Language genders

Moved here because… off topic in Announcements.

For the exact meaning of Ayah

I’ve not looked, but I’m just going to guess it’s the same sort of thing as abuela, the granny that rules the home (even if some random man thinks he’s the one in charge).

I don’t really understand how there can be more than three genders

My personal theory is that languages have a defined amount of mental requirement. Romance languages, for example, have accents to guide pronunciation, but then they have genders to make things difficult. Not to mention, at least in the case of French, an oddity where something plural makes the whole sentence pluralised (think “those blacks taxis”).

English? No weird gender rules to bother with, but a pronunciation from hell. Some words are spelled the same but said differently and mean different things. Other words are spelt differently but said the same. And some letter combinations have multiple ways to say. And that’s not counting Britain’s astonishing combination of regional accents which take all of this and mix it up even more.

As for word genders? What’s the point? I can see it might be useful to tag a word like “they” or “them” according to whether you are referring to a male or female person/feline, but…

…I’ve just taken the macaroni cheese out of the microwave, put it on a plate, and stuck a fork into it.

I have just taken my pátes au fromage (feminine) out of the micro-ondes (masculine), put it on an assiette (feminine), and stuck a fourchette (feminine) into it.
I’m sorry. I understand that it isn’t masculine and feminine as in male and female, but I just can’t tag a macaroni cheese as anything other than “delicious”. But languages don’t have an umami tag. Maybe I should create a new language to rectify that? ;)

animate became masculine, inanimate became neuter and feminine developed from inanimate plural

That’s an interesting way of looking at it.

So it’s often related to the shape or feel of the word.

I’d love to say that plugs are male and sockets are female… but in French both are feminine. What a letdown.

I don’t know whether there is any evidence that the gender of nouns influences how speakers of that language think of things in terms of biological sex or sex-based stereotypes.

I would say yes. I had this argument with my line manager several years ago. Fifty woman and one me and the entire group should be referred to as a male group.
Every so often there are plans to mess with the genders in French. For example, a female teacher is a professeur, not something like a professeuse.
[the word enseignant / enseignane is often used too]
However proper French (rather than what is spoken) is fairly resistant to change.

mistake a rock for a bear and little harm is done, while the other way round could be disastrous.

One would hope that the people that use the same word for a rock and a bear would rapidly die out to be replaced by those who use different words so there is never any ambiguity.

If you equate animate with can fight back if you mess with it then you see

It makes me wonder why we don’t have short snappy words for dangerous things so they can be shouted as a warning rapidly.
Sure, we have “bear” and “dog”, but then we have “crocodile” and “hippopotamus”.

And interesting how in French the familiar singular can be used in a demeaning way

As you know, for many it’s still seen as insulting to be familiar at the wrong time. The T-V distinction is important business for some, mostly those who are older or who think they’re better than you.

My current Franglaise is a mixture of both, depending on what conjugation I remember at the time. As a Brit, I was never taught the familiar, and back in the late ‘80s the advice was "just don’t" because it is always better to be formal than to use the familiar incorrectly.

Addressing a suspect as if they were a child demotes/devalues them in a similar way!

That’s quite possible in English. Words like “son” and a patronising tone of voice can convey the same sense of meaning.

This language stuff is awfully interesting if totally off-topic!

That’s why I’ve move it to this other place.

allow nuance that we don’t have in English.

This turns up a lot in Japanese with the multitude of levels of politeness. Once, many years ago, I was watching an animé. One of the characters was some sort of princess (or thought she was, I don’t remember) and her character quirk was to use almost all of these levels. As I was watching a fansub, it came with two subtitles included. One was a straight translation, the other was annotated to tell you exactly how she was talking to people. It added a huge amount to the understanding of her character, something that simply doesn’t translate.

Before I am dispatched to Aldershot or Psueds Corner I would just like to say “tambien me encanta el modo subjuntivo”.

Were I to admit to the same predilection, that would make two of us.

I’ve not looked, but I’m just going to guess it’s the same sort of thing as abuela, the granny that rules the home (even if some random man thinks he’s the one in charge).

Not quite. The link was to something not much bigger than that!

Ayah – mother. Well that’s what it means to an ordinary Indian, but so far as British children growing up in India during the British Raj were concerned (or nowadays, many posh Indian children), their mother was Mother, and the Indian lady who looked after them was their Ayah. (Ayah is also the past tense of to come, but that’s just an example of a homonym.)

The T-V distinction is important business for some, mostly those who are older or who think they’re better than you.

Another nice (depending on your pov) bit of Hindi there (and not there in the Penny Lane glossary – probably should be):

Mañ means I; Hum means We. But self-important Indians use the Royal Wee, and say Hum meaning I. Then others say Humlowg (we-people) to make sure it’s plural. Then the Very Self-Important (Modi is a classic case) use Humlowg for I. I’ve yet to hear anyone say Humlowglowg…

Hindi also has the Vous-Tu distinction (Aap-Tum), used in exactly the way it’s used in French.

