Language is, furthermore, not a model that merely describes objective reality. It actually actively shapes the reality we see in fascinating ways, as this video about the Himba tribe will show
Hah, now you're speakin' my *ahem*
Language! Except the video seems broken to me.
Do you mean this?I do thank you for the video, though. While I already knew this before, I didn't realize that my Dyslexia was actually a boon for me just as it's a curse -- I don't see colors the same way as people, but actually a complex visual navigation. Er, I'll talk about it if anybody's interested; now back to the topic.
As for gender in language, the last time I checked, linguists weren't quite sure what purpose it served, but it pops up often enough that they're pretty sure it has one, and that it has little or nothing to do with real-world gender categories (consider "das Madchen", "die Kartoffel"—the last time I checked, a young woman was female and a potato was not, but German reverses them).
That said, the whole gender thing in language totally wigs me out, too. I've been meaning to see if any studies have been done on the romance languages & gender perception but I haven't managed it yet...
The '
Gender's Game' (yes, I'm awesome) isn't so surprising where I come from, however we haven't put much thought into it either (although many linguists have, though I forget).
As I mentioned the last time, while Platonic Duality has existed since forever the personifications of nature and complex / abstracts concepts have are quite a correlation with Language itself, and the ancient languages primarily focused on Duality in essence -- there was always a
He or
She, but never
It -- and this focused the ancient perception on concepts that maybe, just maybe, objects have either masculine or feminine characteristics. This thought evolved and developed further for artistic impressions and progression of language itself. There was also the case of 'Default Gender' but, eh, I'll probably bore you with that sub-topic...
In any case, this duality didn't necessarily mean that an object was alive, or that it had a gender, but was used to mnemonically categorize objects and keep their attributes in mind. For instance, in one language a bridge would be a '
He' because it's strong, and hence focusing on creating stronger bridges, while in another language it could be a '
She' because it looks beautiful, thus leading the natives to focus on aesthetic craft first. But the gender is almost always assigned based on the attributes itself, and it helps in creating strong mnemonic links and creativity (there are other advantages and disadvantages too, but that's a long story). Of course, just because an object (or even people) is assigned by a gender doesn't mean they don't have attributes of the other gender -- in this case, an object could be
Masculine, but it also doesn't mean that it can't have
Feminine attributes. Observe cats. Cats are awesome!
Besides all that, the story behind genders in languages is pretty cool (and complex), but rather than derail the thread, let's just read em up.
TruthOrDeal, the problem with our written language is that we have a lot of unofficial letters. "Ch," "ph," "th," "th" (no, that isn't a repeat), "sh," "kn" and others all used to be a single letter that clearly designated its own unique sound. We got rid of those letters, replaced them with two others, and then moved on to anglimangling the words from other languages. Umlauts and accented letters are strange to me (why not just make a totally new letter instead of modifying a different letter?), but definitely simpler than English's a-doings.
XD You have
no idea how many important phonetic letters / consonants English is missing. While letter combinations may help alleviate that problem, it isn't efficient enough unless you have prior knowledge of other languages.
