being"; a male man was a carlman, and a female man was a wifman--carl meaning a man, and wif a woman or wife. "Carl" was used in the Middle Ages as a term for a man (male), but in time "man" came to be the preferred word. And "man" was dropped from "wif." Lastly, in American English there's a further step where "she" is now almost never used for countries and seldom for ships (or cars) except by people who are in the business and/or cling to the time-honored usage!
Well I got my own bit wrong wer or were means an adult male not a human, Carl or kerl is the origin of the term churl, meaning rude and/or peasant, early middle ages would have been ceorl a social rank just below Thane and above slave or indentured servitude??? So I wonder if OP confused what in essence is a Freeman (ceorlman or carlman) for male human instead of free person
@@alanthomas2064 I am pretty certain the various words were from the same original Old (or Photo) Germanic root. OE also had the word cheorl (I may be misspelling this!) which gave us the modern English churl--but it wasn't derogatory, it meant a man of the ordinary people, not a nobleman (eorl, or modern earl) and not a slave, just your common-or-garden commoner.
"Wifmann" being male makes sense from a German perspective. It seems to be a composite of wif(?) and "mann" in the sense of human. In German the article always follows the gender of the second part of a composite.
@@Timelord79 i think and correct me if im wrong, old english words for man and woman were "wer" and "wif" with "mann" being the neuter term for any individual. over time "mann" became the gendered term for masculine individuals with "wif" combining with "mann" to become "wifmann" or feminine individual. "wifmann" is in effect the origin of the word woman. we still see the use of the term "wer" for a masculine individual in cases like werewolf which is a man-wolf or a wolfish man. also "wif" can be found in terms like wife, a female spouse.
Having only just discovered your delightful linguistic channel, I can only now comment. I was born and raised in the Netherlands, but taught myself to read English when I was 3, and my mother taught me to read Dutch when I was 5... Anyway. I once had a Dutch teacher in school and he invited questions we had about the language that he hadn't covered. So I asked why ships and cars - for instance - were called 'she' and 'her' His unbelievably rude answer - that stopped me in my question-tracks completely - was that 'anything you can put something 'into', with a rude gesture, was called 'she' or 'her'. Dutch is a very quirky language though, and I believe people who say that it's one of the hardest languages to learn, because where it does have rules, there usually are more exceptions to those rules than 'followers'!
I am so much in love with your videos. In my country India, Hindi is not gender neutral, it has two genders for everything, Sanskrit has three, while some languages are gender neutral too, for example, Bangla (Bengali) is gender neutral. When a Bengali speaking speaks Hindi, they find it very troubling to fix gender. More trouble is when a "Marathi" speaker and a Hindi speaker exchange notes, because both aren't gender neutral, but things that are feminine in Marathi are masculine in Hindi. So interesting.
@@thoutube9522 yes, but it seems to me that in many languages nouns that end in A are feminine. I know only few European languages, so please correct me, if I am wrong.
@@pawelzielinski1398Yes, perhaps there is something intrinsic in that. Or maybe it's because many Western European languages have Latin roots. I'm not sure if that's true of Slavic languages.
@@thoutube9522 What is true? Latin had immense influence on Polish. Until at least XVI century that was the language used in any serious literature (poetry and prose) and science. The most famous Polish scientist of these days was fluent in Latin. His seminal work was also written and published in Latin and had profoundly changed how people perceive our place in the universe. My wild guess is that about 10-15% of Polish words have Latin roots. Maybe more. And when it comes to law or medicine or theology/church affairs it's probably much higher. That's why it has always been easy for me to recognize the meaning of so called "difficult" English words (as they are the same or very similar in Polish because they often have Latin or Greek origin), but the real challenge was with native Germanic words in English.
I've been slowly working through all the videos on this channel, I do love all the quirks of our language. At a glance, our language seems so different from every other European language, but when you turn back the clock, those differences aren't so pronounced. I do like how "that" survived its initial meaning and became a pronoun for distant objects.
In the French school system, Greek used to be taught as a mainstream course. That went away only about 40 to 50 years ago I think. However, today, latin is still taught as an option. My son's studying latin in the French school system. Although I hated languages as a kid, I now think that's so awesome. In the US system, you're generally stuck with only Spanish or German. However, you sometimes get more options in the French school system, such as Italian or Portuguese. I'm guessing it's simply because France is in Europe after all. English doesn't count as a foreign language in the French school system (i.e. it is mandatory). So students may end up studying up to four languages, such as my son: French, English, Spanish and Latin.
@@szk4023 French and Spanish are sibling languages and are descended from Latin. While still no easy feat, it should be noted that learning is best done when ideas already have a natural connection between them. Most formal education treats each subject in isolation when there are many commonalities in the abstract. In my opinion, this treatment of knowledge does a disservice to the general public by creating schisms between ideas that would otherwise be connected. It prevents creativity. Take Hedy Lamar, for example. Very little to no formal training in the sciences, yet she was able to combine player piano technology with wireless communications to give us the frequency hopping encryption that is so ubiquitous today that nobody even stops to give thanks to a disgraced actress from the thirties for giving us secure wireless communications everywhere we are: WiFi, Bluetooth, Cellular. All of this was possible because she wasn’t constrained by formal “education.” She was free to let ideas mingle in her mind unlike somebody who constrains themselves within the confines of their expertise. The mind is amazing. Just think, a baby learns to see color within two months after birth. The brain naturally develops millions of simple languages to help describe the reality outside and to mold it to the simulations ran in our minds. People never stop to think about how “color” is just a symbolic language the visual cortex “speaks” to the prefrontal cortex to describe the electromagnetic ripples that tingle the photoreceptors in the retina. Light is the physical reality, and color is the language created to describe it. Want a good exercise to demonstrate this? Try describing “blue” to somebody that has been blind their whole life. It’s impossible. Their brains never developed the language of color, so they have no way of translating your words into an experience they’ve never had.
@@szk4023 Latin and Greek do not count as "foreign languages". They are dead languages. When I was in high-school (in Belgium, in the early 1980s), I had two foreign languages (Dutch and English), about 3 hours/week. On top of that, I had Latin (6h/week) and ancient Greek (5h/week). I think basic Latin (2h/week) is still the norm in the first year of high school, then it becomes optional. But I'm not quite sure.
Fascinating, informative video, Rob, thank you! At school, I often inwardly sighed when we had the added work of all those noun genders in learning Latin, French, and German. And, then, the added burden of tying in the all those correct adjectival agreements! But, to be fair, it was nice when they started being more & more automatically fixed in the mind, and we (well, mostly!) got it right ;-) . Japanese, on the other hand, was refreshingly different in that regard (plus, I was even younger then, and more receptive, probably with better brain plasticity or something, lol). 🙂
As a native Russian, I can say that genders in German are extremely difficult as they don't have define rules. You have to remember a gender for every word. Also, old English had the same approach. The only way is to remember a gender for every single word. In Russain, it's way more simple. You can always define gender by a word's ending even if you hear the word for the first time.
@@arthurhenriqued.a.ribeiro2078 If I'm not mistaken it works approximately for 70% of words. So the main problem of the approach is you can't rely on it. For instance "Name" is not femonine. There are cases when the sense of a word differs depending what gender you use, for example "Mark". It can be feminine or neutrum and it impacts on the word meaning. In Russian it's just impossible.
@@Наблюдатель-д4с Another example is "See" which can be either masculine or feminine, depending on meaning (m: lake, f: sea). And the masculine article "der" is used as a feminine article in other cases (dative and genitive). Much less intuitive than word ending agreement
@@itsgiag As an Spaniard myself, i think they are 'easy' for native speakers but a nuisance for anybody else. Yes the general rule is that words ending in 'a' are femenine and words ending in 'o' are masculine, but not only this has exceptions, there are lots of words than don't end in 'a' or 'o'. There is also the rule of no putting 'la' before some words that start with 'a'. For example, 'el águila calva', where 'águila' is feminine, 'calva' is the feminime form of the adjective 'calvo', but 'el' is the masculine definite article.
I think the “she” for ships probably comes from a lot of interaction with the Spanish on the Atlantic in the 16th and 17th century. “La Fragata” and “La Caravela” would have been types of Spanish ships that would have been common and were feminine in gender.
@@Teun_Jac Even without that stereotype about women, there is a near universal traditional of giving ships female or non-human names, like Elizabeth or Titanic.
My two first languages are Spanish and Portuguese, so I kinda take all of this gender mess for granted. It helps that genders on ES and PT tend to agree, but it's still that kind of complexity you learned as a kid and dont think too much about. I don't think i would be able to learn another language with genders.
@@Blankult em português e espanhol não faz tanta diferença o gênero. Você vai entender mesmo que a pessoa diga "o caneta" ou "os caneta". Mas em línguas como alemão faz muita diferença, porque os adjetivos não só concordam em gênero, número e grau como em português, mas também concordam com a função (declinação) se é do caso dativo, genitivo, nominativo ou acusativo. Em português a gente só preservou a declinação para pronomes, tipo eu, me e mim (eu sou. Ele me viu. Isso é para mim). Mas em alemão e outras línguas adjetivos e artigos também sofrem declinação. Só que para saber como declinar você tem que saber também o gênero. E aí pode acontecer de você falar algo incompreensível. Como se em português alguém falasse "livro, dar ele ela". Quem deu o livro pra quem? Está no passado, presente ou imperativo? Teoricamente alemão só tem três gêneros: der = masculino, die = femino, das = neutro. Mas na prática, você tem que escolher entre der, die, das, den, dem, des, a depender do gênero e caso, e repetir a mesma lógica para os adjetivos. Tudo concorda em gênero, número, grau e caso.
Romance genders generally agree, not just among two so closely related languages as Castilian and Portuguese but also with Italian, French, etc. That's because Latin also had genders (although it had three, incl. neuter, now generally lost, typically into masculine form).
My native language is Spanish. I've learned other romance languages: Portuguese, French and Italian. Most of the time genders are the same but when they don't, at first I tend to make mistakes. I still can't believe, for instance, milk in these three languages is masculine but in my mother tongue it is feminine. My mind is like 🤯 The milk (English) O leite (Portuguese) Le lait (French) Il latte (Italian) La leche (Spanish) This is just one example. I'm already used to these differences but it takes some time to get used to
My understanding is that Middle English was basically a creole, starting as a trade language between English speaking natives and Old French speaking Normans. Grammatical genders and cases were lost because creoles tend to jettison as much as they can to make them simpler and easier to learn and use. Modern English emerged when the ruling class gave up French as the language of law and government and began speaking English; this may have been a major cause of the Great Vowel Shift.
I think given the timing it is also possible that differences between how the Anglo-Norse and Anglo-Saxon cultures ended up settling on a standard gender for everything might have already been making things awkward. Seems plausible you could already have inconsistencies between the dialects there which had yet to be ironed out in the time since the Anglo-Saxons had taken over again. Then these French speakers show up in the 11th century with no doubt yet another bunch of inconsistencies between genders. Would seem to make sense also given it was the Northern dialects that seemed to get the idea of hey lets just get rid of that headache entirely first. Granted the other languages would all have been more similar almost mutually intelligible in fact but not identical, but if anything that would make the pattern easier for some monks or something to probably notice and maybe start to think of that idea. I say monks as they were frequently likely to actually be literate and spent considerable time reading, writing, and copying manuscripts so I'd imagine they would be better placed to notice something like this. There are certainly partial translations of scripture in English that go back far enough (7th century for some portions of the bible for example) to see this evolution over those centuries.
@@seraphina985 I'm with you except for the monks! While monks would be best placed to record and analyse the evolution of language, I highly doubt they would set the trend. Language evolves as it is spoken - by the common majority - hence our widely differing regional accents and dialects. Also, given the general attitude of the typical British working man or woman, the idea of them trying to speak 'like those daft posh monks' makes me giggle.
@@Fledhyris I meant that more in the sense of them noticing and raising awareness then the people deciding that all this palaver every time a different rich b****d takes over the local castle is a fools game.
Also the Normans were basically christian vikings who spoke norman french and would have understood other viking dialects so yea proably made it easier all round to jetison the unecessary.
Icelandic is kinda similar, we still use to some point sá (masc.), sú(fem) and það (but still the definitive article is used more in the ending of words now, adding n's or ð's). And like in old english we don't have an indefinite article.
Great video! My language is Slavic, and we also have three genders, but no articles at all. Both nouns and adjectives have to be in the same gender though, as well as numbers, which my British friends say is maddening. :-)
@@RobWords It all changes 😄 For instance, you would say "Vidim dva siva psa" (I see two grey dogs, where dog is masculine), but also "Vidim dvije sive mačke" (I see two grey cats, where cat is feminine). All nouns, adjectives, pronouns and numbers are always declined, which means that they all change slightly depending on the case that they're in. And we have seven cases 😂😂
@@RobWords it’s easy when you speak other Slavic language. English doesn’t have genders but I always think of genders in my native tongue. For example, hammer must be masculine ;) and camera is feminine because of a ending. That rule is true for Slavic and Italian language. Just like with names - Anna, Alexa, Joanna you know that these must be names for girls.
Utterly fascinating. As a German, and with some of the recent Gender debates, the modern state of things was rather known to me, but the look into old English was both insightful and amusing. Love it!
For me, the worst part of German isn't even the genders per se, or even their declensions, but rather how every single word in-between changes in very specific ways, you have to put an "n" there, an "e" there, an "r" there, it's a nightmare. I don't think I'll ever be able to speak German without sounding like an obvious foreigner with a botched grammar but so be it, I have accepted it and still want to learn it.
I think you just need enough exposure and correct practice so if you say ich liebe meine Hund und meine Vater, it sounds weird and you naturally correct it. I think partly a noun you learn needs to feel like the gender it belongs to, so that I’m a sentence you get a feeling of what changes need to occur if it’s masc, fem or neuter
I'm trying to sharpen up my German, and having forgotten noun genders is the worst challenge. There are some patterns I remember, but there was a reason why teachers had us always give the article when saying a noun: das Haus, die Brille, der Bleistift (I think). There's a book called Der, Die, Das written by a guy who did some computer analysis to try to find more patterns, but basically the only solid way to remember them all is to learn them with the nouns. And Germans grow up doing that, so they're just natural to them.
See, this is one of the reasons why I like learning East and Southeast Asian languages; very few if any have grammatical gender. And this coming from a Spanish speaker, who’s used to it. 😅
When I was learning Portuguese, I really got to experience the confusion of gendered words. It's actually kind of fun to think about the relationship of similar words that have opposite genders (for example: shoe is "calçado" and sidewalk is "calçada" -- it's almost like they're mating, physically and linguistically).
In Slovene, an example of standard ending is: najstnik (m) = male (or unspecified) teenager najstnica (f) = female teenager Sonce (n) = Sun Sončnik (m) and sončnica (f) by word formation both mean "the Sun thing". But: sončnik (m) = a parasol sončnica (f) = a sunflower
@@heimdall1973 Hm. Fascinating. Both are related to the sun so it makes sense to link them linguistically. I just wonder how the original namer decided that a parasol should be masculine and a sunflower should be feminine. Anyway, thanks for the info!
@@jacobopstad5483 The same word construction turns krog (m) = solid circle into krožnik (m) = plate (to eat from) and krožnica (f) = circle edge. dim (m) = smoke dimnik (m) = chimney (or flue) dimnica (f) = smokehouse What makes any of these objects male/ female, I haven't a clue.
Enjoyed watching and learning new things. 😊 I'm Filipino, and although many of our words are bequeathed to us by Spain, the native language does not have gender, especially the pronouns. This is why so many Filipinos, more often than not, interchange he and she when speaking in English. It is common to hear something like, "My son told her teacher that she forgot her assignment."
@@RobWords If your Filipino friends have been living in UK, or abroad for quite a while, or are quite educated, they may not have that issue. It applies more to people here in my country, especially those who are not proficient in the language which, regretfully, are quite a lot.
@Victor K Yeah. I remember that from my Spanish back in university. 😊 Conjugation. O, as, a, amos, ais, an. And the ones for verbs ending in ER and IR. 😊 It was only years after I left uni when I met someone who told me that I need not use he or she in a sentence because the conjugation for third person makes it rather redundant. 😊
Being an American, living in Germany and learning German, I find your videos very interesting to see the similarities between German and Old English. Frawe and Frau.. fascinating
These similarities are of course not accidental. The word "Anglo-Saxon" refers to the Angles, who lived around today's border between Germany and Denmark, and the Saxons. Saxons in this context refers to those Saxons who lived on the North Sea coast of today's Germany and the Netherlands. Their dialects were early forms of German. When these people colonized/conquered Britain, the language evolving from their dialects became the new prestige language of the island, replacing the old Celtic languages. This is why Old English (also known as Anglo-Saxon) was extremely similar to Old Low German (the contemporary form of German spoken near the coast) and also to Old High German (the contemporary form of German spoken further south, ancestor of Standard German). The Celtic languages had some influence on English, mostly simplifying it but also adding a weird complication: Obligatory use of 'do' in negations. Then the Vikings came from Scandinavia and gave a slight north Germanic touch to English. Then French-speaking Vikings came from the north coast of France and brought a large supply of French vocabulary to English. By the way, the word 'frouwe' (standard Middle High German spelling) actually means noble lady. Over many centuries, Europeans have had the tendency to refer to women as if they had a higher social status than they actually had. This made the words gradually change their meanings. Today, in German a Frau is just any woman rather than a noble lady, and in fact, in some contexts politeness requires saying Dame instead even for a woman who is neither noble nor particularly refined. What was once the standard word for a woman, Weib/wife, has become the German word for a vulgar woman and the English word for a married woman. Similar things happened in the Romance languages.
What a wonderful video, and it's extremely rare that people take the time to pronounce German words properly. It seriously means a lot to us! Thank you! Subbed!
In Portuguese it is very easy, usually the genders of words ending in -a are feminine and nouns ending in -o are masculine. For example "mesa" (table) is feminine and "morro" (hill) is masculine. Easy peasy!
Except for the huge amount of words that doesn’t end in “a” or “o” (o cabide, a verdade, o lençol, a mão, o amor) and the ones that end in “o” or “a” but have opposite genders (a modelo, o clima, o dilema, a tribo, a radio)
@@gaborhertelendy absolutely no one in portuguese cares if it is masculine or feminine. Its not about giving the object a sexual gender, its about matching sounds.
I took a course in old and middle English when I was at school. I distinctly remember that I had to memorize different forms of the indefinite article for three geners, three numbers (sigular, dual and plural) and 5 cases (Nominative, Genitive, Dative, Accusative and Ablative) in old English. They definitely existed at one point, and then only two forms remained. (Just like singular and plural forms of some nouns like man/men. )
The German word "das Mädchen" comes from the word "die Magd" (maiden, female servant), which turned into "das Mägdchen" and then got simplified to "das Mädchen", probably because in Northern German dialects, "g" [g] turns into [j], [χ] or [h], so people just omitted it completely. (Same with the English word "maiden")
@@tsuikr The grammatical features of languages must have consequences. Russian has far fewer irregularities than German, but it compensates for that with an overabundance of useless rules, so many in fact, that by the time people speak their first grammatical sentence they have already submitted to so much that an Ivan the Terrible here and a Stalin there won't be much of an additional encumbrance..
@@peterjansen7929 Nonsense)) All those rules allow to condense a ton of meaning, overtones and info into very short phrases. Of course, it does have its linguistic "encumbrances" and oddities, but that's common to most languages that evolved over a long time. In fact, I find it's much deeper and varied in the "flavour" of meaning it can express, much more so than our English. Which don't make things any easier for Europeans in general. But for example Hindi speakers do have a certain affinity with it, it kind of, in a very remote way, reminds them of Sanskrit, or so I've been told.
