this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2024
825 points (98.5% liked)
Microblog Memes
6028 readers
1855 users here now
A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
Rules:
- Please put at least one word relevant to the post in the post title.
- Be nice.
- No advertising, brand promotion or guerilla marketing.
- Posters are encouraged to link to the toot or tweet etc in the description of posts.
Related communities:
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
"Some feminitives" is disingenuous. It's an Indo-European language, it shares the structure of other IE languages, in some cases pared down and/or in disuse, but they're still there, same as vestigial base-12 counting.
I don't get why people are so upset about the concept of grammatical gender, though. It's gramatical, it's not actual gender - original division in PIE was "animate" and "inanimate". Hell, I vaguely remember a conlang that had separate genders for terrestrial and aquatic animals, so you could absolutely make one that has a gender for "wolf".
I'm not talking about that, frankly. Just that grammatical gender means usually its own inflections for cases, for adjectives, for verbs. At least some of those.
Fair point. My point would be that English doesn't really inflect words at all, but when it does, namely pronouns, it has both cases and genders.
For comparison, in German, cases don't change nouns either (except some genitives - kinda like English, now that i think about it), they instead affect articles, and even then the nominative and accusative case are identical, except for masculine singular nouns, and first and second person pronouns. So, if n. and f. nouns dominate, you could make the case that German doesn't have an acc. case, and then make a carveout for m. noun "outliers". Except step into first and second person, and acc. pops back out, meaning it was always there, even for f. and n.
OK, I agree with the argument, but one can call that a rudiment - same as for Russian some people say it has not 6, but 7 cases. That is, a vocative case (which archaic Russian speech would have, Belorussian and Ukrainian have without doubt, but standard Russian does not formally). It's used when calling someone by name, like "Вась, Петь, Миш, Маш".
Well, it's never clear cut with languages
True.