Telling Boys and Girls Apart

In most languages, not including English, nouns have a gender, i.e. masculine, feminine, and sometime neutral.  The requirement to have adjectives agree with their nouns requires the speaker or writer to quickly identify the gender of the noun.  In speaking, a person can guess or fudge the sound.   This is not true in writing.  Alas, some languages are more user friendly than others.

Italian makes life the easiest.  If the noun ends in o, it is masculine; if in a, it is feminine.  So, Italians say uno bello carro but una bella casa.  If the ends in an e, it can vary.  You have to memorize those.  So, uno fabricante is masculine while una delusion is feminine.  All, it is not too difficult for the learner, as is typical for Italian in general.

French is a different story.  I personally have spent hours checking and rechecking the gender of nouns.  The only rule that seems to stay in my head is that nouns ending in ion and é are feminine.  To see the problem, look at this site: http://www.languageguide.org/french/grammar/gender/rule.html.  It reinforces my sense that the rules are only indications of probability.  A learner either has to have a good ear and memory and do what I do, check it in the dictionary.  La vie est dure sans confiture.

Hebrew is not too bad.  If a nouns ends in a consonant except for ת  (tov) or ה (heh), it is masculine, with only a few exceptions.  So,  כותבת(kotevet – address) is feminine while מכתב (miktav – letter) is masculine.   Hebrew is an easy language to learn in this sense.

By contrast, Russian is a challenge. It adds a third gender, neutral.  Moreover, whatever rules exist are more than equally matched by the exceptions.  The indications on this site, http://masterrussian.com/nounsandcases/gender_and_number.htm, are a bit misleading.  A comprehensive Russian grammar book can provide a rather long list of exceptions to every rule.  Sometimes I wonder if native Russian speakers get it right all the time.

Clearly, English is the easiest – there are no noun genders.  There are few feminine forms of professions – stewardess, waitress, and actress, to name a few.  However, those are fairly obvious.

So, not languages are equally kind to their learners.  Just having long hair and an a at the end of the word may not be enough to say whether it is a girl.

These are a few of my favorite things

As a connoisseur of linguistic delights, I have learned to appreciate the unique ways each language approaches communication, often wishing that the “trick” could be copied to other languages.

Here is a partial list of my personal language favorites:

French – The word si expressing disagreement to a negative statement:  “You don’t want another piece of cake” “Si”, i.e. yes I do.

Russian: the pronoun свой [svoi], which refers to the person in the subject: I, you, s/he, we:, they see свой face.

Spanish: the upside down question mark at the beginning of a question: ¿You understand?

Hebrew: The intense use of roots, making learning new vocabulary much easier: write, dictate, address, letter, correspond all have the same root, כתב [katav].

English: the lack of agreement in gender and number between adjectives and nouns, massively reducing the chances of error in making sentences, as large hand(s), not large(s) hand(s).

Italian: The natural sing-song rhyme of the language that leaves you no option but to smile: Io amo parlare italiano tutto il giorno.

Alas, nothing is perfect; here are a few aspects of these languages I am less fond of, namely:

French: the lack of firm rules to know whether a noun is masculine or feminine, which has caused me to spend a lot of time checking dictionaries.

Russian: the awful tendency of Russian to have one page of exceptions for every page of rules; believe me on this point.

Spanish: the subjunctive mode will quickly change your opinion that Spanish is an easy language to learn.

Hebrew: the binyanim or verb groups have always defied my understanding; call this a personal taste.

English: The spelling system, based on a wide base of extremely varied pronunciation patterns, is beyond logic.

Italian: Listening to Italian, how can you take the message seriously?

So, while I am also fond of raindrops, whiskers, kettles, and mittens, those are also a few of my favorite things.

Naturally Exceptional English

Learning a foreign grammar mirrors our experience growing up.  First, we are told that there are rules of correct behavior.  Then, we discover that some people don’t have to follow them.  Similarly, students learn verb conjugation tables – er, ir, re in French, the famous binyanim in Hebrew, to name a few, and then continually run into verbs that do not exactly follow those rules.  Like the confused child, the learner gets the impression that the rules were a big lie.

The first logical question concerns the reason for the very existence of these exceptions.  The obvious but true answer is that because they were always there.  Native speakers, even today, learn most of their grammar through listening and imitating, not formal study.  Most first language native speakers cannot explain their choice of verb tense logically, knowing what is correct by what sounds “good.”  In other words, it is correct if we are used to it, not if it follows some academic rule.  On the other hand, if people rarely use and hear a given verb, rendering them unsure of the correct form, they will go with the general rule.  For example, the past simple in English is made by adding ed to a word.  Therefore, when unsure, about a form, the speakers generally follows the rule or looks for a similarly sounding  known verb.  So, while it is clear to Americans and Brits that the past of sit is sat, most speakers would say that the past of shit is shitted, although the phonetic similarity would lead some to say shat.

In practice, this means that the verbs people use regularly have a nasty tendency to remain irregular.  Speakers who say “I goed” are corrected even though the conjugation clearly follows the formal rule.  On the other hand, confusing exceptions such as lie (lay, laid) and lay (laid, lain) are often mistaken (except by English teachers, of course) without causing undue comment.  Therefore, the key to irregularity is use.

An example of an exception proviing a rule is Hebrew.  Hebrew was basically static for some two centuries.  This period allowed scholars to devise rules to explain almost all exceptions.  This structure, called binyanim effectively organizes all Hebrew verbs.  Most languages, especially English, have never had such a period to allow the scholars to catch up with actual use.

A deeper explanation of why English grammar in particular has so many exceptions will be the subject of another post.