Commonly misspelled in English is the loanword "fiancé." It's often misspelled because English speakers don't understand that "fiancé" refers to a man, and "fiancée" refers to a woman. This distinction is quite useful and efficient, avoiding the need to actually use more words to explain the gender of a person getting married.
Just like the blond(e) example RobWords used, this is because it comes directly from French. And because it started as an adjective and had that masc/feminine adjective modifier on it. A fiancé is someone you're engaged/betrothed to.
The older is the variant of a language, the closer it is to other Indo-European languages. For example, SE (m) and SEO (f) in old English, compare it to old Russian words meaning "this": SEY (m) and SEYA (f), in modern Russian they can be used in "high style" speech. THAT probably corresponds with ETOT, also meaning "this", or TOT ("that").
Wow, well noticed! Also there is the word SIYE for neutral gender, for example "сие деяние" (siye deyaniye) "this action". Sey, siya and siye (сей, сия, сие) literally means "this". The word "now" in Russian is "сейчас" (seychas) which was formed from "сей час" = "this hour". Also some grannies (babushkas =) ) say "сию минуту" (siyu minutu, also now, right now) which is "сия минута" (siya minuta = this minute) in nominative case, but "сию минуту" is accusative case what most likely means "в сию минуту" = "at this minute". Well, another modern word is "сегодня" = "today", which likely formed as ''в течение сего дня"="during this day" (сего дня (sego dnya) is genitive case), in nominative case "сей день" (sey den = this day)
Nope, OE sē is not related to Russian сей, it's actually related to Russian тот, with OE sē deriving from the animate declension while Russian тот comes from the inanimate declension of PIE demonstrative pronoun *só (with *tód being the inanimate form). Russian сей is actually related to OE hē whence Modern English "he", both coming from PIE deictic particle *ḱe.
Besides gender-specific pronouns, the only other thing English has as far as gender is gender-specific nouns, like "actor/actress," "waiter/waitress," "host/hostess," etc. However, other languages I've learned such as French have a gender distinction for other types of people, such as "lawyer," "nurse," "spouse," "fiancé," etc.
Blond/Blonde says hi, ok technically it's a loan word, but it's an adjective and I think that last non-noun to be commonly gendered, I think the 90's saw it's end and the end of school teachers throwing a hissy fit over it at least out loud, but it's still technically a gendered word in english that isn't just a noun.
The "ess" to distingush a female ":actor" for examble is on the way out. Using it in some circles is considered "bad form"' and anachronistic. There is also the more and more universal "-person" suffix. A female waiter is a waitperson, and even that moderation on usage will disappear. The being who brings your soup is the waiter, period..
A lot of these words will probably disappear, too. I know “actress” is being encouraged to be replaced by “actor” for all. We often just say “host” for everyone, too. I think it’s a matter of time.
This is so very interesting. I'm a native English speaker, who's studying Japanese, which is another genderless language (outside of the myriad of ways to say "I", but that's a whole other ball of wax 😅), I have really zero frame of reference for how gendered language works. It's so cool to learn this history to my native language. People already say modern English is difficult, I guess they should be glad we have what we do now instead of this old English. 😂
@@dodgeplow This is assuming they have frequently encountered and have enough of an interest in Spanish to have some sense of the langauge beyond 'this sounds like Spanish'. For example, I sometimes watch Japanese TV, but I didn't know that Japanese doesn't utilize gendered language much until just now. However, I do know about Spanish's gendered articles because I learned a few words and phrases online as a kid (and I took a couple years of French).
@@georgeandrews1394 An assumption, but I'd think he'd have heard plenty of it. It's the language spoken by the second most number of people on this planet after Mandarin Chinese. If he's in the Americas or the UK it'll be fairly present in typical culture. Now if he's in Oceana, less likely, but plenty of international movies and other culture media make it a frequent encounter to English speakers.
Japanese has word classes aka genders. They define what counting word you must use for correct Japanese. Also in Japanese it's best to avoid saying pronouns whenever possible. Either by just dropping them or replacing them with a name or proper noun
old english would probably be easier because it seemed way more well-structured. you'd learn rules instead of doing everything case-by-case, word-by-word like modern english.
As an English language learner myself, I really find it much more helpful than other European languages that English doesn't have genders of objects. and I’ve always wondered why English is like that. So this video was really interesting for me and I really enjoyed it. Thanks a lot for sharing this useful and intriguing information.
It is easier in Danish and Swedish. Den (it) = common gender item, det (it) = neuter gender item, han (he) = masculine person, hun (she) = feminine person. Only items can be common gender though
@@RobWords Actually, English does have common gender--in the plural. That's why the personal pronoun for all plural nouns is "they." In the singular, we may not have grammatical gender, but we do have natural gender, so we have the pronouns "he," "she," and "it." In vernacular English, "they" has been used for centuries as a common gender pronoun in the singular when the sex of the referent in unclear. For example, "If someone took something, they must pay for it" in the vernacular, as opposed to standard English "If someone took something, he must pay for it."
My wife’s cousin married a French girl and, when I was learning French, he explained to me that you need to learn the gender right from the start. Just like in the USA you need to say not just the name of the town but also the state that it comes from, like Paris, Texas, or Nashville, Tennessee (as opposed to Nashville, Indiana). So you always learn “une baguette” or “la table” instead of baguette or table. It’s been a useful trick for me.
Yes, since you almost always have to stick a definite or indefinite article in front of a noun, might as well learn it as a pair of words and that will clue you into gender.
This naming states thing makes total sense within a broad context, so that people know where you're referring to; and if I went to the States, I would tell people I was from Manchester, England, for the same reason. But do people use them locally, too? If you live in Tennessee, and took a trip to Nashville in the same state, would you still tell everyone 'I'm heading up to Nashville, Tennessee' or would you shorten it because it's then assumed you mean the closest city of that name?
@@Dracopol Except if there's an vowel in front of the noun, then, you only have l' so you have no clue as to gender. A better idea is to make your la or le sound alike so you are not heard making a mistake. LOLOL!
@@Fledhyris Right! I once told my 80 something mother that my son was headed by ship--he was in the Canadian Navy Reserves and stationed in Halifax, Nova Scotia--to Sydney. "Australia?" my mother asked, sounding worried. The Olympic Games had just been held there so I guess my mother had Sydney, Australia on her mind. "No," I laughed, "Sydney, Nova Scotia!" The ship didn't even get that far. Too much ice.
Thank you SO much... I have wondered about this for years... I had personally come to the conclusion that you suggest here - that as languages blended - and genders conflicted - they just naturally fell away. Cannot tell you how happy I am to come across your videos.
When You said NEUTER, I was afraid it meant what we do to cats and dogs! lol! When I studied English Grammar, I never knew it had had genders. They just didn't teach us that. Your video is very educational, and interesting! Thanks for all the information about ancient English! ~Janet in Canada
The classic "The Story of English" series by (I think) the BBC or maybe PBS or some combination, also talked about standardization of plurals being attributable to the complications of language in the Danelaw. Considering that these are the kind of simplifications that happen in pidgins and creoles generally, it makes sense to me for the loss of gender to be from that source.
The difference in spelling for blond/blonde isn't really an "English" thing, because it exists solely because we borrowed the word (and its different, gender-related spellings) from French. Incidentally, although I agree with the blond/blonde rule as you state it, the distinction isn't universally accepted by all authoritative references... I would argue that English still has three genders, since every single noun is replaceable by one of three pronouns: he (masculine), she (feminine), or it (neuter). It's just that the vast, vast majority of modern English nouns are neuter. And as you mention towards the end of your video, certain nouns which most speakers would think of as neuter today (such as car, ship, country) often took the feminine pronoun (she/her) in the recent past (and somewhat continues today, but sounds dated). After several more common European languages, I'm learning Turkish and I appreciate its lack of grammatical gender ("o" can be translated as "he," "she," or "it" in English, for example). Without genders, there is only one form of an adjective to learn, and only one indefinite article (they use the number "one" -- "bir" -- as an indefinite article when necessary). The definite article is totally different from how we conceive it in English, as they use the accusative suffix, so some would say it's not really a definite article at all. But at least it has totally regular rules for use, its form depending on euphony (how the root word is spelled/pronounced, a bit like our a/an variation in English) rather than any aspect (such as gender) of the word itself.
@@ahmeth.k.2566 I used the wrong terminology, I apologize. I'm referring to what Lewis V. Thomas calls "the objective definite suffix" in the classic "Elementary Turkish." It is also called an "objective suffix" in "The Delights of Learning Turkish" by Yaşar Esendal Kuzucu. It's the -i, -ı, -ü, -u suffix.
The word brunette also reflects this. Brunet is the word for a male with brown hair but no one uses it. Again I think this is the French again since it reflects a diminutive.
I think the video's example is wrong. Blond doesn't change as an adjetive (blond lass), but only as a noun (he's a blond). And yes, it's silly that the examples we have are lifted from French (fiancée), so English doesn't really quite have them
@@rafaelq.1689 because English doesn't have it anymore. Also modern English especially American English has completely discarded one gendered term as a noun, how can they be expected to keep the adjective and it's gendered spellings. Most people I've asked this think blonde/blond is how the Americans and Brits spell things different kind of like color and colour (if they know at all.) Almost no one knows brunet/brunette. Could we use dom/domme (lol)? Still all these come from French. I don't know an English word that has retained both spellings/pronunciations like these French borrowed ones. So we rid ourselves of them then burned all the evidence.
modern English does not even "kind of" have genders because of the pronouns, English instead divides pretty much all living things by their physical number, age and sex (the number of divisions made in practice varies based on a whole bunch of factors, you'd be surprised how long the list can get for one kind of farm animal), using a different word for each relevant combination, and the pronouns reflect this. A lot of ignorant people have put about a large amount of of confusing stupidity due to a combination of not being able to get their head around this fact and the fact that English uses the word "gender" for four very different but tangentially related things: Grammatical gender, (an agreement system used in many languages. what gender a word has is usually more down to it's pronunciation or spelling than any real association with a given sex), biological sex (because the word "sex" was becoming badly overloaded, while prudes and immature idiots were making life difficult for the bureaucrats of the time about it), specific social constructs (gender roles. the individual responsible for most of the nonsense surrounding this was a journalist who later admitted to pretty much fabricating the bulk of it in order to meet a deadline. didn't stop various factions latching onto the idea and exploiting it to the hilt for various ends), and what ultimately amounts to an aspect of neurology and psychology (gender identity. transgender people and the like. I'm of the opinion that a lot of baggage and nonsense could have been avoided if a better term had been chosen, because malicious and/or stupid actors on all sides of That issue have run the ability to use the terms to conflate the concepts into the Ground in their rhetoric. often actually undermining their own point if the listener actually applies an ounce of logic to the argument... not that most do, tribalism and ideology being what they are).
Super!! As Spanish, we also (of course) have moved on a lot...particularly since we became 'democratic'. Politics are also the road to allow things to be 'accepted' mire easily as society develops and accepts or chooses to 'let go', be free...Look at all the English words in modern Spanish! Technology, Art, Sports, Politics etc...I.LOV E YOUR VIDEOS!! 7:16
Thanks for the content. I've just found this channel. I thought I was the weird guy who studied the roots of the English Language. I've done it ever since I learned in a book, as an aside in the story, that Polis comes from Greek, and means city, so Policeman literally means 'Man of the City'.
Fun fact: the correlation between object genders in German and Portuguese is almost perfectly negative. Hence, we in Brazil use that when we want to make a caricature of a German trying to speak Portuguese. Just turn the V's into F's, "ão" into "on" and switch all genders. Kind of like the backwards Я for Яussian.
I guess you are overstating the negative correlation a bit. Between German and French (which should mostly have the same genders as Portuguese) the same applies. Some of the most prominent offenders are Sun and Moon (the Sun is masculine in Romance languages and the Moon feminine, and in Germany both genders are reversed) and the large number of French loan words ending in -age in German, which for some reason all became feminine in German even though they are originally masculine. Except of course for 'la plage' (beach, feminine in French), which doesn't exist as a loanword in German, and is translated by the masculine noun 'der Strand'.
@@TheSandkastenverbot Als Witz bezogen auf ein fast zufälliges Verhältnis wäre es langweilig. Was den Witz gut macht ist doch gerade die Tatsache, dass das Verhältnis eben wirklich nicht zufällig ist sondern bei Substantiven ohne natürliches Geschlecht (sowas wie Frau oder Ochse) die beiden Sprachen wirklich öfter das entgegengesetzte Geschlecht haben als dasselbe. Wer das nicht weiß, unterschätzt aber den ursprünglichen Witz, und deshalb hab ich mir erlaubt die Pointe zu erklären und ein bisschen weiter auszuführen.
My first language is Spanish . I use to love telling my over protective mom that I was hanging out with my friend because in English friend doesn’t have a gender like in Spanish. So I would say it and act like I already gave her enough information 😂
So when you read a headline in an English paper: "Teacher had sex with student" you really have not many details what was going on. In Polish the same headline would clearly indicate the gender of both people involve in the situation. Same with German. English creates ambiguity.
@@pawelzielinski1398yes it creates ambiguity in situations where the gender is of interest, but I'd argue that the majority of the time it's actually superfluous information and therefore creates not only needless complexity in the language, but also keeps this silly idea alive that people's gender is so core to their makeup that it needs to be taken into consideration in every circumstance.
@@briandhamby nah, if you are native speaker...then you don't have to learn those genders... besides having a crappy spelling system is even worse and it's way more stupid because people can actually do something about it and they don't. It takes the Japanese like 20 years to learn how to spell college-level words... in Italian, Spanish, Finnish, etc it only takes you half a year.
I love your videos, Talking about gender - you should try Icelandic! It makes German look easy! I lived there and for ages was scared to open my mouth and speak any, even though I'd been going to classes there. One night though I was at a party and I noticed that people were making grammatical "mistakes" all around me - and it wasn't just because they were drunk (which they were!)
0:22 "...including pretty much all the other European languages..." So, if anybody is wondering about possible exceptions, Hungarian doesn't have grammatical differences based on gender. That includes even "he" and "she and you can just use "ő", to refer to either. So simple! I'm sure that some speakers of gendered languages would argue that somehow the added complexity of their language serves some sort of indispensable, useful purpose but once you need to arbitrarily assign gender to inanimate objects and do complex and exact matches (I know this varies from language to language) for nouns, verbs, pronouns, adjectives, even articles and who knows what else and dealing with EXCEPTIONS to the rules, not to mention possible regional differences 🤪, I think the argument wears pretty thin and just comes down to highly subjective aesthetics and just following traditions. On the downside, starting with a grammatically gender neutral language as the first one and learning gendered languages later, even after many years, I still occasionally slip up in another language... Of course, every language has weird complexities that are not essential and Hungarian is not different. Some languages have differences in how the language is used, based on levels (sometimes multiple!) of politeness or age?! 🤪
Instead, we have our case system and definite and indefinite conjugation topped with wovel harmony. But nevertheless, in any languages, if you dare to communicate and the recipient has any goodwill they will understand you, regardless of cases, genders and whatnot :)
Considering a lot of gendering of language happens in fertility centric cultures (Technically the Christian "GOD" has it roots in the Pagan god of war, or similar as the influences were multiple, the Pagan roots were very fertility-centric), it has me wonder why certain inanimate objects are gendered. Take for example the Hindi word "Kitaben" (book) is "feminine" ("akin to that of femininity, female-like"), my take is that people saw males going around with books, reading books and collecting books, thus since they thought "males complement females and females complement males, therefore the book complements the male, therefore the book is female" (I'm sure there's a book-fettish joke in there somewhere X'D) The meaning of Gender had somewhat a bit of an umbrella meaning starting from the mid 60's to about 2010 where Gender Abolitionists push for the erasure of the awareness of male/female uniquenesses and features (Pretty much the root of the ideologue, considering the push for equal opportunity and general equality, "woman" isn't a stereotype, just a name for a person who has a specific "female" function that males don't have... hence the basis for the laws that give rights to both males and females based on this core principle). Historically gendered English language (technically very archaic English, so not really English at that point, but the starting point) was archaic with gendering in that innate stuff was being attributed "male/female like" rather than people (Which is the current-ish affair with he/she/they for male/female/difficult-to-interpret-or-neutral for English) thus had the same problem as the rest of Europe where females wern't able to express about the oppressive nature of those societies or struggled to reason with themselves as to why those societies were oppressive, that atop the fact that if they'd of figured out how to speak up, she'd be accused of being a witch and burnt...
Hungarian is a Finno-Ugric language, related to Finnish, Karelian and Estonian to mention but a few. I know Finnish doesn't have grammatical gender, so it's perfectly reasonable that Hungarian doesn't. Most European languages are Indo-European, and they are quite different from Finno-Ugric. Among Indo-European languages English is the one that stands out, but my own native language, Swedish, is moving towards genderlessness, and a new third person singular has worked its way into the language, to the point where its used in official documents. Originally this was meant to be used to refer to non-binary persons, but it's become the pronoun of choice when gender isn't known or is irrelevant. And some young people use it exclusively, and have completely dropped han and hon (he and she). Losing pronouns that indicate biological sex is still a long way from losing grammatical gender altogether, but it's a step in that direction. And I'd be surprised if Danish and Norwegian don't go that way too.
I observed that, as well, and I said: you're wrong. Then I realized that Hungarian isn't a European language. It's Asian. We hear that English 's "woman" comes from wife+man. Fun fact: In Hungarian the word "man" (férfi) comes from husband+boy (férj+fiú).
Going back far enough, Hungarian has Altaic language roots. This was suprisingly obvious when I was exposed to some modern Asian languages with Altaic origin. Beyond a few random expressions, I don't speak these languages but for example when we were comparing language features with a Korean colleague, we've found a surprising number of similarities between Hungarian and Korean, especially when contrasting these with Indo-European languages. Ignoring the many differences in actual words, Hungarian has a lot more in common with Korean and Japanese than with English. Some of the similarities and differences are at a very fundamental level within the languages. An example is head directionality. It is really at the core of how sentences are constructed. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head-directionality_parameter
I don't know about the other gender-sensitive languages, but French is learned with things being combos: article+noun. A child doesn't learn "livre", which may mean "book" or "pound", depending on gender. They learn "le livre", "book" ... or "la livre", "pound".
That’s not such a great system once you run into nouns that start with a vowel or silent ‘H’. How do you learn the gender of « l’hôtel » in this format?
@@ConellossusLittle kids don't think about gender. They learn that a book is "un livre" and that a pound is "une livre". So obviously, those two things are not the same.
I watched a video not too long ago about languages that have genders. It basically said they used it because it works and many cases it gets specific when describing or referring to something. Personally I think it's awesome being able to describe something with detail. Spanish is my native language I also speak French. I learned English as a second language. Anyway each language has its thing and they work. If English doesn't want genders it still works, the only difference in other languages is you could give further details beyond what English can.
Yes, I agree. For example, the relative pronouns in English tend to go immediately after the entity they refer to, for example: "the man who..." However, as we have grammatical gender in Spanish, we don't need the relative pronoun to be immediately after the entity they refer to. "El que, la que los que, las que, las cuales , los cuales" give us more freedom with the placement of the relative clause. "Le compré una casa a un hombre con muchos jardines, la cual estaba sucia". It doesn't have to be the gardens. It can be the house despite the word "gardens" is in between.