(Of course English’s awful pronunciation/spelling confusion makes Hum and Tum look as though the UM is the same in both, but it’s not. The U in the first is like the A in Formula; the U in the second is like the OO in book – unless you come from Oldham, in which case the OO in book is like the OO in boot…)

The Hittite for ‘that (person)’ was ‘apas’ or ‘abas’. The cuneiform writing does not distinguish between the two. The word ‘ape/abe’ (over there) is cognate with Latin ‘ibi’, and ‘kwapi’ (when/where) with Latin ‘ubi’. In the same vein, Hittite ‘kwapikki’ (anywhere) is cognate with Latin ‘ubique’. I guess that Hindi ‘Aap’ started out as ‘that person’ and became an honorific ‘you’; much as ‘De’ does in Danish. Danish (Aap-Tum) is (De-Du). I am told that modern Danes are no longer uptight about the distinction.

This, from one of my novels: If you think that with those etymological speculations I’m straying into areas where I’m no scholar, you’re right, but I make no apologies for it. Real scholars are usually pretty tentative, especially about anything very far back in the mists of time. Somehow their tentative conclusions have a tendency to become much firmer by the time they arrive in less scholarly publications, often much to the annoyance of the original scholars, if they take any notice at all of the popularizations.

If you want to see the context, it’s here: https://clive.semmens.org.uk/Fiction/Penny/India1993.html#Surkanda

their mother was Mother, and the Indian lady who looked after them was their Ayah

Ah, so like the maid then.
Yeah, mom was raised more by “the Help” than her own mother. For context, think “Driving Miss Daisy” except this Miss Daisy was… let’s just say vindictive and leave it at that.

Then the Very Self-Important (Modi is a classic case)

Can’t help but feel we ought to put him and Macron in a room together and see who comes out.

English’s awful pronunciation/spelling confusion

It’s a bit rich blaming English for that mess. Why not spell it hahm and tume or something?
It might work if you were blaming French, lundi → lahndee for the ‘a’ sound, and dessus → deh’soo for the ‘oo’ sound; but in English it tends to be yew, oo, and uh (uniform, ruler, jump). Or just randomly replaced by a schwa like our famously missing letter r, and various other vowels in words (is it magazine or is it maguhzine?).
But, anyway, the tricky part in transliteration is giving enough information that somebody reading the Latinised version could attempt to say the words. If it uses the same Latin vowel for two entirely different sounds, maybe it’s not entirely right yet?

[bonus points if the transliteration is good enough that it can be converted back to the original language, some schemes are lossy]

It’s a bit rich blaming English for that mess. Why not spell it hahm and tume or something?

Perfectly unambiguous before I transliterated it into English. Deva Nagri (Hindi writing) is perfectly phonetic…hahaha…well, it has an unambiguous 1:1 correspondence with Shudh Hindi, and people will say your pronunciation is perfect if it matches Hindi spelling exactly. But not many of them will actually pronounce it that way themselves, with notable regional variations and some personal idiosyncrasies.

[bonus points if the transliteration is good enough that it can be converted back to the original language, some schemes are lossy]

Ain’t that the truth. But the Latin alphabet simply doesn’t have enough letters, and the English phoneme set is a very poor match for the Hindi phoneme set. Hindi doesn’t have nearly as many vowel sounds as English – just ten, whereas English has dozens. But Hindi does at least have ten characters for its ten vowels… But consonants? English has a few more sounds than letters, but not many. Whereas Hindi has loads more distinct consonants than English, and a letter for each. There are four distinct Ts, which the untrained English ear can’t distinguish but whose difference is immediately obvious to a Hindi speaker, and carries meaning; four Ds; two Ks; two Gs; two Ps; two Bs; four sounds in the general area where we have L and R (one of them heading off in the general direction of one of the Hindi Ds…)

Transliteration of English into Hindi loses loads of vowel information; transliteration the other way loses loads of consonant information*. International Phonetic Alphabet is all very well in theory, but I don’t know it, I don’t know how many people do – I suspect only a very small percentage of those who think they do, if anyone at all. Since I don’t know it, I don’t know how well it really captures the phoneme sets of every language – my strong suspicion is not very well for less well-known languages (which probably doesn’t include Hindi – while many educated Hindi speakers are not really terribly literate in Hindi, they’re normally perfect fluent and articulate in it†).

* and some vowel information, but that’s only because of English’s weird, inconsistent letter/phoneme correspondence in vowels, as mentioned in previous posts…

dessus → deh’soo

If that’s how you pronounce dessus, you’re doin’ it wrong. :)

I think you mean dessous → deh’soo

If that’s how you pronounce dessus, you’re doin’ it wrong. :)

I think you mean dessous → deh’soo

I think the little letter ants move around while Rick isn’t looking carefully, possibly even when he is.

English has a few more sounds than letters, but not many.

Maybe similar to the number of letters we ought to still have – thorn isn’t the only letter that has gone AWOL

That’s only consonants, of course, Steve – the Latin alphabet is WAY short of vowels for English. And completely inconsistent in how those few vowel letters are used.

thorn isn’t the only letter that has gone AWOL

Probably true, although it’s not a subject I’m familiar with. I know eth in Faroese and Icelandic – but did we ever have it in English? And then there’s ch and sh and the zh sound in pleasure and leisure but that’s about it with English consonants I think.

