this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2024
123 points (92.4% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35781 readers
1009 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Why do some languages use gendered nouns? It seems to just add more complexity for no benefit.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Zehzin@lemmy.world 4 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

There is benefit to complexity. When you say "Mike and Susan went back home because he forgot his suitcase", you don't have to repeat Mike three times because the gendered pronouns carry that information, but you also know who the suitcase belongs to and who forgot it.

[–] Skua@kbin.social 6 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (3 children)

Pretty sure that OP is referring to noun class systems. English doesn't use one, but most other European languages do and English used to. Like German's three equivalents to English's "the": der, die, and das, which German changes depending on the noun class ("grammatical gender") of the noun in question regardless of its actual gender or whether it even has one

[–] Wasgaytsiedasan@feddit.de 5 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Zehzins example is also true for objects. "After the cat jumped on the table with the glass and the bowl it pushed it down." Did the cat push down the glass or the bowl? In german for example it's "Nachdem die Katze auf den Tisch mit dem Glas und der Schüssel gesprungen ist, hat sie sie heruntergestoßen." (In this case the bowl) or "Nachdem die Katze auf den Tisch mit dem Glas und der Schüssel gesprungen ist, hat sie es heruntergestoßen." (In this case the glass).

[–] Skua@kbin.social 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Your cat example works because it shows an example that is ambiguous in English but not in German. Zezhin's example was showing something that wasn't ambiguous in English, a language with no noun class distinctions outside of referring to things by their actual gender, so there's no benefit to having more general noun classes in that example

[–] Wasgaytsiedasan@feddit.de 5 points 8 months ago

He was showing how gendered words can resolve ambiguity in an example were this also applies in english, so that you can extrapolate to situations like the one I (or the other replies) showed.

[–] Zehzin@lemmy.world 3 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Same thing applies. For instance, you could say "I like drinking tea, but I'd rather drink beer, but "she" 's bad for you".

Granted, in this case it's not at all necessary because you don't even need a pronoun here to get the information but I'm not great at examples lol

[–] MxM111@kbin.social 2 points 8 months ago

The post above you talks about the same. In English, if you say “I see a door and a window. It is open”, it is not quite clear what “it” is. But if door is male gender and window is neutral gender, then it becomes clear that “it” refers to window in that sentence.