An interesting extra aspect to add to this is that in the Scandinavian languages, which also used to have masculine, feminine, and neuter, as time went by masculine and feminine merged and became the common gender. Neuter stayed separate. So, now we have two genders, like many other languages do, but unlike elsewhere they are not masculine and feminine. Growing up in Denmark and learning the two genders' names, which translate as 'shared gender' and 'no gender' puzzled me for a long time. Some dialects of Danish and Norwegian have retained all three though, possibly some Swedish ones as well.
Norway still has the 3 grammatical gender system, but in bokmål (one of our official Norwegian written languages), the feminine grammatical gender *is* optional, but still used by a vast majority of our population (except in Bergen, which only has the masculine and neuter grammatical genders).
They vary even within the same language: in the south of Italy it’s common to refer to a box with masculine “uno scatolo”, as it’s masculine in Neapolitan dialect, however standard Italian requires it to be feminine “una scatola” and you’d be looked at like a peasant if you used the masculine. This led to people even when using dialect to contract the article and Neapolitan tends to “cut off” the final letters, so it becomes “e scat’l”, where the article is pronounced like a fast “ö”
In 9th grade I had to take French and I got the whole "masculine" and "feminine" deal with no problem (also 10th grade German, my choice). In 8th grade, however, I had to take Spanish, and as soon as the teacher started talking about "gender," I could NOT wrap my around it and then couldn't even focus on the lessons. I can't quite remember what I was trying to decipher about it, I just know that my mind shut down completely.
Isn't that odd! Gender in French and Spanish works almost the exact same way, though words can sometimes be one gender in Spanish and the other in French. Perhaps the Spanish teacher wasn't very good at explaining it. :-)
That was most enjoyable! I minored in French in college, and took two semesters of German “for fun”, and a Latin class “for fun”. I had a fascination with languages at the time. Linguistics is a really convoluted pursuit, but your focus on discreet aspects encountered among English speakers is a good approach to understanding how English was influenced, and why it’s the universal language.
Talking of boats, I think it would be great to see an episode on the etymology of sailing terms. This is because the meanings of words are all muddled up and different because of their function (ropes are never called ropes for instance) Its about how quickly a captain can convey meaning. One of the reasons I think that we have clung to boats being feminine is because on occasion you just need a distinct term to identify that you are referring to the boat as a whole . So you might say something like "bring her along side" rather than "move the boat next to the pontoon" because its almost twice as quick to say and you cant say "It" because it would be far to vague.
My native language is Brazilian Portuguese. The thing is, when you learn as kids do, by immersion and hearing people talk, and getting corrected when you make a mistake, it just feels natural and obvious which gender each object belongs to. I think foreigners trying to learn a gendered language should listen more to native speakers instead of putting so much effort into memorizing.
Nope. Your native language is Portuguese. Period. You don’t hear Australians saying their native language is Australian English or the Americans saying they speak American English!!
@@nelsondesousa9304 As an American, I have made the distinction of speaking "American English" on occasion, and will sometimes joking say "I speak British!" when translating some British phrase into "American English" for my family. I have known European and Asians who take classes specifically for "American English" to use when speaking to Americans rather than Brits. I knew one Asian who planned to return home one day and become a teacher of "American English", as it was a valued ability in his country. I also knew a Spaniard who referred to his version of the language as "Castilian Spanish", and looked down on "Latin American" Spanish. I don't have any personal knowledge of how much Brazilian Portuguese has drifted from Portugal's version, but in general such distinctions are not unusual or unuseful.
@@rhymeswithorange6092 They drifted a lot... The writing is basically the same, only with some different word usage like in AE and BE. The grammar usage changed quite a bit in colloquial language. The pronunciation, however, is veeery different... for many, Brazilian Portuguese sounds more like Spanish while European Portuguese sounds like Russian. Many Brazilians can't understand Portuguese when they speak fast if they don't have previous contact with their language.
@@nelsondesousa9304 Don't forget that movies have options for BR PT and EU PT... so, yes, we can say that we speak Brazilian Portuguese. As I notice from my Portuguese friends, they receive more content from Brazilian television than we do from Portugal, so we are not that used to EU PT. Also, I don't know whether you're Br or Pt, just please don't get offended, it's not my intention... My suggestion is that people stop with that colonizer mind. Brazil got its independency in 1822, and since then developed in a very different way. Thus, trying to make Brazil still belong to Portugal is a common habit for many Portuguese people that ends up making Portugal seem a weak country, which I'm certain it is not.
Very interesting, thank you. I always new Old English had grammatical genders but always wondered what they were. As a native German speaker who happens to live in an English speaking country I am frequently being asked how to determine the grammatical gender of an object. As I also speak French and (some) Spanish I am well aware how this can differ between the languages. On day the penny dropped: the grammatical gender depends almost exclusively on the sound of a word. In Spanish it is relatively easy. Very(!) simplified : -a is female and -o is male. I admit it is a lot more complex in German but if you start grouping words according to their ending sound and look into their grammatical gender you will see this will coincide >90%.
An important exception to your rules (heuristics?) for Spanish are masculine words of Greek origin: el día, el mapa, el sistema, el esquema, el cura, el planeta, etc.
That is how I tried to "cheat" when I was trying to learn German. I figured that when I became immersed (by speaking not reading and writing) in the language, I would naturally pick up the correct genders. However, I found I usually learned the correct gender when learning the word itself. Now, I only cheat when I've forgotten the correct gender! The indefinite articles still drive me crazy, so I plan to slur them until I can mimic them.
While in German the gender is usually derived from the ending, there are also a ton of exceptions. For example, the word “Band” can have all three genders, and refers to different things every time: der Band = tome, die Band = band (this is a loanword), das Band = ribbon. Some words' gender also depends on the dialect, for example for “Semmel” (which is a purely southern German word and refers to a bread roll).
I studied German in Berlin. I had 2 classes in 1993 and 1995. My first German teacher was American, but the second teacher was German. The American teacher told us that we have to memorize gender of each words. However, the German teacher didn't tell so. She told the students to memorize noun with article. Like Das Auto. So, you don't have to remember the gender of words.
It's the same thing though. The articles are gendered, so if you remember the correct article, you automatically know the gender of the noun. You could instead also remember the correct pronouns, because they're also gendered. You could even write the correct English pronouns - he, she or it - next to the German vocabulary, if that helps you memorize it the quickest, or paint them in different colors. But in the end, you need to remember the gender of every single noun, because there's no logic behind it.
Important to know the last noun of a German word makes the gender (guess the most of you know we describe words by putting different words / nouns together ;-))
@@pxlcowpxl6166 I just wanted to add: there is a logic, but a very complex logic which has exceptions (which have reasons to be exceptions) and therefore the whole article System seems random.
But that actually helped me a lot when learning Italian. It’s like if I try to learn that meat is carne in Italian I don’t know the gender yet. So I can either learn that carne is feminine and remember that fact or just learn that meat is la carne in Italian, kinda treating it like one word. The 2nd one has, at least imo the big advantage that you will just automatically think of it as la carne. And if someone wanted to ask you about the gender you can think about it and know it because it’s part of the thing you just learnt. This means you don’t have to think about which article to use by remembering the gender but like I just said, the opposite. On the other hand you can remember the gender of an object and if you did a test about which gender does the word have you would do a great job. But while speaking you would have to do one additional step of thinking. From the gender to the article. Now let’s choose. Which one is more important to just know intuitively. Imo it’s clear. If someone asks me about a word's gender, I will have to connect these dots for one to two seconds and then I can tell them. I am sure they won’t mind waiting that short time. But in a fluent conversation that time isn’t short. One to two seconds can seem like an eternity if used to thinking during a conversation. But that’s just my opinion. :)
You used German, French, and Spanish ad examples for comparison when talking about English and as someone who speaks all these languages, it was a treat to see the comparisons made. I rarely see videos about languages where they compare equivalents of X language to Y language to Z language. I love it. Can you please do more on this topic? Old English? Also, spellings have changed a lot from 12th century to 16th century. I read the Geneva Bible of 1560 and they write the “u” as “v” and omit some vowels etc. thank you for this video!!! I’d love to see other languages compared. Dutch-Afrikaans; Farsi-dari-Arabic; Aramaic-Hebrew-Arabic; Russian-Slovak-Serbian-Croatian-Bulgarian. Etc ❤
I would've elaborated on Dutch, because there's an interesting thing: there is no difference between feminine and masculine (de) but we do have a neuter (het). In the past we did have more different words, like there still are in German, for definite and indefinite articles. Regarding the increasing use of 'they' in English, that posts a little bit of a problem in Dutch, because 'she' and 'they' are both 'zij'. So while saying 'they', you're also still saying 'she'. There are some used alternatives, but tbh, they all feel 'weird' language-wise, at least to me.
Wanted to say this. Also how de or het changes if you add an adjective. Learning Dutch from Afrikaans (my native tongue) as a base, I got this quickly, but I found it interesting and easier than German.
Also, when using -je* at the end of a word to get the smaller version (like the mädchen example from German), the gender changes to neuter. De boom (tree), het boompje (small tree, extra p sneaks in 😎) De auto (car), het autootje (mind the extra o) Het huis (house), het huisje Depending on the word you add it to it knows deferent forms: -pje, -tje, -netje, -otje, -atje, or just -je. 😆
@@epbeket oh yes, of course! I forgot about that. In the meantime in Afrikaans we have: die boom, die boompie, die kar, die karretjie (car), die huis, die huisie, die baba, die babatjie (I don't know if you have a diminutive form of 'baby' in Dutch). You get it, it's all "die" 😂. Or 'n (from 'een'), or g'n (from 'geen') and they mean the exact same. The definite article and then 'none'.
@@alias201 looks like simplified Dutch to me (getting rid of the de/het problem), but keeping some strange exceptions that have to do with easy pronunciation: the extra P and T remain. BoomPie Thinking of it, the rules are weird and very complicated. After a M, you get an extra P (boom, boompje), but bom/bommetje (small bomb) not bompje 😆
I've tried out French, German, Swedish, and Finnish to an extent, and as a native English speaker I've found Finnish easier amongst those 4, even tho the first 3 are related to English. Finnish doesn't even have a separate pronoun for 'he' and she', it just uses the same word for both...never MIND the rest of the language totally lacking grammatical gender to begin with which I appreciate. They have a case system, which I've seen many online tout as 'extremely difficult'...but I find that ludicrous. It's harder to and takes more time to learn the arbitrary gender of every noun in a gendered language. Meanwhile, the case endings in Finnish are regular, with only a slight sound change to agree with the vowel harmony. The vocabulary may be totally foreign 99% of the time, but because of the phonetics and phonotactics of Finnish, they're easy to remember too. You're not going to find a large consonant or vowel cluster in Finnish (from what I can tell). Also easy to learn to read, no stupid spelling rules lol.
Mandarin's grammar is super easy too, and it's really flexible. The thing that makes Mandarin annoying to learn (and why I suspect the FSI has it ranked as one of the harder languages to learn) is the fact that its writing system is such a pain, with no alphabet and no phonetic link to the way it's spoken.
As a native Finnish speaker, the need for genders for words is something that has never made any sense. In this video, a question asked is, why English as done away with genders. My question has always been who in their right mind has ever had the idea of assigning genders to the bloody words. Why?
@@sarppaleffat Hi! Surprisingly, this question is not that difficult to answer. Human beings tend to classify things. And different groups of humans can choose different categories to do that. This happened to the Proto-Indo-European people, who lived thousands of years ago and whose language gave rise to most European languages today as well as some Middle Eastern and Indian languages. For some reason, they chose gender. Perhaps they noticed that the world was full of opposites like "night" and "day", "earth" and "sky" and so on, and associated them with the opposites "male" and "female". The fact is that each language has its own classifications. There are languages that differ animate from inanimate, such as Russian and Japanese. And there are languages that classify things by their shape: long, flat, round, etc. like Japanese and Chinese. Even when the classification is arbitrary, it sounds natural to the native speaker because we hear people refering to an object in the same way over and over since childhood. This way, grammatical gender becomes part of the nature of the object itself. As a native Portuguese speaker who speaks German fluently, I still sometimes hear myself using the Portuguese equivalent first and then correcting it. ¯\_( ͡ᵔ ͜ʖ ͡ᵔ)_/¯
Having french as my mother tongue, I thought I would have no problem learning german. Wrong! Our masculine words often are feminine in german an vice versa, or neuter or sometimes the same. Then you add the declensions for even more fun. I learned later on that it is just a matter of getting used to it. It looked scary at first.
haha, yes... all words thats been taken over from french into German ending on -age just twisted gender from m to f only for the fun it... but words ending on -ion kept there f gender... and all other words are just a great mess... but in Baden Würrtemberg, we sometimes use the french gender instead of the correct German one.. Der Butter, nicht Die Butter... 🤣😂🤣
"La mairie" in French, "Das Rathaus" in German, "Il Municipio" in Italian.....just sayin' And don't get me started on "le soir" vs "la sera" or "la mer" vs "il mare".....
Yeah, that's typical when you learn another language. Even with english, "she's a nice plane" when in Polish, an airplaine is masculine. But it can be indeed tricky when in German you have the - mentioned in the clip - das Maedchen which is highly counter-intuitive for someone whose language has it "naturally" feminine.
My mother tongue is English, and I did not study any other language until Hebrew School, where I started at age 6. I quickly resented being required by my parents to attend until I was 13 years old, five days a week. By the time I was 16 years old, I had managed to forget almost every word of Hebrew that I was forced to study each afternoon of my boyhood. In high school, I began a three year course of French study. Modern French has two genders. In college, I was required two more years of language. I began German, which has three genders. I loved the literature of both languages, the songs, and the wit. Today, many decades later, I still have a good reading knowledge of both French and German. I remember the genders in both French and German of most words that I know. Once learned, the gender is associated somehow with the word, I find. There is an old saying, "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink"! I was that bad-boy horse, and I just would not sip Hebrew when I wanted to be out playing ball after school and not attending yet another school for Hebrew!
@@lonestarr1490 It does: masculine and feminine. Adjectives have to agree in gender with the noun they qualify. All the Semitic languages are like this (Arabic, Aramaic, and Amharic).
You were learning Biblical Hebrew, weren't you? If you weren't religious, it would have been drudgery, no doubt, just like learning Latin was for English people of my generation and earlier. I am a non-Jewish Englishman who is currently studying Modern Hebrew. It's a very attractive language.
@@DieFlabbergast No. Nobody learns "Biblical Hebrew" except those studying religious literature. "Hebrew School" students learn modern Hebrew, but because they don't live in Israel, they only get to apply it to prayers, mostly, or some Israeli folk songs. They don't get to speak it regularly. So it seems boring, because it does not apply well to their lives. The problem that it's not appreciated by Hebrew school teachers *as a language* instead of just a cultural instrument. The truth is, if you can unlock the patterns of both Semitic and Indo-European languages (say, by learning Hebrew and Latin), you will have quite a fair grasp of linguistic structure that can quickly help you pick up more languages in those groups.
One of the things that discouraged me from learning German some years ago was having to learn the genders of things all over again since they don't match to those in Spanish, it ended up being way more confusing than expected. On the other hand when I learned English I just didn't have to bother since it's essentially all neuter except for a few exceptions. English really is the ideal second language to learn if you're lazy, the only mildly complicated thing being the spelling.
@@CheeseBae maybe, diacritics could definitely help with some things but I don't see that happening with how much native English speakers seem to be intimidated by special characters. But I'm actually mostly thinking about making things a bit more consistent and intuitive in certain cases, like if it's read different it should be spelled different (like with the tenses of "read"), or make up their minds about what sound/s "gh" represents and when.
English is a pig of a language. But English speakers are used to hearing it being spoken wrong, so you can make mistakes and be understood. for example if you said "He eat an apple", no one would even bother correcting you that it should be "eats", I eat, you eat, she eats, he eats, it eats, we eat, they eat. If you said "he did walk on the beach", no one would bite your head off for not saying "He walked".. when you make mistakes like that in French or German they can act like they dont understand anything youre saying and that makes English the best second language. No one really speaks it properly, so feel free to butcher it and everyone will understand.
@@geroutathat verb conjugation is really simple tho, a bit too simple sometimes, I'm a bit bothered by the fact that it's often impossible to drop the subject because the verb barely carries any context. But yes, the fact that you can screw something up and the other person is still capable of understanding what you meant to say is a nice pro, on the other hand it can feel like you're building the most precarious shack and calling it a proper house.
Almost as fascinating is the (probable) reason why Indo-European languages have grammatical gender in the first place. Modern English leans heavily on word order to establish the relationships between words. The subject noun is almost always the one before the verb. An adjective applies to the following noun, not the preceding one and so on. But this is a relatively recent development. In the older indo-european languages, word order is much less rigid. The subject noun is the one with the nominative case ending. An adjective applies to the noun with the matching gender, even if it isn't adjacent, and so forth. With all of this case gender, the actual words in the sentence can come in almost any order. Word order could then be used to encode other information. As word order has become more rigid in English (and in many Indo-European languages), the case and gender systems of these languages have begun to erode. Interestingly, it is the pronouns, whose location within a sentence is most unpredictable, that have retained much of their case and gender.
Fascinating comment Paul! I was actually reading about how English shifted from a synthetic to an analytic language just the other day. Living in Germany, I'm getting a good idea of the differences.
Yes that's something that really annoyed me about Italian and English as a German, when I learned them. You have no freedom to change the position of words within a sentence without messing up the whole meaning. In German we use the positioning of a word to put emphasis on particular words. You can't do that in English and Italian.
@@lsfornells I know. I'm fluent in Italian. But you can't turn "mia cugina saluta il conduttore" into "il conduttore saluta mia cugina" without changing the meaning, while in German "meine Cousine grüßt den Schaffner" and "den Schaffner grüßt meine Cousine" mean exactly the same, just that in the second sentence you underline that she's greeting the conductor and not someone else.
As always, your video is really interesting and entertaining for a somewhat nerdy non-native English speaker like myself, who had the wonderful opportunity of growing up withing the rather gender-less Hungarian language :)
Apple in Russian is яблоко, which is neuter. So it’s literally all 3 genders in different languages. Something else to add: Some languages have done away with gender completely, there isn’t even a distinction like he and she pronouns for people. Azerbaijani is one such language, as I find out trying to learn it.
It's not that they have 'done away', but that they never had grammatical genders, and these languages do not have gendered pronouns either. Turkic languages (like Azeri) do not have, neither do Fenno-Ugric (Finnish etc) and as far as linguists can probe the past, they never had them - at least what comes to Fenno-Ugric that is.
The thing that always amused me about English is how you can miss out a lot of the glue words from sentences and they still make sense, you just end up sounding like a little kid or someone who is still learning the language. It’s actually pretty hard to make an English sentence that doesn’t make sense.
Yea from hearing a lot of ESL speakers, some good, some not so good...as long as the words are in the correct order...you can get the jist of what someones trying to say.
Always have so much fun to know these kinda interesting sides of language. The Indonesian language doesn't even have 'she' or 'he', only 'dia'. LOVE IT !!!
Chinese is similar, "he", "she", and "it" are all said as "ta". They do have different characters when written, but that's a relatively more recent change. In the past they all used the same character, too.
@@nayutaito9421 Of course it doesn't. He was referring to how "ta" is written as 他 for males, 她 for females, 它 for animals or objects, and 祂 for gods and deities. The word "you", "ni", is also written differently for different genders: 你 for males, 妳 for females, 袮 for gods and deities.
Fun fact: The word "neuter" in german is "neutrum" which comes from the latin combination ne utrum. Ne utrum translates to "none of the other two". My latin teacher in germany told me that. Oh by the way latin also has 3 genders.
