Re: Gender in language (was Re: way-OT: regularity of german v. english [was: <snip>])
On Wed, Oct 22, 2003 at 10:54:24PM -0500, Ron Johnson wrote:
> On Wed, 2003-10-22 at 20:47, Erik Steffl wrote:
> > Nori Heikkinen wrote:
> > > on Sun, 19 Oct 2003 12:38:45PM -0700, Erik Steffl insinuated:
> > ...
> > >> of course, you can create various complex and ambiguous sentences in
> > >>english, the point is that you can take few forms of sentences and
> > >>have a working language (that's pretty much what BASIC (talking
> > >>about programming language) is).
> > >
> > > you can do that in both languages.
> >
> > let's say you have a function called isRed(x) (returns true if x is
> > red). Now how would you call this function in german? it would never be
> > in agreement with all possible x (grammatically). not sure if this is
> > the best example - perhaps in this case it would be acceptable to use
> > istRot, regardless of gender of x. point is you would run into problems
> > like this trying to use german, you would very rarely come up with
> > problems of this nature in english...
>
> Being a native speaker of American, I've always wondered
> - What is the purpose of "gender" in grammar/language?
> - Is it only the European/Latinate languages that have the gender
> concept?
> - Why English doesn't have gender, since it's predecessor, German,
> does have gender?
I'd imagine that specifying gender in terms is done in order to keep
up with gender-based rules that are inherent in some
languages. (Though this does lead you to a chicken-or-egg paradox.)
Though IANAL(inguist). I'm sure that there's a more scientific
explanation for it, but this is the first thing I could come up
with. :)
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