Google Ubykh < https://omniglot.com/writing/ubykh.htm > or listen to it
< https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pCUOcmGuso >. It has 80 consonants and only 2 or 3 vowels.

80 consonants? That makes Hindi’s 36 consonants seem a bit short…

Not remembering exactly how many consonants Hindi has and not being able to be bothered to count them in my head, I looked for a chart on DuckDuckGo – which indeed matched my knowledge of the Hindi consonants very nicely. But it shows three more vowels – but they’re actually combinations (Grace explained them to me). Lots of combinations in Hindi – equivalent to ligatures in English, more or less – but no additional phonemes implied.

Apparently 84 is the tally for Ubykh’s consonants. When I hear the videos I find it impossible to reproduce the sounds myself. I have no idea which muscles are brought into play. Actually I have the same reaction to Northern Irish accents. I love Derry Girls, and their accent, but I am quite unable to pronounce “now” in it. It sounds more like “noy” to me. It is a reminder of how incredible babies are at picking up language.

When I hear the videos I find it impossible to reproduce the sounds myself.

Interesting. Your ears (&/or the brain areas associated with them) are evidently better than mine, whereas my mouth and tongue (&/or etc.) might be better than yours. I struggle (and in some cases fail) to hear the difference between some of the Hindi consonants, never mind some language with 84 of the buggers; but having been taught how to make the differences with my voice, apparently I do so perfectly well.

When I was younger my ears were better, and I picked up local accents easily (and unintentionally). I spent a fair amount of time in Norn Ireland in my late teens and twenties, and that is now part of my repertoire – although it only comes back when I’m talking with folks with that accent, I can’t do it to order. I was 33 before I first went to India, and 34 before I really started learning Hindi seriously – too late for the best of my ears 8~(

If that’s how you pronounce dessus, you’re doin’ it wrong. :)

It might be a regional accent thing? They’ve tried to explain dessus/dessous to me several times but I swear it’s the same thing they’re saying.

Another quirk is a tendency to make a kind of hissing noise after “oui” (and some other stuff). It’s like a cross between sh and th.
And “moi” here sounds like mwuh whereas singers on TV with a more Paris accent would say mwaaa.

But, then, I rather get the feeling that this place is the French equivalent of Zomerzet.

Another quirk is a tendency to make a kind of hissing noise after “oui”

The word “oui” was originally “auditus” meaning “yes, I heard”. Oyez! That hissing noise is standing in for all the bits which dropped out over the millennia. I believe “moi” was pronounced “mway” in old French. In Romanian they spell the cognate diphthong as “oa”.

@Rick,

Try these two links:

https://www.howtopronounce.com/french/dessus

https://www.howtopronounce.com/french/dessous

Surely you hear the difference?

Surely you hear the difference?

I don’t know about Rick, but I hear that difference. But I know from experience that which differences one hears and which one doesn’t hear varies a lot from person to person – probably partly according to one’s experience of different dialects and languages, but probably also simply idiosyncratically.

Surely you hear the difference?

Yes, one is like dess-eww and the other dess-owh but note that that’s probably not the accent around here and it’s two different people speaking.

but probably also simply idiosyncratically.

Hooo-boy. https://heyrick.eu/blog/index.php?diary=20240407

Look for the part beginning “I feel that I lack an input filter.” (about halfway down).

It’s no wonder I wear headphones when I’m shopping (picture just above that). Half the time they’re not even playing music, just active noise cancellation to SHUT THE WORLD UP because… sometimes I really wish I had an Off button (that wasn’t a terminal Off option).
Or maybe the world needs an Off button? I’m undecided. Let me go overthink that question.

that’s probably not the accent around here

It’s also not quite the pronunciation in the part of France (Brittany) where I learnt French pronunciation, but dessous and dessus are perfectly distinct there too.

Or maybe the world needs an Off button?

I could definitely do with being able to turn my hearing off. I can look the other way when the telly’s on, but I can’t listen the other way 8~(

I can look the other way when the telly’s on, but I can’t listen the other way

Surely there’s a market for phased array hearing aids?

And “moi” here sounds like mwuh whereas singers on TV with a more Paris accent would say mwaaa.

I’ve been told that some (many?) parts of France don’t consider Parisians to be French, so their different pronunciation of French words is a totally logical outcome of them being foreign.

Surely there’s a market for phased array hearing aids?

Hmm…what’s the wavelength of 1.5kHz sound in air?

I think vanishing upstairs with two closed doors in between is easier, if slightly less sociable…

Hmm…what’s the wavelength of 1.5kHz sound in air?

https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/sound-wavelength

I think vanishing upstairs with two closed doors in between is easier, if slightly less sociable…

While I was still in the parental home, my father would tell me I needed to get out to the pub and socialise, and he needed to make sure I didn’t get lost on the way there or back.
I have only a vague idea what programmes the female members of the family watched while we were gone.

As my fellow CAMRA members commented, I lost a very good friend when my father died.