That's a glorious fact! Thanks
Swedish has Masculine, Feminine, Neuter, and Non-Neuter. But, mostly everything is Non-Neuter (den) or Neuter (det).
So basically neutral
Whew...
That's a relief...
I was just a bit worried that these people were walking around thinking...
That object is male... and that object is female... and that object got its balls cut off!!!
The Languages that derive from Proto-Indoeuropean language provide all in all 4 genders: "masculine", "feminine", "utrum" and "neuter". But no language uses all 4 genders. English has just one gender for nouns, which has no official name, but I think it is most similar to utrum. Italian has two genders (masculine and feminine). Swedish also has two genders, but they are utrum (mainly used for things that live, like men and women but also for animals, gods and ghosts) and neuter (for non-living things). German is an example for a language with 3 genders (masculine, feminine and neuter). Some African language even have more than 20 genders (Swahili has 22). But when a language has so many genders, you no longer call them "genders" but "noun classes". And I think that also for European languages the term "noun class" describes the concept of this feature much better than "gender", because the term "noun class" describes clearly, that it is a grammatical feature of nouns, not a property ob the objectes named by the nouns.
My native language (Faroese) has 3 genders (masculine, feminine and neuter) and my 2nd language (Danish) has 2 genders (common gender and neuter), and my 3rd language (English) has none. Things just got easier as I progressed through my language learning, lol.
genders aren't hard especially if you are a native speaker
You could technically say that there are hints of the 3 genders of Old English. He, she, and it refer to male beings, female beings and objects, respectfully.
By contrast, Turkish has only one genderles pronoun "oh." The writer Orhan Pahmuk wrote that when he was a little kid, he thought that Allah was female. This was because in Turkish, there is only one genderless pronoun: "O." Therefore, there was no obvious sign what gender Allah was.
@@John-qd5of😂😂😂 I suppose he was misgendering his god!! 🤣🤣🤣
You have my sympathy. The harsh cold winds of the Faroe Islands would be Purgatory for me.
@@craftah Not if you’re a native speaker, no, but it can be quite difficult when you’re learning a new language, because the grammatical genders don’t always make sense, and the same words have different genders in different languages.
For example, in German, a knife is neuter, a fork is feminine and a spoon is masculine, while in Faroese they are masculine, masculine and feminine. :)
@5:00 Persian also did away with gender at about the same time. It's completely genderless and highly simplified! It seems that when a language gets used by many different peoples to communicate with each other, it gets simplified along the way.
It's more efficient and makes more sense.
We just make things better over time as with anything else. Houses, cars, technology, tools, science, and language is not an exception
One of the many reasons I never bothered much with Esperanto: a fairly brief look showed it had agreeing adjectives etc., which seemed a _backward_ step for something supposed to be simplifying/unifying. (Also it seemed too close to Italian and Spanish to me - and, seemed to be little taken up anywhere.)
It's called creolisation.
Interesting about the "blond" vs. "blonde" thing. It makes a lot more sense what you said here, but I work for companies here in the United States where we review other businesses, and the technical standard I was taught as an editor for reports is "blond" is an adjective, and "blonde" is the noun form. E.g. "She has blond hair" vs. "she is a blonde." However, most Americans don't know the difference and just use or the other for everything.
"Blond" is a French word and English is keeping its French grammar for whatever reasons. "Blonde" can be an adjective and is used of a girl or woman. For example, she has blonde hair. Inversely, blond is used of a boy or man. For instance, he is a blond.
I remember learning about this at uni. You summed up a whole lecture in about 7 minutes. Amazing video, Rob!!
Thanks Emma! And thanks for watching 👍
This guy is riveting; should start his own cult if he hasn't already.
@@I_Have_The_Most_Japanese_Music he’s got loads of videos on TikTok, been watching them all afternoon whilst sitting in the sun in the garden 👍
@@lordpetrolhead477 😄
Who was the teacher that took so long then? te he
In Finnish we have a lot of difficult weirdness, but some things are so logical it’s weird it’s not more common:
1) No gendered objects
2) not even he or she, just ”hän” for anyone
3) almost never any silent letters
4) every alphabet is always pronounced the same unique way. For example ”i” is always [i] (like english letter E), not context sensitive like english ”Titanic”
nevermind all the agglutination
🤔 If your people hope to conquer the world, I may defect so a reasonable language takes hold 😉
Finnish is relatively young as a written language so it doesn't have all this historical baggage that English does. Compare it to the Latin alphabet used for Turkish, which was developed in the 1920's and is also nearly completely phonetic like Finnish
@@murkotron yes in that sense we’re horrific😅
Finnish has no gendered objects? Interesting! Did it used to have genders, like English did?
I came from Hong Kong, Cantonese (Chinese) and English are the 2 languages I speak for most of my life, and none of them have grammatical genders. Imagine my face when I saw: Le La, Un Une when I started learning French. It was and still is such a nightmare
I'm learning German and adding a third gender DOES NOT help.
Languages are all about repetition, mimicking and unconscious memory. If you have a steady immersive learning of French then it comes in naturally (like walking, cycling, swimming, etc.). 5 year old French kids are fluent in French, so why not you ?
Also what you need is an optimistic perspective, a will to learn French for a reason that stimulates you : the culture, arts including "bande dessinée" (comics), the cuisine, wines, fashion, the history, the musicality of the language, it's sofistication and "superiority", the French people, professional perspectives, a distinct and unique "French" view on the world, etc.
Try to be (for a while) of the same mindset as the French : it may sound ridiculous but the French are genuinely persuaded that they live in the most beautiful country, that they have the best "art de vivre" and that they are the most civilised people on earth (with the most civilised language !).
Of course if you are force-feeding yourself with the language then it becomes a nightmare...
As an example I woud recommand you watch around 5 times (!!!) a French movie you really like and gradually repeat and (mimick!!!) dialog parts...
Also the immersive part is important : you could spend a weekend eating french food, listening to French music, radio, news, reading in French, watching French movies, news, talking with French people, commenting in French UA-cam posts, etc. basically LIVING IN A FRENCH BUBBLE.
Don't ask yourself too many questions, enjoy a glass of tasty French wine and let the French language slowly and pleasantly come up to you head...
@@jandron94 beautifully said. This even helped me
@@RobWords while as a Spanish native speaker I am used to genders, and while learning French and Portuguese it wasn't that big of a deal even if the words that were a different gender than in Spanish confused me, I am starting to learn German soon, I hope the third gender does not mess me up.
@@patax144 I don't think it will. I learned German in my middle teens, and these were the hardest things about the language for me: verbs (several conjugations, as in Latin, plus very many irregular ones); case for nouns and adjectives (subject, object, possessive, dative); two forms of the adjective (strong and weak); a rigid word order (again, as in Latin). It meant a lot of rote learning, of declensions and conjugations. It was more like learning Latin than learning French--but at least with Latin I didn't have to attempt to speak it! That said, the language is very rich and has some beautiful poetry. I hope you will enjoy your studies!
Great video, I studied English, German and linguistics at a French Uni many moons ago, and still to this day I am fascinated by languages and their interaction throughout history, the forgotten links, the etymology of words etc. I have added this video to my favourites needless to say! Thank you for posting this.
I feel like I could have written this post because you have articulated exactly how I feel about language! It is so interesting and I wish I studied it at university.
great video until the end.
English is, in some cases, quite similar to Plattdeutsch (Low German), which has been recognized as its own language, just like Frisian. Plattdeutsch just has one article for feminine and masculine words, as well: de. Sounds rather similar to "the", if you ask me. And if you have something neuter, then you just say "dat", quite similar to "that". But you can say "de" also, as far as I know. So it's "de Appel", "de Beer" and "dat/de Water". Just like "the apple", "the pear" and "the water" in English.
Frisian seems to always get the label of closest to English, but I always thought Low German gets overlooked in that regard. I've noticed in Dutch cognates with English words that have the "th" sound end up being a "d" so I assume this is often the case with Low German as well. Of course at one time I believe all the Germanic languages had the "th" (dental fricative) sound, now it's just reduced to English and Icelandic.
@@kbm2055 Low German certainly is closer to English than High German is to English, arguably even closer than Low German is to High German due to missing the vowel shift. And there are many Low German words which are "English" and not "German", like (Standard) German "wie", which is "as" in English, also is "as" (pronounced differently though) in Low German.
My grandparents spoke Low German and when I visited relatives in Germany I found their accents easy on my ears. When my grandparents spoke English they had Low German accents.
To my ears, people from Schleswig-Holstein, where the original Angles came from, speak German like English people do. Sometimes when I hear a British or American person speaking very good German, I can't distinguish them from residents of, say, Flensburg speaking their native tongue.
Like Afrikaans
I love the style of your videos, they're so casual yet professional. Please keep making more!
In Norwegian, particularly in "bokmål" (the Danish based written language) we're in the process of merging the masculine and feminine grammatical gender (neuter is not endangered). We tend to use the masculine indefinite article "en" for both masculine and feminine (traditionally using "ei") while still using the appropriate definite suffixes "-en" for masculine and "-a" for feminine, but this is also slowly merging to just "-en".
But there's a new trend were the feminine article and suffix is used for any gender as a sort of diminutive instead. So we might end up with two genders common gender and neuter like has happened in some other Scandinavian dialects, but with the feminine markers retained with a new grammatical function.
Woah, this is worth a video in itself. Thanks.
I was going to say, isn't this how Swedish is? I'm currently learning Swedish and learned that they used to have male/female and now have common and neuter genders... neither of which says "gender" to me, but maybe there is just no other good term.
@@EricaGamet yes, in Swedish masculine and feminine is completely merged into common gender.
(in most dialects at least, could be some where it isn't. After all we have dialects in Norway retaining a full case system, so why not)
And yes, grammatical gender has nothing to do with social gender or biological sex. It's just called that since the grammatical phenomenon of "gender" in Latin happened to have two genders associated loosely with biological sex. And they named the phenomenon.
I'm English but I'm learning Bokmål, and I was super happy when I learned that you can treat feminine words like masculine, its much easier for me to learn this, because remembering all of the genders is so confusing! They are especially foreign to me because we dont have them!
If I'm being honest I still dont see the point in genders, it just adds unnecessary confusion in my opinion, but I've only been learning for about 8 months so what do I know?
For anyone that doesn't know, the letter at the beginning of the word "þæt" is called a thorn and makes a "th" sound. In a lot of old manuscripts and printed texts it looks like the letter "y", so the word "þe" (i.e., "the") looks like "ye"-this led to famous phrases like "ye olde" and others. Thanks for the cool video!
Mind blown. Not about the gendered language (although that's cool), but about blond/blonde. As a Canadian, I assumed one was the British spelling and the other American, because... well, so many other words have that. :D
Likewise. I'm British and thought the same thing.
I picked up a smattering of German whilst in Germany with the British army, mainly to pursue my hobby at the time of RC modelling. I could make myself understood, but was very much aware of my language shortcomings.
I found the native Germans were very sympathetic to my pathetic attempts and were very helpful.
Most Germans do speak english anyway, but seemed to regard an Englishman attempting to speak to them in their language as a compliment. After all, most English men EXPECT 'Johny foreigner' to speak english because it's regarded as the international language.
Ditto about the blond / blonde...
Public education ' is an oxymoron
Yes, blond/blonde is standard Yank usage - but unfortunately too many of us Americans are ignorant of the proper usage 😕 Owen Wilson is blond, and Scarlett Johansson is blonde.
I'm German and I kind of assumed the same!
So the question then becomes, which do people actually in Canada or the UK?
I had a bit of a hard time learning German because of the gender mismatches between it and my native language. I never realized how learning English was actually so simple before starting to study German. German feels like learning English with the difficulty slider cranked to 11.
Yep, x the difficulty of German by at least 3 for Polish! 7 declensions and even people's names change their endings!
German is actually simple, once you have studied and got used to French genders and the word order. Unlike English it is logical and doesn't have umpteen different pronunciations for the same letter groups, we have umpteen ways to pronounce "-ough" for example
@@musicloverUK same goes for czech and many slavic languages
@@Neil070 can I complain about German word order? Ok, good XD
The "logical" word order imo would be "subject, verb(s), object, complement". That way you answer "who did what, to whom, and how". You add the words from the most important to the least important. Now, in German, when you have two verbs in a sentence, you can't simply add the complement in the end, you have to think beforehand! I mean, who does that? Do Germans always know every sentence before they say it?
The subject is not necessarily the most important part of the sentence, and this is perfectly reflected in the German V2 word order (verb as the second topic of the sentence). Thus you can put the object in front if you want to stress it. "Den Mann sah ich nicht, aber die Frau" - "The man I did not see, but the woman".
What do you mean by "two verbs"? Composite forms like "habe gesehen" (have seen)? In this case, the "habe" occupies the V2 position, and the other parts of the composition are appended ("Ich habe den Mann nicht gesehen"). Of course, you have the verb in mind when you start speaking.
You referred to blond/blonde at 4:53 as an exception in English. It's not an exception. It's a part of a special rule where borrowed words (in this case, from French) are used as in their source language until the time comes when they're fully assimilated into English.
Some other examples of French-borrowed inflected nouns or adjectives are fiancé/fiancée, divorcé/divorcée, and né/née. In all cases, pronounced the same, but written differently.
The English word "naive" started as one of these. It was borrowed from French also - naïf (masculine), naïve (feminine). Eventually its French origin began to fade from collective memory, and now "naive" (without the dieresis) is the most common form of the word in English, at least in the US, where I'm from (I'm not sure about elsewhere). I can say, for example, that my brother is naive about his kids' behavior when he isn't around, and it wouldn't be incorrect - except for the fact that I don't have a brother.
And they will be assimilated. Resistance - as we all know - is futile
Maybe for people who has English as native language don't see this, but for me, for example, English is almost another latin language. You have so many words I can understand, not because I studied English, but because is almost the same, or sometimes is exactly the same word in my language. In your comment there are many words I recognize very easily. Referred, exception, part, special, case, used, language, time, assimilated, examples, adjectives, pronounced, differently. All these words are almost the same in Portuguese.
@@davidbio1 English is descended in a general way from Latin, yes. Our technical terms are pulled pretty much straight from Latin or Greek. Our everyday stuff is Latin-influenced also, but not quite as clearly as in the Romance languages (Italian, Spanish-Portuguese-Romanian, French etc.). Because Great Britain (where English was formed) was conquered and ruled in whole or in part by the Romans, but also by the Vikings and by Viking descendants such as the Normans. Therefore, we often have two common words for things, one from the Romance thread and the other from Germanic.
@@davidbio1 The base words are Germanic (Anglo-Saxon), and the more subtle complex words are Romance (Norman French), add in a different branch of Germanic (from the Vikings), Latin and Greek for technical stuff, a bit of modern French and other European languages, and words from the countries we colonised, and then mash it altogether, simplify the grammar, randomise the spelling and pronunciation, and add a lot of idioms, word-play and slang, and you've got English. What's interesting is that we often have pairs of words with slightly different meanings from Anglo-Saxon and French - the differences often reflect the Anglo-Saxons being ruled by the Norman French, so peasants farmed cows and sheep, and the gentry consumed beef and mutton.
Your English is so polished, it's music to my ears.❤
Im shocked this channel doesn’t have more subscribers. You explain things in such a clear concise way which is also fun to watch. And your videos are super high quality. Good work man!
Well that's very kind, thank you
It's the non-blinking, creepy smile face that makes people run away.
I agree, but not everybody is a languages nut like we here appear to be. It seems that most of us also have abilities with several languages, hence the multilingual comments written, read and responded to in whatever language seems the most suitable, and we are therefore in a minority because of that too.
The most confusing thing for me when learning German, was how “die” (feminine) turns to “der” (masculine) in dative! Spanish has el and la, but those remain the same, no matter what case you use. German is on a whole other level! 😂
We have genders and plurals, but no cases in Spanish. The hardest bit for English speaking learners is the Spanish conjugation, but again many languages have proper conjugation. English is quite an easy language to learn quickly enough to understand and make yourself understood in normal basic life: no genders and very simple conjugation in all tenses. The best bit of Spanish is how the rules have very few exceptions and the language itself is quite helpful once one puts some effort into learning those rules. Also, we don't bother with ridiculously confusing vowels: 5 vowels, 5 sounds, always the same. As simple as that.
@@shaunmckenzie5509 I'm not sure I agree it's an ugly language. It sounds nice to me but very fast!
@@shaunmckenzie5509 I guess that taste needs to be respected, but bad manners like calling another language "very ugly", not really. Personally, and many also agree with me, I find that a limited number of vowels, such as in Italian and Spanish, not only sound nicer and clearer but will also make it easier to learn. Also less spitting than German or English speakers, and easier to understand as not tons of mute letters as in French.
@@shaunmckenzie5509 There, there, finally learning to at least hold insults! Your social skills are improving, you are welcome. The main difference with Italian is the hard "J" sound and that comes from Arabic, 8 centuries of invasion leave their mark. But then also with Celtic and Germanic languages, of which we have dents too.
I don't quite agree with that description. It's not that "feminine" articles turn "masculine" in German, it's that none of the definite articles are unique to a specific combination of gender/case/number.
Logically, you might expect 24 distinct article variants: 3 genders × 4 cases × 2 numbers (singular, plural) = 24. But in reality there are only 6 different definite articles in German, each occurring in multiple positions of the full table: der (6), die (8), das (2), des (2), dem (2), den (4).
Sure, "die" is the article for feminine/nominative/singular, but it is also used for feminine/accusative/singular as well as nominative and accusative plural for all three genders. Similarly, "der" is the article for masculine/nominative/singular, but it is also used for feminine/genitive/singular and feminine/dative/singular as well as genitive plural for all three genders.
(Is it a good system? No. Does it make sense? Also no. But hey, it's how the language works.)
At least in the plural table you get some simplification, but in the opposite way compared to Spanish: Instead of articles staying the same across cases, German plural articles stay the same across genders. For example, "den" is the dative plural article regardless of whether the noun is masculine, feminine, or neuter.
I am hooked after just two explanations! You are showing just how fascinating the history of language is! Love your style of explanation. If you had been my teacher at school I just might have learned to speak a second language.
Yeah but he takes fucking forever
as a hungarian, i really appreciate that english also doesnt have object genders (tho it has gender pronouns which give you guys quite a trouble nowadays), and although i speak german quite alright, i really dont know the gender articles. I totally gave up on french not in small part because of the gendered objects.
Recently im very enthusiastic about japanese, beacuse it not only doesnt have genders for objects, theres also no plural form of nouns, and also you dont need to inflect verbs to match the person, so its great!
The Japanese were always way ahead of the curve. :)
As aTurkish person speaking a god blessing non-gender language, I appreciated the non-genderless of English more, when I began learning French and German later in my life. In Turkish we also do not have "he-she-it" we just have a simple "o" and "onlar" as "they" in plural.
but Japanese like Hebrew and I’m sure many others have different words for “I” as in me, based on two genders.
*` **#Ő** vibráló""*
And only two irregular verbs in the entire language. I seriously preferred learning 2000 kanji over having to deal with irregular verbs, noun cases, gender, articles, verb agreement, and all that crap
In traditional Westcountry dialects, countable objects like a newspaper or a stone can be referred to as "he" or "him" and mass nouns like sand or water are referred to as "it". I don't know whether this is a relic of the gender system or a later development after gramatical gender was lost, but I used to hear it regularly when I was a boy; "Pass 'im 'ere, youngun."
No way?? I had no idea. Thanks for that!
