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ya Cheeky, 6 Juni 2007

Ujumbe: 9

Lugha: English

Cheeky (Wasifu wa mtumiaji) 6 Juni 2007 11:01:31 asubuhi

Hi everyone

I'm new to Esperanto,i'm doing the "Bildoj kaj demandoj" course and i'm loving it.
I've tried learning Spanish and French but found them very frustrating,the gender aspect particularly,we don't have that in English and even worse when i've asked my girlfriend and her sister who are both fluent French speaker about this hoping they would tell me the purpose giving gender to everything they just confirmed it serves no purpose.
I still want to learn French,Spanish and a few other languages,hopefully learning Esperanto will doing so easier(as is claimed).

Thanks Kevin sal.gif

mnlg (Wasifu wa mtumiaji) 6 Juni 2007 1:20:13 alasiri

Cheeky:the gender aspect particularly,we don't have that in English
You do, actually. For instance, lands and ships are feminine. It plays a much weaker role as it does in romance languages, yes, but it's there.

Charlie (Wasifu wa mtumiaji) 6 Juni 2007 1:30:04 alasiri

Well there is certainly a convention that ships are referred to as feminine, but that is not quite the same thing. Lands ? - only sometimes poetically. For instance I would say of Russia that IT is a very large country, not SHE is a very large country.

erinja (Wasifu wa mtumiaji) 6 Juni 2007 2:38:39 alasiri

I agree that we conventionally call ships "she" (perhaps because sailors are a bunch of men alone on a ship for way too long?)

I think genders of countries really depend on what other countries call themselves, rather than having some kind of convention in English. We speak of "mother Russia", but Germany is certainly the "fatherland". Genders pop up occasionally when poetically referring to the US, as Charlie mentioned, but I think if you went around talking about the US closing "her" borders, or about "her" actions abroad, people would think you were weird.

mnlg (Wasifu wa mtumiaji) 6 Juni 2007 3:16:33 alasiri

Yes, I forgot to mention that I have seen "her" used for lands/countries only in formal/historical contexts.

richardhall (Wasifu wa mtumiaji) 6 Juni 2007 11:14:15 alasiri

It may be a bit old-fashioned, but I think it is correct English, at least in Britain, to refer to ships and countries as 'she'. I have certainly seen the US referred to as 'her' both in print and the web. Mind you, I think this is a completely seperate issue to grammatical gender.

mnlg (Wasifu wa mtumiaji) 7 Juni 2007 6:38:32 asubuhi

Hm. I remember I once mentioned to my English teacher in High School (who, as you might see, did a very good job) that there weren't grammatical genders in English, but he looked at me and said "who told you there aren't?!".

Indo-European languages have them, and Germanic languages have them, but it does seem that in the case of English the matter is more controversial.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender

One could argue that English had a grammatical gender distinction once, but all inanimated objects have then falled back into the neutral gender.

richardhall (Wasifu wa mtumiaji) 7 Juni 2007 8:09:06 asubuhi

mnlg:One could argue that English had a grammatical gender distinction once, but all inanimated objects have then falled back into the neutral gender.
For sure. Old English had the masculine/feminine/neuter of modern German, but it was falling out of use, I think, by the time of Chaucer.

Cheeky (Wasifu wa mtumiaji) 9 Juni 2007 12:56:18 asubuhi

I think most of you have missed the point of my message,i'm not saying that gender as applied to objects doesn't exist in English but that it isn't fundamental to learning English.In French and Spanish you have to learn whether an object is masculine or feminine and thus is an added and needless aspect to take in and remember.
For all of the faults levelled at English you don't have to learn whether a sofa is masculine or feminine and seeing that it doesn't have a penis or vulva it surely doesn't matter.
I'm sure it would take a child or a non English speaker learning English about two minute to learn that boats and countries are sometimes refered to as "she". senkulpa.gif

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