My neighbour, who has lived in the West Country all his life, does exactly that. A plant in his garden is 'im and the coal, for he still has a weekly delivery, is 'it'. It doesn't seem to bear any relationship to the gender in other Germanic languages. For example in modern German 'plant' is 'die Pflanze' (feminine). So what I read about the male /female genders in Dutch being rolled into a common gender rings true for English as commonly spoken in the West Country.
I am from Somerset and have never heard of this before.
My partner is from the Forest of Dean, his family do this too.
Perhaps it's a feature of the Celtic language
Fascinating as ever! Other Germanic languages are also in the process of losing their grammatical gender- in Dutch, Danish and Swedish they still use neuter but masculine and feminine have merged into 'common' gender. Perhaps a similar thing happened in England in the Middle Ages. When I was studying Spanish and German at the same time, I had a similar feeling when it comes to the genders of objects not matching up. In German you say 'der Tisch' (masculine) for a table and 'la mesa' (feminine) in Spanish, I can see a situation where the English simply gave up with gender once Norman French had been introduced.
I like it that in Dutch we call common gender, commuun genus (dutchified Latin) or zijdig (sided) and neuter is called onzijdig (non-sided). But what I think is strange, it was also in the video, that diminutives are always neuter. In Dutch we ‘de man’ (the man, common gender) en ‘het mannetje’ (the little man, neuter) and ‘de vrouw’ (the woman, common gender) and ‘het vrouwtje’ (the little woman, neuter). The strange thing is that if we did the same as in English (they don’t use or don’t have a diminutive) and use the little man, literally ‘de kleine man’ in Dutch, it doesn’t change to neuter, it stays common gender. This in contrary to ‘het mannetje’ which is neuter. So in English it is in both cases the little man while in Dutch we can use ‘het mannetje’ en ‘de kleine man’ which have different genders.
Another example: “sun” is masculine in Spanish (el sol) and feminine in German (die Sonne), while “moon” is feminine in Spanish (la luna) and masculine in German (der Mond).
Apparently, in Arabic, like German, “sun”(الشمس - ash-shams) is feminine, while “moon” (القمر - al-qamar) is masculine.
@@romanr.301 I agree with the Arabic and Deutsch, as women are constant in their presence and shining warmth, as it were, men (look down, lads) are constantly changing, including from full to...insomma, è evidente vero? ; )
In Danish the “gender” is between et and en. It’s not technically called Gender and it isn’t assigned to be masculine or feminine, but it works the same way.
English lost all its genders in a similar process that leads vulgar latin to lose its neuter gender (that's why all romance languages, except for Romanian, have only 2 genders).
The reason is very simple: Phonological change.
Genders are usually marked in the end of the words. As soon as the native speakers of some language start to reduce the words and eat the end of them (something very common in English), genders are lost.
So, for exemple, in Spanish is, in general, the vowel "a" that indicates the feminine gender, while the vowel "o" usually indicates the masculine gender.
Chica alta (tall girl)
Chico alto (tall boy)
If, for some phonological evolution, Spanish native speakers start to reduce vowels in Spanish and end up eliminating the final vowels in the words, then there won't be any distinction between both genders, so no genders anymore.
Chic alt
That's also the reason English and the Romance languages lost their cases.
Found your channel yesterday...the how to read French one. I'm really enjoying watching these, you present them so well. I've always been interested in language and it's origins. I speak Italian, Greek and terrible French. Words are fascinating and there is so much here I didn't know. Thank you, I'll keep watching.
Reading Stephen King's "It" in Spanish (many, many years back, this may have changed in the meantime), the first time "it" is mentioned, there is a lenthy footnote on gramatical differences in English and Spanish to explain the use of "eso" in the book for lack of a neuter personal pronoun in Spanish. The title of the book was still "it" though
LMAO! Thanks for the explanation. I live in Chile and laughed my arse off when trying to figure out what the title _should_ be in Spanish when the remake came out. "Lo" or "Eso." sound ridiculous.
I have heard a theory that the reason English grammar became greatly simplified was a direct result of the Norman conquest. The Normans couldn't be bothered to learn Old English, but they still needed to communicate with their subjects, so a creole or pidgin English emerged that was simpler for both to learn, and the "new" English eventually replaced the old one. Am I right or was the eventual loss of genders in English unrelated to William the Conqueror?
Yep. Look at Afrikaans which creolised from a huge number of languages thanks to Dutch settlers, Malay and Indian slaves, Bushmen and others integrating into the same society. Afrikaans is incredibly easy to learn and has a very efficient grammar system. For example, it only has one form of 'to be'.
Yes, Anglo-Norman is the actual language used then, however old english already had oddities from the german mother tongue of the anglo saxons, its a northern german language, but it seems to have picked up odities from the people the anglo saxons killed, the native britons of England, and then merged with Anglo-norman.. for example, the video says there is no gender, but "it" is the neuter gender, and English has that. A language with no neuter gender refers to everything as "leave him/her on the table" not "leave it on the table", some languages have no "it"
Theory I like is that the creolization happened, but it was due to interaction between Old English and Old Norse... the genders didn't quite match up between the two (a given word might be masculine in one and feminine in the other), so they just got rid of the whole schmeer.
This is a false theory, as English is not a creole at all. Simplification does not equal creole anyway.
This simplification of the grammar is a blessing for everyone who learns English as a foreign language.
On the other hand the Norman conquest also brought many French words into English, increasing the vocabulary significantly. The basic vocabulary of English you need to learn is quite big. E.g. when referring to the animal suus scrofa domesticus English uses "pig", "swine" and "hog" in parallel for no real reason. To make it even more confusing when it is going to be eaten it becomes "pork" (from French).
And secondly, with these changes in the spoken language and the Norman-French influence, the spelling of English became a complete mess. English spelling almost lacks any logic, for many words you have to memorize both, the pronounciation and the spelling. This is why spelling contests exist in English speaking countries. In most languages (Spanish, Italian, Hungarian, Slavic languages ...) such a contest would be completely pointless as the spelling strictly mirrors the pronounciation.
Fascinating stuff. Love the series. I only speak two languages English and Profane. Profane does away with many parts of speech like adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions and interjections and really only retains nouns and verbs. Sometimes it is best to be simple to get your message across.
These profane words have often been referred to as Language enhancers
As for me - having learned five languages by age five and adding other later -
I can comfortably curse in ten languages if need be - however I refrain from
cursing where possible.
The advantage to speaking two or more languages = even when one in not
fluent - is listening to the conversations of others - particularly when these
people don't know or suspect that someone around then understands the
language - A is said in Spanish Pared tiene oidos
@@andrew_koala2974 What languages did you learn and who taught you FIVE languages by age five? Well done!
When I worked in Saudi Arabia with my small team of TCNs, I felt it was my duty to instruct them in art of speaking english colourfully.
To wit 'fxxxxxxg this!' and 'fxxxxxxg that!' and 'txsspxt!' and 'wxxxxr!' etc.
I like to think I had enhanced their chances when applying for their next employment during interviews.
A likely scenario springs to mind ....
Interviewer - "Do you speak english?"
Applicant - "Fxxxxxg right, I do, cxxt!"
@@Blurb777 It's not completely unheard of. Kids are ridiculously good at picking up languages through exposure, certainly good enough to pick up at least the basics of multiple language if there is a wide and consistent variety of languages.
As a native Spanish speaker myself, having realized English objects are non-gendered was something that relieved me. When I studied French, the whole gender assignment towards objects was super natural, but just like the apple example, Spanish and French disagree with some other examples, such as account (compte: Feminine in Spanish, masculine in French) or vehicle (voiture: Masculine in Spanish, feminine in French).
In times of doubt, I just look it up and that's it. 😊
es cierto. Solo se inglés. Estoy aprendiendo español. No es fácil de recordar. la serpiente, el agua
Meanwhile, German has a Neuter gender for words, thus an apple is... feminine (apparently).
vaya, la señora manzana. iqual en español. la (the feminine) manzana. la mesa, la silla, femenina etc.
As a native French speaker learning Spanish ATM, the difference in gender doesn't bother me when the words are completely different (la voiture, el coche) but when they're similar it really messes with my brain (la vidéo, el video / la couleur, el color / etc.) haha!
@@thetightwadhomesteader3089 agua is actually feminine 😂.
When I was in the US Army stationed in Germany, I was told to say "duh" if I didn't know which article to use because the Germans would know what I meant. What you didn't cover in here is that depending on the part of speech or tense, those basic der, die and das, would morph into several other articles, such as dem and den, among others (been years and I can't remember them all).
Sorry but if you’re gonna learn German, you’re gonna have to learn all the articles in different cases. You can’t go around it.
@@FransceneJK98 But if you're only going to be there a couple years and want to get the main point across, you're not going for fluency.
In German, my mother tongue, it must be most confusing for those about to learn German, that feminine article "die" becomes "der" (exactely the masculine form) when used in the Dativ case: "Die Schule" ["the school"] becomes "in der Schule" ["at school"] / "Ich gehe zur (zu der) Schule" ["I'm going to school"] .
@@michaelwurthner8505 I studied German in high school for two years (before transferring to a school that only offered Spanish as a foreign language option). I found articles the most confusing part of the language. I had less trouble years later studying Russian in university, and Cyrillic is much different from just adding on some umlauts or an Eszett. I enjoyed studying foreign languages, but have never become fluent. it's difficult when there's no one to practice on.
German doubles up on the genders by making you also modify adjectives based on the gender, case, and whether you're using an indefinite article, a definite article, or no article at all. There are three tables of adjective endings you need to memorize. It's a nightmare.
In Portuguese, due to the difficulty of communication between Europe and South America in the XX century, many recently imported words were adopted in different ways, for example in Portugal 'a console' became 'uma consola', in the feminine, but in Brazil it became 'um console', in the masculine.
Wow, I had no idea the English language used to have genders. Thank you for the very informative and also entertaining video! As a side note, Romanian also has 3 genders. The neutral noun is masculine when it is singular, but feminine as a plural.
So glad YT recommended this channel! I have so often wondered about weird plurals in the English language and about when it stopped using genders. Rob explains things so clearly and precisely - with a brilliant touch of humour thrown in!
I live in Italy so am very familiar with masculine/feminine and asking permission to give someone the "tu" (or the "thou" 😆).
Thank you for the great education and entertainment 👏👏
I recall my freshman year German class, our teacher, a native English speaker but someone fluent in German, pointed out the way that we use gender for ships in English. She also pointed out child/children and goose/geese to point out how irregular plurals work for the majority of German nouns.
¡Interesante! Nunca lo supe.
It’s funny coz I’m a native English speaker but always find it strange when people gender a ship, or inanimate object. Learning German though you quickly get used to it
I read that with the collision of Norse and Anglo-Saxon cultures there was a simplification of grammar as the languages were melding and changing each other.
Yes I heard that on the excellent history of English podcast.
I saw a video about language that said something similar.
Yup! I used to blame the Normans, but by late Old English, a lot of grammatical simplification was already underway due to Norse influence.
This includes the case system and even verb endings.
Normans were more responsible for the change in vocabulary to Latinate words and the extinction or narrowing of native Anglo-saxon words.
The linguistic term is "creolisation".
Thank you for bringing Old Norse into the history of Old English! Sometimes teachers/writers skip straight from Old English into OE + Norman French and ignore the couple of centuries when English inhabitants and Danish or Norwegian newcomers interacted. A couple of points: first, for Americans, blond/blonde spelling is a little different. Adjective (for men or women) is blond; noun for women only is a blonde, whereas a man would be a blond (not often used). Second, in Old English, the personal pronouns for the third person (he, it, they) began with "h," but the endings made it clear which word was which. But when the various endings began to blur into one, probably because of the influence of Old Norse (as this video says) and then of Norman French, confusion arose, and English borrowed "th" for the plural (they, them, their) from Old Norse and "sh" for the subjective form of the feminine singular (she)--but "her" was retained, possibly because it wasn't too like "him: or "his." Quite commonsensical! Where the "sh" came from is not clear; probably not directly from "seo." Finally, "Man" in Old English basically meant "human being"; a male man was a carlman, and a female man was a wifman--carl meaning a man, and wif a woman or wife. "Carl" was used in the Middle Ages as a term for a man (male), but in time "man" came to be the preferred word. And "man" was dropped from "wif." Lastly, in American English there's a further step where "she" is now almost never used for countries and seldom for ships (or cars) except by people who are in the business and/or cling to the time-honored usage!
Were or Wer was also the old english for human as in werewolf and wergild, man(person)-wolf and man(person)-price
Possible Carl descended from germania kerl.
Well I got my own bit wrong wer or were means an adult male not a human, Carl or kerl is the origin of the term churl, meaning rude and/or peasant, early middle ages would have been ceorl a social rank just below Thane and above slave or indentured servitude??? So I wonder if OP confused what in essence is a Freeman (ceorlman or carlman) for male human instead of free person
@@alanthomas2064 I am pretty certain the various words were from the same original Old (or Photo) Germanic root. OE also had the word cheorl (I may be misspelling this!) which gave us the modern English churl--but it wasn't derogatory, it meant a man of the ordinary people, not a nobleman (eorl, or modern earl) and not a slave, just your common-or-garden commoner.
@@elainechubb971 I think your computer corrupted proto into photo? Autocorrect is a flaming nuisance, as an Aussie would say.
"Wifmann" being male makes sense from a German perspective. It seems to be a composite of wif(?) and "mann" in the sense of human. In German the article always follows the gender of the second part of a composite.
Wif = woman (cognate with German weib) - mann = human. Wifmann = female human. A male human adult was "wer" (where we get werewolf)
If I had to guess the literal meaning might be “with man” or “wifed to man”? Which eventually got shortened to wife?
@@Timelord79 I gave the definition above. "With" is "mid" in Old English, hence: midwife. Wifmann means female human.
@@ulujain damn, old English considered women mid. Very based
@@Timelord79 i think and correct me if im wrong, old english words for man and woman were "wer" and "wif" with "mann" being the neuter term for any individual. over time "mann" became the gendered term for masculine individuals with "wif" combining with "mann" to become "wifmann" or feminine individual. "wifmann" is in effect the origin of the word woman. we still see the use of the term "wer" for a masculine individual in cases like werewolf which is a man-wolf or a wolfish man. also "wif" can be found in terms like wife, a female spouse.
Having only just discovered your delightful linguistic channel, I can only now comment. I was born and raised in the Netherlands, but taught myself to read English when I was 3, and my mother taught me to read Dutch when I was 5... Anyway. I once had a Dutch teacher in school and he invited questions we had about the language that he hadn't covered. So I asked why ships and cars - for instance - were called 'she' and 'her' His unbelievably rude answer - that stopped me in my question-tracks completely - was that 'anything you can put something 'into', with a rude gesture, was called 'she' or 'her'. Dutch is a very quirky language though, and I believe people who say that it's one of the hardest languages to learn, because where it does have rules, there usually are more exceptions to those rules than 'followers'!
No way bro said 👉👌 💀💀💀💀💀
Heard that German builders have the place a window is put ( a space ) in one gender, and the window itself another.,
I am so much in love with your videos.
In my country India, Hindi is not gender neutral, it has two genders for everything, Sanskrit has three, while some languages are gender neutral too, for example, Bangla (Bengali) is gender neutral. When a Bengali speaking speaks Hindi, they find it very troubling to fix gender. More trouble is when a "Marathi" speaker and a Hindi speaker exchange notes, because both aren't gender neutral, but things that are feminine in Marathi are masculine in Hindi. So interesting.
Wow, that is amazing. It perhaps demonstrates that there's nothing intrinsic about choice of grammatical gender.
@@thoutube9522 yes, but it seems to me that in many languages nouns that end in A are feminine. I know only few European languages, so please correct me, if I am wrong.
@@pawelzielinski1398Yes, perhaps there is something intrinsic in that. Or maybe it's because many Western European languages have Latin roots. I'm not sure if that's true of Slavic languages.
@@thoutube9522 What is true?
Latin had immense influence on Polish.
Until at least XVI century that was the language used in any serious literature (poetry and prose) and science. The most famous Polish scientist of these days was fluent in Latin. His seminal work was also written and published in Latin and had profoundly changed how people perceive our place in the universe.
My wild guess is that about 10-15% of Polish words have Latin roots. Maybe more.
And when it comes to law or medicine or theology/church affairs it's probably much higher.
That's why it has always been easy for me to recognize the meaning of so called "difficult" English words (as they are the same or very similar in Polish because they often have Latin or Greek origin), but the real challenge was with native Germanic words in English.
@@pawelzielinski1398 I had no idea. Excuse my ignorance, and many thanks for correcting me.
I've been slowly working through all the videos on this channel, I do love all the quirks of our language. At a glance, our language seems so different from every other European language, but when you turn back the clock, those differences aren't so pronounced.
I do like how "that" survived its initial meaning and became a pronoun for distant objects.
So once upon a time I decided to take classical Greek in college.
Completely kicked my ass .... but would absolutely do it again!
In the French school system, Greek used to be taught as a mainstream course. That went away only about 40 to 50 years ago I think. However, today, latin is still taught as an option. My son's studying latin in the French school system. Although I hated languages as a kid, I now think that's so awesome. In the US system, you're generally stuck with only Spanish or German. However, you sometimes get more options in the French school system, such as Italian or Portuguese. I'm guessing it's simply because France is in Europe after all. English doesn't count as a foreign language in the French school system (i.e. it is mandatory). So students may end up studying up to four languages, such as my son: French, English, Spanish and Latin.
@@szk4023 French and Spanish are sibling languages and are descended from Latin.
While still no easy feat, it should be noted that learning is best done when ideas already have a natural connection between them. Most formal education treats each subject in isolation when there are many commonalities in the abstract.
In my opinion, this treatment of knowledge does a disservice to the general public by creating schisms between ideas that would otherwise be connected. It prevents creativity.
Take Hedy Lamar, for example. Very little to no formal training in the sciences, yet she was able to combine player piano technology with wireless communications to give us the frequency hopping encryption that is so ubiquitous today that nobody even stops to give thanks to a disgraced actress from the thirties for giving us secure wireless communications everywhere we are: WiFi, Bluetooth, Cellular.
All of this was possible because she wasn’t constrained by formal “education.” She was free to let ideas mingle in her mind unlike somebody who constrains themselves within the confines of their expertise.
The mind is amazing. Just think, a baby learns to see color within two months after birth. The brain naturally develops millions of simple languages to help describe the reality outside and to mold it to the simulations ran in our minds.
People never stop to think about how “color” is just a symbolic language the visual cortex “speaks” to the prefrontal cortex to describe the electromagnetic ripples that tingle the photoreceptors in the retina.
Light is the physical reality, and color is the language created to describe it.
Want a good exercise to demonstrate this?
Try describing “blue” to somebody that has been blind their whole life. It’s impossible. Their brains never developed the language of color, so they have no way of translating your words into an experience they’ve never had.
@@szk4023 Latin and Greek do not count as "foreign languages". They are dead languages. When I was in high-school (in Belgium, in the early 1980s), I had two foreign languages (Dutch and English), about 3 hours/week. On top of that, I had Latin (6h/week) and ancient Greek (5h/week). I think basic Latin (2h/week) is still the norm in the first year of high school, then it becomes optional. But I'm not quite sure.
Fascinating, informative video, Rob, thank you! At school, I often inwardly sighed when we had the added work of all those noun genders in learning Latin, French, and German. And, then, the added burden of tying in the all those correct adjectival agreements! But, to be fair, it was nice when they started being more & more automatically fixed in the mind, and we (well, mostly!) got it right ;-) . Japanese, on the other hand, was refreshingly different in that regard (plus, I was even younger then, and more receptive, probably with better brain plasticity or something, lol). 🙂
As a native Russian, I can say that genders in German are extremely difficult as they don't have define rules. You have to remember a gender for every word. Also, old English had the same approach. The only way is to remember a gender for every single word. In Russain, it's way more simple. You can always define gender by a word's ending even if you hear the word for the first time.
You can reliably guess the gender by how the word ends in German though, can't you? Like how -e is often feminine and -er is often masculine?
@@arthurhenriqued.a.ribeiro2078 If I'm not mistaken it works approximately for 70% of words. So the main problem of the approach is you can't rely on it. For instance "Name" is not femonine. There are cases when the sense of a word differs depending what gender you use, for example "Mark". It can be feminine or neutrum and it impacts on the word meaning. In Russian it's just impossible.
@@Наблюдатель-д4с Another example is "See" which can be either masculine or feminine, depending on meaning (m: lake, f: sea). And the masculine article "der" is used as a feminine article in other cases (dative and genitive). Much less intuitive than word ending agreement
In Spanish, too - there are only a few exceptions, those of which are easy to learn.
@@itsgiag As an Spaniard myself, i think they are 'easy' for native speakers but a nuisance for anybody else. Yes the general rule is that words ending in 'a' are femenine and words ending in 'o' are masculine, but not only this has exceptions, there are lots of words than don't end in 'a' or 'o'.
There is also the rule of no putting 'la' before some words that start with 'a'. For example, 'el águila calva', where 'águila' is feminine, 'calva' is the feminime form of the adjective 'calvo', but 'el' is the masculine definite article.
I think the “she” for ships probably comes from a lot of interaction with the Spanish on the Atlantic in the 16th and 17th century. “La Fragata” and “La Caravela” would have been types of Spanish ships that would have been common and were feminine in gender.
Or it's just an universal thruth among sailors that something so loved but high maintanance like a ship, must be feminine
@@Teun_Jac Even without that stereotype about women, there is a near universal traditional of giving ships female or non-human names, like Elizabeth or Titanic.
Just to add to this, women bear children much in the same way ships bear passengers.
Caravela é portuguesa caralho!!!
Also they have broad bottoms
My two first languages are Spanish and Portuguese, so I kinda take all of this gender mess for granted. It helps that genders on ES and PT tend to agree, but it's still that kind of complexity you learned as a kid and dont think too much about.
I don't think i would be able to learn another language with genders.
.."o planeta"...
My native language is also portuguese and i never really thought about that, certainly would make learning another language with genders way harder.
@@Blankult em português e espanhol não faz tanta diferença o gênero. Você vai entender mesmo que a pessoa diga "o caneta" ou "os caneta". Mas em línguas como alemão faz muita diferença, porque os adjetivos não só concordam em gênero, número e grau como em português, mas também concordam com a função (declinação) se é do caso dativo, genitivo, nominativo ou acusativo. Em português a gente só preservou a declinação para pronomes, tipo eu, me e mim (eu sou. Ele me viu. Isso é para mim). Mas em alemão e outras línguas adjetivos e artigos também sofrem declinação. Só que para saber como declinar você tem que saber também o gênero. E aí pode acontecer de você falar algo incompreensível. Como se em português alguém falasse "livro, dar ele ela". Quem deu o livro pra quem? Está no passado, presente ou imperativo?
Teoricamente alemão só tem três gêneros: der = masculino, die = femino, das = neutro. Mas na prática, você tem que escolher entre der, die, das, den, dem, des, a depender do gênero e caso, e repetir a mesma lógica para os adjetivos. Tudo concorda em gênero, número, grau e caso.
Romance genders generally agree, not just among two so closely related languages as Castilian and Portuguese but also with Italian, French, etc. That's because Latin also had genders (although it had three, incl. neuter, now generally lost, typically into masculine form).
My native language is Spanish. I've learned other romance languages: Portuguese, French and Italian. Most of the time genders are the same but when they don't, at first I tend to make mistakes. I still can't believe, for instance, milk in these three languages is masculine but in my mother tongue it is feminine. My mind is like 🤯
The milk (English)
O leite (Portuguese)
Le lait (French)
Il latte (Italian)
La leche (Spanish)
This is just one example. I'm already used to these differences but it takes some time to get used to
Glad to find UR Channel again!
German is a very excact leanguage, means u can describe ' everything' very well.
Abonnement is granted!
Great Work!
My understanding is that Middle English was basically a creole, starting as a trade language between English speaking natives and Old French speaking Normans. Grammatical genders and cases were lost because creoles tend to jettison as much as they can to make them simpler and easier to learn and use. Modern English emerged when the ruling class gave up French as the language of law and government and began speaking English; this may have been a major cause of the Great Vowel Shift.
Very interesting, you made me look it up. It's called the Middle English creole hypothesis.
I think given the timing it is also possible that differences between how the Anglo-Norse and Anglo-Saxon cultures ended up settling on a standard gender for everything might have already been making things awkward. Seems plausible you could already have inconsistencies between the dialects there which had yet to be ironed out in the time since the Anglo-Saxons had taken over again. Then these French speakers show up in the 11th century with no doubt yet another bunch of inconsistencies between genders. Would seem to make sense also given it was the Northern dialects that seemed to get the idea of hey lets just get rid of that headache entirely first. Granted the other languages would all have been more similar almost mutually intelligible in fact but not identical, but if anything that would make the pattern easier for some monks or something to probably notice and maybe start to think of that idea. I say monks as they were frequently likely to actually be literate and spent considerable time reading, writing, and copying manuscripts so I'd imagine they would be better placed to notice something like this. There are certainly partial translations of scripture in English that go back far enough (7th century for some portions of the bible for example) to see this evolution over those centuries.
@@seraphina985 I'm with you except for the monks! While monks would be best placed to record and analyse the evolution of language, I highly doubt they would set the trend. Language evolves as it is spoken - by the common majority - hence our widely differing regional accents and dialects. Also, given the general attitude of the typical British working man or woman, the idea of them trying to speak 'like those daft posh monks' makes me giggle.
@@Fledhyris I meant that more in the sense of them noticing and raising awareness then the people deciding that all this palaver every time a different rich b****d takes over the local castle is a fools game.
Also the Normans were basically christian vikings who spoke norman french and would have understood other viking dialects so yea proably made it easier all round to jetison the unecessary.
Icelandic is kinda similar, we still use to some point sá (masc.), sú(fem) and það (but still the definitive article is used more in the ending of words now, adding n's or ð's). And like in old english we don't have an indefinite article.
Irish doesnt have an indefinite article either, nor scottish.
Great video! My language is Slavic, and we also have three genders, but no articles at all. Both nouns and adjectives have to be in the same gender though, as well as numbers, which my British friends say is maddening. :-)
Whaa? Are all numbers the same gender?
@@RobWords It all changes 😄 For instance, you would say "Vidim dva siva psa" (I see two grey dogs, where dog is masculine), but also "Vidim dvije sive mačke" (I see two grey cats, where cat is feminine). All nouns, adjectives, pronouns and numbers are always declined, which means that they all change slightly depending on the case that they're in. And we have seven cases 😂😂
@@m00n3east5 Oh good grief 🤯! That doesn’t sound like a language you could just "pick up as you go along".
Yeah, I guess not 😄
@@RobWords it’s easy when you speak other Slavic language. English doesn’t have genders but I always think of genders in my native tongue. For example, hammer must be masculine ;) and camera is feminine because of a ending. That rule is true for Slavic and Italian language. Just like with names - Anna, Alexa, Joanna you know that these must be names for girls.
Utterly fascinating.
As a German, and with some of the recent Gender debates, the modern state of things was rather known to me, but the look into old English was both insightful and amusing. Love it!
For me, the worst part of German isn't even the genders per se, or even their declensions, but rather how every single word in-between changes in very specific ways, you have to put an "n" there, an "e" there, an "r" there, it's a nightmare. I don't think I'll ever be able to speak German without sounding like an obvious foreigner with a botched grammar but so be it, I have accepted it and still want to learn it.
I will never be able to speak English without sounding like an obvious foreigner, but I am OK with that.
@@pawelzielinski1398 I guess that part is probably inevitable, but your English grammar seems pretty solid.
I think you just need enough exposure and correct practice so if you say ich liebe meine Hund und meine Vater, it sounds weird and you naturally correct it. I think partly a noun you learn needs to feel like the gender it belongs to, so that I’m a sentence you get a feeling of what changes need to occur if it’s masc, fem or neuter
It’s the same with Arabic and Russian. Good luck in your studies!! Don’t give up
I'm trying to sharpen up my German, and having forgotten noun genders is the worst challenge. There are some patterns I remember, but there was a reason why teachers had us always give the article when saying a noun: das Haus, die Brille, der Bleistift (I think). There's a book called Der, Die, Das written by a guy who did some computer analysis to try to find more patterns, but basically the only solid way to remember them all is to learn them with the nouns. And Germans grow up doing that, so they're just natural to them.
See, this is one of the reasons why I like learning East and Southeast Asian languages; very few if any have grammatical gender. And this coming from a Spanish speaker, who’s used to it. 😅
Good luck with the tone.
When I was learning Portuguese, I really got to experience the confusion of gendered words. It's actually kind of fun to think about the relationship of similar words that have opposite genders (for example: shoe is "calçado" and sidewalk is "calçada" -- it's almost like they're mating, physically and linguistically).
In Slovene, an example of standard ending is:
najstnik (m) = male (or unspecified) teenager
najstnica (f) = female teenager
Sonce (n) = Sun
Sončnik (m) and sončnica (f) by word formation both mean "the Sun thing". But:
sončnik (m) = a parasol
sončnica (f) = a sunflower
@@heimdall1973 Hm. Fascinating. Both are related to the sun so it makes sense to link them linguistically. I just wonder how the original namer decided that a parasol should be masculine and a sunflower should be feminine. Anyway, thanks for the info!
@@jacobopstad5483 The same word construction turns krog (m) = solid circle into krožnik (m) = plate (to eat from) and krožnica (f) = circle edge.
dim (m) = smoke
dimnik (m) = chimney (or flue)
dimnica (f) = smokehouse
What makes any of these objects male/ female, I haven't a clue.
@@heimdall1973 Oh, cool. I get the connections but I wonder what they would call a square plate now
In Galician we have some words like that. For instance, "dedo" means finger but "deda" means toe.
This is a very well done production in many aspects. Clear narrative, informative and light hearted. Fun watching.
Enjoyed watching and learning new things. 😊 I'm Filipino, and although many of our words are bequeathed to us by Spain, the native language does not have gender, especially the pronouns. This is why so many Filipinos, more often than not, interchange he and she when speaking in English. It is common to hear something like, "My son told her teacher that she forgot her assignment."
Thanks for this! I'll listen extra closely to my Filipino friends to see if I can spot this.
@@RobWords If your Filipino friends have been living in UK, or abroad for quite a while, or are quite educated, they may not have that issue. It applies more to people here in my country, especially those who are not proficient in the language which, regretfully, are quite a lot.
@Victor K Yeah. I remember that from my Spanish back in university. 😊 Conjugation. O, as, a, amos, ais, an. And the ones for verbs ending in ER and IR. 😊 It was only years after I left uni when I met someone who told me that I need not use he or she in a sentence because the conjugation for third person makes it rather redundant. 😊
Being an American, living in Germany and learning German, I find your videos very interesting to see the similarities between German and Old English. Frawe and Frau.. fascinating
These similarities are of course not accidental. The word "Anglo-Saxon" refers to the Angles, who lived around today's border between Germany and Denmark, and the Saxons. Saxons in this context refers to those Saxons who lived on the North Sea coast of today's Germany and the Netherlands. Their dialects were early forms of German.
When these people colonized/conquered Britain, the language evolving from their dialects became the new prestige language of the island, replacing the old Celtic languages. This is why Old English (also known as Anglo-Saxon) was extremely similar to Old Low German (the contemporary form of German spoken near the coast) and also to Old High German (the contemporary form of German spoken further south, ancestor of Standard German).
The Celtic languages had some influence on English, mostly simplifying it but also adding a weird complication: Obligatory use of 'do' in negations. Then the Vikings came from Scandinavia and gave a slight north Germanic touch to English. Then French-speaking Vikings came from the north coast of France and brought a large supply of French vocabulary to English.
By the way, the word 'frouwe' (standard Middle High German spelling) actually means noble lady. Over many centuries, Europeans have had the tendency to refer to women as if they had a higher social status than they actually had. This made the words gradually change their meanings. Today, in German a Frau is just any woman rather than a noble lady, and in fact, in some contexts politeness requires saying Dame instead even for a woman who is neither noble nor particularly refined. What was once the standard word for a woman, Weib/wife, has become the German word for a vulgar woman and the English word for a married woman. Similar things happened in the Romance languages.
What a wonderful video, and it's extremely rare that people take the time to pronounce German words properly. It seriously means a lot to us! Thank you! Subbed!
In Portuguese it is very easy, usually the genders of words ending in -a are feminine and nouns ending in -o are masculine. For example "mesa" (table) is feminine and "morro" (hill) is masculine. Easy peasy!
Yes, but what makes a table woman and a hill man? If i put a table on a hill, can they have a kid?
@@gaborhertelendyA mesA
O morrO
It's about matching sounds not about men and women
Except for the huge amount of words that doesn’t end in “a” or “o” (o cabide, a verdade, o lençol, a mão, o amor) and the ones that end in “o” or “a” but have opposite genders (a modelo, o clima, o dilema, a tribo, a radio)
@@shadowmoon1657
Makes no sense
@@gaborhertelendy absolutely no one in portuguese cares if it is masculine or feminine. Its not about giving the object a sexual gender, its about matching sounds.
I took a course in old and middle English when I was at school. I distinctly remember that I had to memorize different forms of the indefinite article for three geners, three numbers (sigular, dual and plural) and 5 cases (Nominative, Genitive, Dative, Accusative and Ablative) in old English. They definitely existed at one point, and then only two forms remained. (Just like singular and plural forms of some nouns like man/men. )
The German word "das Mädchen" comes from the word "die Magd" (maiden, female servant), which turned into "das Mägdchen" and then got simplified to "das Mädchen", probably because in Northern German dialects, "g" [g] turns into [j], [χ] or [h], so people just omitted it completely. (Same with the English word "maiden")
There is also Maid in both languages as in... Schöne Maid, hast du heut für mich Zeit...
If you grew up with such a language, there is a good chance your thinking would be all screw up!
@@tsuikr The grammatical features of languages must have consequences.
Russian has far fewer irregularities than German, but it compensates for that with an overabundance of useless rules, so many in fact, that by the time people speak their first grammatical sentence they have already submitted to so much that an Ivan the Terrible here and a Stalin there won't be much of an additional encumbrance..
In Slovak we also have a neuter for a girl. (To) dievča (it is read dyevcha)
@@peterjansen7929 Nonsense)) All those rules allow to condense a ton of meaning, overtones and info into very short phrases. Of course, it does have its linguistic "encumbrances" and oddities, but that's common to most languages that evolved over a long time. In fact, I find it's much deeper and varied in the "flavour" of meaning it can express, much more so than our English. Which don't make things any easier for Europeans in general. But for example Hindi speakers do have a certain affinity with it, it kind of, in a very remote way, reminds them of Sanskrit, or so I've been told.
Commonly misspelled in English is the loanword "fiancé." It's often misspelled because English speakers don't understand that "fiancé" refers to a man, and "fiancée" refers to a woman. This distinction is quite useful and efficient, avoiding the need to actually use more words to explain the gender of a person getting married.
Just like the blond(e) example RobWords used, this is because it comes directly from French. And because it started as an adjective and had that masc/feminine adjective modifier on it. A fiancé is someone you're engaged/betrothed to.
Oh, yeah, and the name, René (masculine] and Renée (feminine].
That was the other one I thought of too. A lot of people get the spellings wrong.
I told my husband this as soon as we got engaged because I knew he wouldn’t know lol
Ok I did t know this at all. I guess the spelling could be different though but not the way you say it.
Very interesting and incredibly well explained!
Congratulations, I loved the video!!! 😀
The older is the variant of a language, the closer it is to other Indo-European languages. For example, SE (m) and SEO (f) in old English, compare it to old Russian words meaning "this": SEY (m) and SEYA (f), in modern Russian they can be used in "high style" speech. THAT probably corresponds with ETOT, also meaning "this", or TOT ("that").
Wow, well noticed! Also there is the word SIYE for neutral gender, for example "сие деяние" (siye deyaniye) "this action". Sey, siya and siye (сей, сия, сие) literally means "this". The word "now" in Russian is "сейчас" (seychas) which was formed from "сей час" = "this hour". Also some grannies (babushkas =) ) say "сию минуту" (siyu minutu, also now, right now) which is "сия минута" (siya minuta = this minute) in nominative case, but "сию минуту" is accusative case what most likely means "в сию минуту" = "at this minute".
Well, another modern word is "сегодня" = "today", which likely formed as ''в течение сего дня"="during this day" (сего дня (sego dnya) is genitive case), in nominative case "сей день" (sey den = this day)
@@Dimasyaism
Русское сиё (это) соответствует французскому с'est (сэ) - это
А также русское сиё соответствует финскому se
Nope, OE sē is not related to Russian сей, it's actually related to Russian тот, with OE sē deriving from the animate declension while Russian тот comes from the inanimate declension of PIE demonstrative pronoun *só (with *tód being the inanimate form). Russian сей is actually related to OE hē whence Modern English "he", both coming from PIE deictic particle *ḱe.
@@VEGETA19954 Thank you for the clarification. So, something is related anyway :)
@@Dimasyaism the "г" in "сегодня" is pronounced "в" - transliterated, sevodnya.
Besides gender-specific pronouns, the only other thing English has as far as gender is gender-specific nouns, like "actor/actress," "waiter/waitress," "host/hostess," etc. However, other languages I've learned such as French have a gender distinction for other types of people, such as "lawyer," "nurse," "spouse," "fiancé," etc.
Blond/Blonde says hi, ok technically it's a loan word, but it's an adjective and I think that last non-noun to be commonly gendered, I think the 90's saw it's end and the end of school teachers throwing a hissy fit over it at least out loud, but it's still technically a gendered word in english that isn't just a noun.
The "ess" to distingush a female ":actor" for examble is on the way out. Using it in some circles is considered "bad form"' and anachronistic. There is also the more and more universal "-person" suffix. A female waiter is a waitperson, and even that moderation on usage will disappear. The being who brings your soup is the waiter, period..
A lot of these words will probably disappear, too. I know “actress” is being encouraged to be replaced by “actor” for all. We often just say “host” for everyone, too. I think it’s a matter of time.
@@Cafeallday222 here is the host of Jeopardy, Mayim Bialik. Back in the 70s, before Vanna, Wherl of Fortune had a hostess Susan Stafford.
@@jeopardy60611 yes, that’s what I mean. It’s a slow disappearance.
This is so very interesting. I'm a native English speaker, who's studying Japanese, which is another genderless language (outside of the myriad of ways to say "I", but that's a whole other ball of wax 😅), I have really zero frame of reference for how gendered language works. It's so cool to learn this history to my native language.
People already say modern English is difficult, I guess they should be glad we have what we do now instead of this old English. 😂
You must've heard Spanish even if you're not fluent - lots of gendered examples there.
@@dodgeplow This is assuming they have frequently encountered and have enough of an interest in Spanish to have some sense of the langauge beyond 'this sounds like Spanish'.
For example, I sometimes watch Japanese TV, but I didn't know that Japanese doesn't utilize gendered language much until just now. However, I do know about Spanish's gendered articles because I learned a few words and phrases online as a kid (and I took a couple years of French).
@@georgeandrews1394 An assumption, but I'd think he'd have heard plenty of it. It's the language spoken by the second most number of people on this planet after Mandarin Chinese. If he's in the Americas or the UK it'll be fairly present in typical culture. Now if he's in Oceana, less likely, but plenty of international movies and other culture media make it a frequent encounter to English speakers.
Japanese has word classes aka genders. They define what counting word you must use for correct Japanese.
Also in Japanese it's best to avoid saying pronouns whenever possible. Either by just dropping them or replacing them with a name or proper noun
old english would probably be easier because it seemed way more well-structured. you'd learn rules instead of doing everything case-by-case, word-by-word like modern english.
As an English language learner myself, I really find it much more helpful than other European languages that English doesn't have genders of objects. and I’ve always wondered why English is like that. So this video was really interesting for me and I really enjoyed it.
Thanks a lot for sharing this useful and intriguing information.
Actually in Dutch,
Het = Neuter
De = Combination of masculine and feminine,, so we call it "common gender"
But, thanks for this informative video 😁.
Oh wow, that's fascinating! If only we could all just have a common gender...
Thanks for watching.
De because Der and Die basically matched up when they were "reduced" in Dutch? Like how Es became Het, Wort became Woord, Aus became Uit, etc.
It is easier in Danish and Swedish. Den (it) = common gender item, det (it) = neuter gender item, han (he) = masculine person, hun (she) = feminine person. Only items can be common gender though
So meisje (girl) isn't feminine ...
@@RobWords Actually, English does have common gender--in the plural. That's why the personal pronoun for all plural nouns is "they." In the singular, we may not have grammatical gender, but we do have natural gender, so we have the pronouns "he," "she," and "it." In vernacular English, "they" has been used for centuries as a common gender pronoun in the singular when the sex of the referent in unclear. For example, "If someone took something, they must pay for it" in the vernacular, as opposed to standard English "If someone took something, he must pay for it."
My wife’s cousin married a French girl and, when I was learning French, he explained to me that you need to learn the gender right from the start. Just like in the USA you need to say not just the name of the town but also the state that it comes from, like Paris, Texas, or Nashville, Tennessee (as opposed to Nashville, Indiana). So you always learn “une baguette” or “la table” instead of baguette or table. It’s been a useful trick for me.
Yes, since you almost always have to stick a definite or indefinite article in front of a noun, might as well learn it as a pair of words and that will clue you into gender.
This naming states thing makes total sense within a broad context, so that people know where you're referring to; and if I went to the States, I would tell people I was from Manchester, England, for the same reason. But do people use them locally, too? If you live in Tennessee, and took a trip to Nashville in the same state, would you still tell everyone 'I'm heading up to Nashville, Tennessee' or would you shorten it because it's then assumed you mean the closest city of that name?
@@Dracopol Except if there's an vowel in front of the noun, then, you only have l' so you have no clue as to gender. A better idea is to make your la or le sound alike so you are not heard making a mistake. LOLOL!
@@Fledhyris Right! I once told my 80 something mother that my son was headed by ship--he was in the Canadian Navy Reserves and stationed in Halifax, Nova Scotia--to Sydney. "Australia?" my mother asked, sounding worried. The Olympic Games had just been held there so I guess my mother had Sydney, Australia on her mind. "No," I laughed, "Sydney, Nova Scotia!" The ship didn't even get that far. Too much ice.
A useful trick, which sadly doesn't work in Latin which has neither definitive nor indefinite articles...
Thank you SO much... I have wondered about this for years...
I had personally come to the conclusion that you suggest here - that as languages blended - and genders conflicted - they just naturally fell away.
Cannot tell you how happy I am to come across your videos.
Really enjoy your channel, and even more so, now that I am learning Greek. You make sense of the chaos!
When You said NEUTER, I was afraid it meant what we do to cats and dogs! lol! When I studied English Grammar, I never knew it had had genders. They just didn't teach us that. Your video is very educational, and interesting! Thanks for all the information about ancient English! ~Janet in Canada
The classic "The Story of English" series by (I think) the BBC or maybe PBS or some combination, also talked about standardization of plurals being attributable to the complications of language in the Danelaw. Considering that these are the kind of simplifications that happen in pidgins and creoles generally, it makes sense to me for the loss of gender to be from that source.
I remember watching a "The Adventure of English" which came a few years later and throughly enjoyed it.
The difference in spelling for blond/blonde isn't really an "English" thing, because it exists solely because we borrowed the word (and its different, gender-related spellings) from French. Incidentally, although I agree with the blond/blonde rule as you state it, the distinction isn't universally accepted by all authoritative references...
I would argue that English still has three genders, since every single noun is replaceable by one of three pronouns: he (masculine), she (feminine), or it (neuter). It's just that the vast, vast majority of modern English nouns are neuter. And as you mention towards the end of your video, certain nouns which most speakers would think of as neuter today (such as car, ship, country) often took the feminine pronoun (she/her) in the recent past (and somewhat continues today, but sounds dated).
After several more common European languages, I'm learning Turkish and I appreciate its lack of grammatical gender ("o" can be translated as "he," "she," or "it" in English, for example). Without genders, there is only one form of an adjective to learn, and only one indefinite article (they use the number "one" -- "bir" -- as an indefinite article when necessary). The definite article is totally different from how we conceive it in English, as they use the accusative suffix, so some would say it's not really a definite article at all. But at least it has totally regular rules for use, its form depending on euphony (how the root word is spelled/pronounced, a bit like our a/an variation in English) rather than any aspect (such as gender) of the word itself.
@@ahmeth.k.2566
I used the wrong terminology, I apologize.
I'm referring to what Lewis V. Thomas calls "the objective definite suffix" in the classic "Elementary Turkish."
It is also called an "objective suffix" in "The Delights of Learning Turkish" by Yaşar Esendal Kuzucu.
It's the -i, -ı, -ü, -u suffix.
The word brunette also reflects this. Brunet is the word for a male with brown hair but no one uses it. Again I think this is the French again since it reflects a diminutive.
I think the video's example is wrong. Blond doesn't change as an adjetive (blond lass), but only as a noun (he's a blond). And yes, it's silly that the examples we have are lifted from French (fiancée), so English doesn't really quite have them
@@rafaelq.1689 because English doesn't have it anymore. Also modern English especially American English has completely discarded one gendered term as a noun, how can they be expected to keep the adjective and it's gendered spellings. Most people I've asked this think blonde/blond is how the Americans and Brits spell things different kind of like color and colour (if they know at all.) Almost no one knows brunet/brunette. Could we use dom/domme (lol)? Still all these come from French. I don't know an English word that has retained both spellings/pronunciations like these French borrowed ones. So we rid ourselves of them then burned all the evidence.
modern English does not even "kind of" have genders because of the pronouns, English instead divides pretty much all living things by their physical number, age and sex (the number of divisions made in practice varies based on a whole bunch of factors, you'd be surprised how long the list can get for one kind of farm animal), using a different word for each relevant combination, and the pronouns reflect this.
A lot of ignorant people have put about a large amount of of confusing stupidity due to a combination of not being able to get their head around this fact and the fact that English uses the word "gender" for four very different but tangentially related things: Grammatical gender, (an agreement system used in many languages. what gender a word has is usually more down to it's pronunciation or spelling than any real association with a given sex), biological sex (because the word "sex" was becoming badly overloaded, while prudes and immature idiots were making life difficult for the bureaucrats of the time about it), specific social constructs (gender roles. the individual responsible for most of the nonsense surrounding this was a journalist who later admitted to pretty much fabricating the bulk of it in order to meet a deadline. didn't stop various factions latching onto the idea and exploiting it to the hilt for various ends), and what ultimately amounts to an aspect of neurology and psychology (gender identity. transgender people and the like. I'm of the opinion that a lot of baggage and nonsense could have been avoided if a better term had been chosen, because malicious and/or stupid actors on all sides of That issue have run the ability to use the terms to conflate the concepts into the Ground in their rhetoric. often actually undermining their own point if the listener actually applies an ounce of logic to the argument... not that most do, tribalism and ideology being what they are).
Super!! As Spanish, we also (of course) have moved on a lot...particularly since we became 'democratic'. Politics are also the road to allow things to be 'accepted' mire easily as society develops and accepts or chooses to 'let go', be free...Look at all the English words in modern Spanish! Technology, Art, Sports, Politics etc...I.LOV E YOUR VIDEOS!! 7:16
Thanks for the content. I've just found this channel. I thought I was the weird guy who studied the roots of the English Language. I've done it ever since I learned in a book, as an aside in the story, that Polis comes from Greek, and means city, so Policeman literally means 'Man of the City'.
That’s awesome.
I love studying word origins and root words. I’m obsessed.
As opposed to man of the united......
I learned that one from Sir Terry Pratchett, as it is a plot point in one of his books 🙂
And megalopolis means "big huge city" ... and politics means +/- "city business"!
Fun fact: the correlation between object genders in German and Portuguese is almost perfectly negative. Hence, we in Brazil use that when we want to make a caricature of a German trying to speak Portuguese. Just turn the V's into F's, "ão" into "on" and switch all genders. Kind of like the backwards Я for Яussian.
Brilliant!
I guess you are overstating the negative correlation a bit. Between German and French (which should mostly have the same genders as Portuguese) the same applies. Some of the most prominent offenders are Sun and Moon (the Sun is masculine in Romance languages and the Moon feminine, and in Germany both genders are reversed) and the large number of French loan words ending in -age in German, which for some reason all became feminine in German even though they are originally masculine. Except of course for 'la plage' (beach, feminine in French), which doesn't exist as a loanword in German, and is translated by the masculine noun 'der Strand'.
@@johaquila Alle haben kapiert, dass das ein Witz ist. Nur der Deutsche wieder nicht 🙄
@@TheSandkastenverbot Als Witz bezogen auf ein fast zufälliges Verhältnis wäre es langweilig. Was den Witz gut macht ist doch gerade die Tatsache, dass das Verhältnis eben wirklich nicht zufällig ist sondern bei Substantiven ohne natürliches Geschlecht (sowas wie Frau oder Ochse) die beiden Sprachen wirklich öfter das entgegengesetzte Geschlecht haben als dasselbe. Wer das nicht weiß, unterschätzt aber den ursprünglichen Witz, und deshalb hab ich mir erlaubt die Pointe zu erklären und ein bisschen weiter auszuführen.
What do you mean about the backwards Я??? That letter is pronounced "yaah".
My first language is Spanish . I use to love telling my over protective mom that I was hanging out with my friend because in English friend doesn’t have a gender like in Spanish. So I would say it and act like I already gave her enough information 😂
That’s awesome
So when you read a headline in an English paper: "Teacher had sex with student" you really have not many details what was going on.
In Polish the same headline would clearly indicate the gender of both people involve in the situation. Same with German. English creates ambiguity.
@@pawelzielinski1398yes it creates ambiguity in situations where the gender is of interest, but I'd argue that the majority of the time it's actually superfluous information and therefore creates not only needless complexity in the language, but also keeps this silly idea alive that people's gender is so core to their makeup that it needs to be taken into consideration in every circumstance.
hmmm I think you get the main piece of information in 'teacher had sex with student' xD@@pawelzielinski1398
@@briandhamby nah, if you are native speaker...then you don't have to learn those genders... besides having a crappy spelling system is even worse and it's way more stupid because people can actually do something about it and they don't. It takes the Japanese like 20 years to learn how to spell college-level words... in Italian, Spanish, Finnish, etc it only takes you half a year.
I love your videos, Talking about gender - you should try Icelandic! It makes German look easy! I lived there and for ages was scared to open my mouth and speak any, even though I'd been going to classes there. One night though I was at a party and I noticed that people were making grammatical "mistakes" all around me - and it wasn't just because they were drunk (which they were!)
0:22 "...including pretty much all the other European languages..."
So, if anybody is wondering about possible exceptions, Hungarian doesn't have grammatical differences based on gender. That includes even "he" and "she and you can just use "ő", to refer to either. So simple! I'm sure that some speakers of gendered languages would argue that somehow the added complexity of their language serves some sort of indispensable, useful purpose but once you need to arbitrarily assign gender to inanimate objects and do complex and exact matches (I know this varies from language to language) for nouns, verbs, pronouns, adjectives, even articles and who knows what else and dealing with EXCEPTIONS to the rules, not to mention possible regional differences 🤪, I think the argument wears pretty thin and just comes down to highly subjective aesthetics and just following traditions.
On the downside, starting with a grammatically gender neutral language as the first one and learning gendered languages later, even after many years, I still occasionally slip up in another language...
Of course, every language has weird complexities that are not essential and Hungarian is not different.
Some languages have differences in how the language is used, based on levels (sometimes multiple!) of politeness or age?! 🤪
Instead, we have our case system and definite and indefinite conjugation topped with wovel harmony.
But nevertheless, in any languages, if you dare to communicate and the recipient has any goodwill they will understand you, regardless of cases, genders and whatnot :)
Considering a lot of gendering of language happens in fertility centric cultures (Technically the Christian "GOD" has it roots in the Pagan god of war, or similar as the influences were multiple, the Pagan roots were very fertility-centric),
it has me wonder why certain inanimate objects are gendered.
Take for example the Hindi word "Kitaben" (book) is "feminine" ("akin to that of femininity, female-like"), my take is that people saw males going around with books, reading books and collecting books, thus since they thought "males complement females and females complement males, therefore the book complements the male, therefore the book is female" (I'm sure there's a book-fettish joke in there somewhere X'D)
The meaning of Gender had somewhat a bit of an umbrella meaning starting from the mid 60's to about 2010 where Gender Abolitionists push for the erasure of the awareness of male/female uniquenesses and features (Pretty much the root of the ideologue, considering the push for equal opportunity and general equality, "woman" isn't a stereotype, just a name for a person who has a specific "female" function that males don't have... hence the basis for the laws that give rights to both males and females based on this core principle).
Historically gendered English language (technically very archaic English, so not really English at that point, but the starting point) was archaic with gendering in that innate stuff was being attributed "male/female like" rather than people (Which is the current-ish affair with he/she/they for male/female/difficult-to-interpret-or-neutral for English) thus had the same problem as the rest of Europe where females wern't able to express about the oppressive nature of those societies or struggled to reason with themselves as to why those societies were oppressive, that atop the fact that if they'd of figured out how to speak up, she'd be accused of being a witch and burnt...
Hungarian is a Finno-Ugric language, related to Finnish, Karelian and Estonian to mention but a few. I know Finnish doesn't have grammatical gender, so it's perfectly reasonable that Hungarian doesn't. Most European languages are Indo-European, and they are quite different from Finno-Ugric. Among Indo-European languages English is the one that stands out, but my own native language, Swedish, is moving towards genderlessness, and a new third person singular has worked its way into the language, to the point where its used in official documents. Originally this was meant to be used to refer to non-binary persons, but it's become the pronoun of choice when gender isn't known or is irrelevant. And some young people use it exclusively, and have completely dropped han and hon (he and she). Losing pronouns that indicate biological sex is still a long way from losing grammatical gender altogether, but it's a step in that direction. And I'd be surprised if Danish and Norwegian don't go that way too.
I observed that, as well, and I said: you're wrong. Then I realized that Hungarian isn't a European language. It's Asian.
We hear that English 's "woman" comes from wife+man. Fun fact: In Hungarian the word "man" (férfi) comes from husband+boy (férj+fiú).
Going back far enough, Hungarian has Altaic language roots. This was suprisingly obvious when I was exposed to some modern Asian languages with Altaic origin. Beyond a few random expressions, I don't speak these languages but for example when we were comparing language features with a Korean colleague, we've found a surprising number of similarities between Hungarian and Korean, especially when contrasting these with Indo-European languages. Ignoring the many differences in actual words, Hungarian has a lot more in common with Korean and Japanese than with English.
Some of the similarities and differences are at a very fundamental level within the languages. An example is head directionality. It is really at the core of how sentences are constructed.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head-directionality_parameter
I don't know about the other gender-sensitive languages, but French is learned with things being combos: article+noun. A child doesn't learn "livre", which may mean "book" or "pound", depending on gender. They learn "le livre", "book" ... or "la livre", "pound".
That’s not such a great system once you run into nouns that start with a vowel or silent ‘H’. How do you learn the gender of « l’hôtel » in this format?
@@ConellossusLittle kids don't think about gender. They learn that a book is "un livre" and that a pound is "une livre". So obviously, those two things are not the same.
In Portuguese we have "o grama", "the gram" and "a grama", "the grass"
What if you had a pound book?
@@EvanG529 "un livre d'une livre" - a one pound book. The two different articles - "un" and "une" - make the meaning perfectly clear.
I watched a video not too long ago about languages that have genders. It basically said they used it because it works and many cases it gets specific when describing or referring to something. Personally I think it's awesome being able to describe something with detail. Spanish is my native language I also speak French. I learned English as a second language. Anyway each language has its thing and they work. If English doesn't want genders it still works, the only difference in other languages is you could give further details beyond what English can.
Yes, I agree. For example, the relative pronouns in English tend to go immediately after the entity they refer to, for example: "the man who..." However, as we have grammatical gender in Spanish, we don't need the relative pronoun to be immediately after the entity they refer to. "El que, la que los que, las que, las cuales , los cuales" give us more freedom with the placement of the relative clause. "Le compré una casa a un hombre con muchos jardines, la cual estaba sucia". It doesn't have to be the gardens. It can be the house despite the word "gardens" is in between.
An interesting extra aspect to add to this is that in the Scandinavian languages, which also used to have masculine, feminine, and neuter, as time went by masculine and feminine merged and became the common gender. Neuter stayed separate. So, now we have two genders, like many other languages do, but unlike elsewhere they are not masculine and feminine. Growing up in Denmark and learning the two genders' names, which translate as 'shared gender' and 'no gender' puzzled me for a long time.
Some dialects of Danish and Norwegian have retained all three though, possibly some Swedish ones as well.
The same thing happened in Dutch
Norway still has the 3 grammatical gender system, but in bokmål (one of our official Norwegian written languages), the feminine grammatical gender *is* optional, but still used by a vast majority of our population (except in Bergen, which only has the masculine and neuter grammatical genders).
They vary even within the same language: in the south of Italy it’s common to refer to a box with masculine “uno scatolo”, as it’s masculine in Neapolitan dialect, however standard Italian requires it to be feminine “una scatola” and you’d be looked at like a peasant if you used the masculine. This led to people even when using dialect to contract the article and Neapolitan tends to “cut off” the final letters, so it becomes “e scat’l”, where the article is pronounced like a fast “ö”
In 9th grade I had to take French and I got the whole "masculine" and "feminine" deal with no problem (also 10th grade German, my choice). In 8th grade, however, I had to take Spanish, and as soon as the teacher started talking about "gender," I could NOT wrap my around it and then couldn't even focus on the lessons. I can't quite remember what I was trying to decipher about it, I just know that my mind shut down completely.
Isn't that odd! Gender in French and Spanish works almost the exact same way, though words can sometimes be one gender in Spanish and the other in French. Perhaps the Spanish teacher wasn't very good at explaining it. :-)
@@weebunny is very easy actually, in Spanish almost every word ending with the "a" vowel is feminine and ending with the "o" vowel is masculine.
Very interesting. Could you possibly elaborate on why this is? As far as I know, both languages are quite similar.
Maybe it was hormonal. 😅
That was most enjoyable! I minored in French in college, and took two semesters of German “for fun”, and a Latin class “for fun”. I had a fascination with languages at the time. Linguistics is a really convoluted pursuit, but your focus on discreet aspects encountered among English speakers is a good approach to understanding how English was influenced, and why it’s the universal language.
Talking of boats, I think it would be great to see an episode on the etymology of sailing terms. This is because the meanings of words are all muddled up and different because of their function (ropes are never called ropes for instance) Its about how quickly a captain can convey meaning.
One of the reasons I think that we have clung to boats being feminine is because on occasion you just need a distinct term to identify that you are referring to the boat as a whole . So you might say something like "bring her along side" rather than "move the boat next to the pontoon" because its almost twice as quick to say and you cant say "It" because it would be far to vague.
My native language is Brazilian Portuguese. The thing is, when you learn as kids do, by immersion and hearing people talk, and getting corrected when you make a mistake, it just feels natural and obvious which gender each object belongs to. I think foreigners trying to learn a gendered language should listen more to native speakers instead of putting so much effort into memorizing.
Nope. Your native language is Portuguese. Period. You don’t hear Australians saying their native language is Australian English or the Americans saying they speak American English!!
@@nelsondesousa9304 As an American, I have made the distinction of speaking "American English" on occasion, and will sometimes joking say "I speak British!" when translating some British phrase into "American English" for my family. I have known European and Asians who take classes specifically for "American English" to use when speaking to Americans rather than Brits. I knew one Asian who planned to return home one day and become a teacher of "American English", as it was a valued ability in his country. I also knew a Spaniard who referred to his version of the language as "Castilian Spanish", and looked down on "Latin American" Spanish. I don't have any personal knowledge of how much Brazilian Portuguese has drifted from Portugal's version, but in general such distinctions are not unusual or unuseful.
@@rhymeswithorange6092 They drifted a lot... The writing is basically the same, only with some different word usage like in AE and BE. The grammar usage changed quite a bit in colloquial language. The pronunciation, however, is veeery different... for many, Brazilian Portuguese sounds more like Spanish while European Portuguese sounds like Russian. Many Brazilians can't understand Portuguese when they speak fast if they don't have previous contact with their language.
@@nelsondesousa9304 Don't forget that movies have options for BR PT and EU PT... so, yes, we can say that we speak Brazilian Portuguese. As I notice from my Portuguese friends, they receive more content from Brazilian television than we do from Portugal, so we are not that used to EU PT. Also, I don't know whether you're Br or Pt, just please don't get offended, it's not my intention... My suggestion is that people stop with that colonizer mind. Brazil got its independency in 1822, and since then developed in a very different way. Thus, trying to make Brazil still belong to Portugal is a common habit for many Portuguese people that ends up making Portugal seem a weak country, which I'm certain it is not.
@@nelsondesousa9304 literally no one asked
Very interesting, thank you. I always new Old English had grammatical genders but always wondered what they were.
As a native German speaker who happens to live in an English speaking country I am frequently being asked how to determine the grammatical gender of an object. As I also speak French and (some) Spanish I am well aware how this can differ between the languages. On day the penny dropped: the grammatical gender depends almost exclusively on the sound of a word. In Spanish it is relatively easy. Very(!) simplified : -a is female and -o is male. I admit it is a lot more complex in German but if you start grouping words according to their ending sound and look into their grammatical gender you will see this will coincide >90%.
An important exception to your rules (heuristics?) for Spanish are masculine words of Greek origin: el día, el mapa, el sistema, el esquema, el cura, el planeta, etc.
That is how I tried to "cheat" when I was trying to learn German. I figured that when I became immersed (by speaking not reading and writing) in the language, I would naturally pick up the correct genders. However, I found I usually learned the correct gender when learning the word itself. Now, I only cheat when I've forgotten the correct gender! The indefinite articles still drive me crazy, so I plan to slur them until I can mimic them.
While in German the gender is usually derived from the ending, there are also a ton of exceptions. For example, the word “Band” can have all three genders, and refers to different things every time: der Band = tome, die Band = band (this is a loanword), das Band = ribbon. Some words' gender also depends on the dialect, for example for “Semmel” (which is a purely southern German word and refers to a bread roll).
ua-cam.com/channels/4u4m4WYdgKQcsuJLJBKMkA.htmlplaylists
>>if you start grouping words according to their ending sound and look into their grammatical gender you will see this will coincide >90%
I studied German in Berlin. I had 2 classes in 1993 and 1995. My first German teacher was American, but the second teacher was German. The American teacher told us that we have to memorize gender of each words. However, the German teacher didn't tell so. She told the students to memorize noun with article. Like Das Auto. So, you don't have to remember the gender of words.
It's the same thing though. The articles are gendered, so if you remember the correct article, you automatically know the gender of the noun. You could instead also remember the correct pronouns, because they're also gendered. You could even write the correct English pronouns - he, she or it - next to the German vocabulary, if that helps you memorize it the quickest, or paint them in different colors. But in the end, you need to remember the gender of every single noun, because there's no logic behind it.
Important to know the last noun of a German word makes the gender (guess the most of you know we describe words by putting different words / nouns together ;-))
@@pxlcowpxl6166 I just wanted to add: there is a logic, but a very complex logic which has exceptions (which have reasons to be exceptions) and therefore the whole article System seems random.
But that actually helped me a lot when learning Italian. It’s like if I try to learn that meat is carne in Italian I don’t know the gender yet. So I can either learn that carne is feminine and remember that fact or just learn that meat is la carne in Italian, kinda treating it like one word. The 2nd one has, at least imo the big advantage that you will just automatically think of it as la carne. And if someone wanted to ask you about the gender you can think about it and know it because it’s part of the thing you just learnt. This means you don’t have to think about which article to use by remembering the gender but like I just said, the opposite. On the other hand you can remember the gender of an object and if you did a test about which gender does the word have you would do a great job. But while speaking you would have to do one additional step of thinking. From the gender to the article. Now let’s choose. Which one is more important to just know intuitively. Imo it’s clear. If someone asks me about a word's gender, I will have to connect these dots for one to two seconds and then I can tell them. I am sure they won’t mind waiting that short time. But in a fluent conversation that time isn’t short. One to two seconds can seem like an eternity if used to thinking during a conversation. But that’s just my opinion. :)
Excellent trick, thanks for sharing 👍
You used German, French, and Spanish ad examples for comparison when talking about English and as someone who speaks all these languages, it was a treat to see the comparisons made. I rarely see videos about languages where they compare equivalents of X language to Y language to Z language. I love it. Can you please do more on this topic? Old English? Also, spellings have changed a lot from 12th century to 16th century. I read the Geneva Bible of 1560 and they write the “u” as “v” and omit some vowels etc. thank you for this video!!! I’d love to see other languages compared. Dutch-Afrikaans; Farsi-dari-Arabic; Aramaic-Hebrew-Arabic; Russian-Slovak-Serbian-Croatian-Bulgarian. Etc ❤
I would've elaborated on Dutch, because there's an interesting thing: there is no difference between feminine and masculine (de) but we do have a neuter (het). In the past we did have more different words, like there still are in German, for definite and indefinite articles.
Regarding the increasing use of 'they' in English, that posts a little bit of a problem in Dutch, because 'she' and 'they' are both 'zij'. So while saying 'they', you're also still saying 'she'. There are some used alternatives, but tbh, they all feel 'weird' language-wise, at least to me.
Wanted to say this. Also how de or het changes if you add an adjective. Learning Dutch from Afrikaans (my native tongue) as a base, I got this quickly, but I found it interesting and easier than German.
Also, when using -je* at the end of a word to get the smaller version (like the mädchen example from German), the gender changes to neuter.
De boom (tree), het boompje (small tree, extra p sneaks in 😎)
De auto (car), het autootje (mind the extra o)
Het huis (house), het huisje
Depending on the word you add it to it knows deferent forms: -pje, -tje, -netje, -otje, -atje, or just -je. 😆
@@epbeket oh yes, of course! I forgot about that.
In the meantime in Afrikaans we have:
die boom, die boompie,
die kar, die karretjie (car),
die huis, die huisie,
die baba, die babatjie (I don't know if you have a diminutive form of 'baby' in Dutch).
You get it, it's all "die" 😂. Or 'n (from 'een'), or g'n (from 'geen') and they mean the exact same. The definite article and then 'none'.
I just realised it must be hell to learn Dutch as an extra language. 🙄
@@alias201 looks like simplified Dutch to me (getting rid of the de/het problem), but keeping some strange exceptions that have to do with easy pronunciation: the extra P and T remain. BoomPie
Thinking of it, the rules are weird and very complicated. After a M, you get an extra P (boom, boompje), but bom/bommetje (small bomb) not bompje 😆
I've tried out French, German, Swedish, and Finnish to an extent, and as a native English speaker I've found Finnish easier amongst those 4, even tho the first 3 are related to English. Finnish doesn't even have a separate pronoun for 'he' and she', it just uses the same word for both...never MIND the rest of the language totally lacking grammatical gender to begin with which I appreciate. They have a case system, which I've seen many online tout as 'extremely difficult'...but I find that ludicrous. It's harder to and takes more time to learn the arbitrary gender of every noun in a gendered language. Meanwhile, the case endings in Finnish are regular, with only a slight sound change to agree with the vowel harmony. The vocabulary may be totally foreign 99% of the time, but because of the phonetics and phonotactics of Finnish, they're easy to remember too. You're not going to find a large consonant or vowel cluster in Finnish (from what I can tell). Also easy to learn to read, no stupid spelling rules lol.
Mandarin's grammar is super easy too, and it's really flexible. The thing that makes Mandarin annoying to learn (and why I suspect the FSI has it ranked as one of the harder languages to learn) is the fact that its writing system is such a pain, with no alphabet and no phonetic link to the way it's spoken.
I am glad you have found Finnish easy. People usually think that it is very hard to learn.
interesting.. as a person coming from a non-gendered language... I shall take Finnish for a challenge
As a native Finnish speaker, the need for genders for words is something that has never made any sense. In this video, a question asked is, why English as done away with genders. My question has always been who in their right mind has ever had the idea of assigning genders to the bloody words. Why?
@@sarppaleffat Hi! Surprisingly, this question is not that difficult to answer. Human beings tend to classify things. And different groups of humans can choose different categories to do that. This happened to the Proto-Indo-European people, who lived thousands of years ago and whose language gave rise to most European languages today as well as some Middle Eastern and Indian languages. For some reason, they chose gender. Perhaps they noticed that the world was full of opposites like "night" and "day", "earth" and "sky" and so on, and associated them with the opposites "male" and "female". The fact is that each language has its own classifications. There are languages that differ animate from inanimate, such as Russian and Japanese. And there are languages that classify things by their shape: long, flat, round, etc. like Japanese and Chinese. Even when the classification is arbitrary, it sounds natural to the native speaker because we hear people refering to an object in the same way over and over since childhood. This way, grammatical gender becomes part of the nature of the object itself. As a native Portuguese speaker who speaks German fluently, I still sometimes hear myself using the Portuguese equivalent first and then correcting it. ¯\_( ͡ᵔ ͜ʖ ͡ᵔ)_/¯
Having french as my mother tongue, I thought I would have no problem learning german. Wrong! Our masculine words often are feminine in german an vice versa, or neuter or sometimes the same. Then you add the declensions for even more fun. I learned later on that it is just a matter of getting used to it. It looked scary at first.
haha, yes... all words thats been taken over from french into German ending on -age just twisted gender from m to f only for the fun it... but words ending on -ion kept there f gender... and all other words are just a great mess... but in Baden Würrtemberg, we sometimes use the french gender instead of the correct German one.. Der Butter, nicht Die Butter... 🤣😂🤣
@@andreasrehn7454 interesting
"La mairie" in French, "Das Rathaus" in German, "Il Municipio" in Italian.....just sayin'
And don't get me started on "le soir" vs "la sera" or "la mer" vs "il mare".....
Yeah, that's typical when you learn another language. Even with english, "she's a nice plane" when in Polish, an airplaine is masculine. But it can be indeed tricky when in German you have the - mentioned in the clip - das Maedchen which is highly counter-intuitive for someone whose language has it "naturally" feminine.
After learning german did you ever get the french gender wrong because you were thinking of the german gender?
You are so entertaining! Also so intelligent! Thank you. Fascinating subject.
My mother tongue is English, and I did not study any other language until Hebrew School, where I started at age 6. I quickly resented being required by my parents to attend until I was 13 years old, five days a week. By the time I was 16 years old, I had managed to forget almost every word of Hebrew that I was forced to study each afternoon of my boyhood. In high school, I began a three year course of French study. Modern French has two genders. In college, I was required two more years of language. I began German, which has three genders. I loved the literature of both languages, the songs, and the wit. Today, many decades later, I still have a good reading knowledge of both French and German. I remember the genders in both French and German of most words that I know. Once learned, the gender is associated somehow with the word, I find. There is an old saying, "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink"! I was that bad-boy horse, and I just would not sip Hebrew when I wanted to be out playing ball after school and not attending yet another school for Hebrew!
For God's sake, tell us whether or not Hebrew has genders already!
@@lonestarr1490 It does: masculine and feminine. Adjectives have to agree in gender with the noun they qualify. All the Semitic languages are like this (Arabic, Aramaic, and Amharic).
You were learning Biblical Hebrew, weren't you? If you weren't religious, it would have been drudgery, no doubt, just like learning Latin was for English people of my generation and earlier. I am a non-Jewish Englishman who is currently studying Modern Hebrew. It's a very attractive language.
@@DieFlabbergast No. Nobody learns "Biblical Hebrew" except those studying religious literature. "Hebrew School" students learn modern Hebrew, but because they don't live in Israel, they only get to apply it to prayers, mostly, or some Israeli folk songs. They don't get to speak it regularly. So it seems boring, because it does not apply well to their lives. The problem that it's not appreciated by Hebrew school teachers *as a language* instead of just a cultural instrument. The truth is, if you can unlock the patterns of both Semitic and Indo-European languages (say, by learning Hebrew and Latin), you will have quite a fair grasp of linguistic structure that can quickly help you pick up more languages in those groups.
One of the things that discouraged me from learning German some years ago was having to learn the genders of things all over again since they don't match to those in Spanish, it ended up being way more confusing than expected. On the other hand when I learned English I just didn't have to bother since it's essentially all neuter except for a few exceptions.
English really is the ideal second language to learn if you're lazy, the only mildly complicated thing being the spelling.
How do you think we could make spelling easier? Use accent marks for specific sounds?
@@CheeseBae maybe, diacritics could definitely help with some things but I don't see that happening with how much native English speakers seem to be intimidated by special characters. But I'm actually mostly thinking about making things a bit more consistent and intuitive in certain cases, like if it's read different it should be spelled different (like with the tenses of "read"), or make up their minds about what sound/s "gh" represents and when.
English is a pig of a language. But English speakers are used to hearing it being spoken wrong, so you can make mistakes and be understood. for example if you said "He eat an apple", no one would even bother correcting you that it should be "eats", I eat, you eat, she eats, he eats, it eats, we eat, they eat. If you said "he did walk on the beach", no one would bite your head off for not saying "He walked".. when you make mistakes like that in French or German they can act like they dont understand anything youre saying and that makes English the best second language. No one really speaks it properly, so feel free to butcher it and everyone will understand.
@@geroutathat verb conjugation is really simple tho, a bit too simple sometimes, I'm a bit bothered by the fact that it's often impossible to drop the subject because the verb barely carries any context.
But yes, the fact that you can screw something up and the other person is still capable of understanding what you meant to say is a nice pro, on the other hand it can feel like you're building the most precarious shack and calling it a proper house.
@@CheeseBae fix the vowels so they're consistent and monophthongs. the worst thing about english are the vowels.
Almost as fascinating is the (probable) reason why Indo-European languages have grammatical gender in the first place.
Modern English leans heavily on word order to establish the relationships between words. The subject noun is almost always the one before the verb. An adjective applies to the following noun, not the preceding one and so on. But this is a relatively recent development. In the older indo-european languages, word order is much less rigid. The subject noun is the one with the nominative case ending. An adjective applies to the noun with the matching gender, even if it isn't adjacent, and so forth. With all of this case gender, the actual words in the sentence can come in almost any order. Word order could then be used to encode other information.
As word order has become more rigid in English (and in many Indo-European languages), the case and gender systems of these languages have begun to erode. Interestingly, it is the pronouns, whose location within a sentence is most unpredictable, that have retained much of their case and gender.
Fascinating comment Paul! I was actually reading about how English shifted from a synthetic to an analytic language just the other day. Living in Germany, I'm getting a good idea of the differences.
You seem to have nailed it. Excellent explanation
Yes that's something that really annoyed me about Italian and English as a German, when I learned them. You have no freedom to change the position of words within a sentence without messing up the whole meaning. In German we use the positioning of a word to put emphasis on particular words. You can't do that in English and Italian.
@@helgaioannidis9365 Italian is not that inflexible about word ordering, it is also used to emphasise meanings.
@@lsfornells I know. I'm fluent in Italian. But you can't turn "mia cugina saluta il conduttore" into "il conduttore saluta mia cugina" without changing the meaning, while in German "meine Cousine grüßt den Schaffner" and "den Schaffner grüßt meine Cousine" mean exactly the same, just that in the second sentence you underline that she's greeting the conductor and not someone else.
As always, your video is really interesting and entertaining for a somewhat nerdy non-native English speaker like myself, who had the wonderful opportunity of growing up withing the rather gender-less Hungarian language :)
Apple in Russian is яблоко, which is neuter. So it’s literally all 3 genders in different languages.
Something else to add: Some languages have done away with gender completely, there isn’t even a distinction like he and she pronouns for people. Azerbaijani is one such language, as I find out trying to learn it.
It's also neuter in Norwegian: et eple (indefinite), eplet (definite).
It's not that they have 'done away', but that they never had grammatical genders, and these languages do not have gendered pronouns either. Turkic languages (like Azeri) do not have, neither do Fenno-Ugric (Finnish etc) and as far as linguists can probe the past, they never had them - at least what comes to Fenno-Ugric that is.
Moscow in Russian is feminine but London is masculine meanwhile Monaco is neuter :)))
English is doing away with gendered pronouns for people with younger generation. Instead of he or she they use they/them as a singular neutral 😐
@@SoulDelSol just ignorant people talk like that
The thing that always amused me about English is how you can miss out a lot of the glue words from sentences and they still make sense, you just end up sounding like a little kid or someone who is still learning the language. It’s actually pretty hard to make an English sentence that doesn’t make sense.
Yea from hearing a lot of ESL speakers, some good, some not so good...as long as the words are in the correct order...you can get the jist of what someones trying to say.
Well perhaps English has to many extra words?
For instance,
"I am a doctor" is simply "I doctor" in most of slavic languages
Point make you good this accepted challenge but
@@gauraprema1932 exactly, better couldn't it I say myself
"Has anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like?"
Always have so much fun to know these kinda interesting sides of language. The Indonesian language doesn't even have 'she' or 'he', only 'dia'.
LOVE IT !!!
Love this. Thanks.
Chinese is similar, "he", "she", and "it" are all said as "ta". They do have different characters when written, but that's a relatively more recent change. In the past they all used the same character, too.
@@zenith1047 Same vibe, I guess :v
@@zenith1047 Chinese does not have grammatical genders at all as far as I know
@@nayutaito9421 Of course it doesn't. He was referring to how "ta" is written as 他 for males, 她 for females, 它 for animals or objects, and 祂 for gods and deities. The word "you", "ni", is also written differently for different genders: 你 for males, 妳 for females, 袮 for gods and deities.
I am not exaggerating: this video is a work of art! Nice job!