The worst thing is when your first language has genders and the language you learn has them too but they don't match

@sillysad3198

Жыл бұрын

EXACTLY!

@zer0homer

Жыл бұрын

Russian native speaker here, WHY THE HELL IS SHIP A SHE?!

@athos401

Жыл бұрын

Right german?!

@matejhajek6325

Жыл бұрын

@@athos401 No czech. Your genders make no sense to me

@franciscopina2899

Жыл бұрын

​@zer0homer according to seafaring lore, it has to do with the similarity between a ship carrying its crew and a pregnant mother carrying her baby: the ship carries and takes care of her passengers and crew until they are delivered safely to their destination.

As a German I'd say that not the article determines the gender but the gender determines the article. For all Students of German we luckily don't have any exceptions to the rules that determine which noun has which article. We simply don't have rules.😂

@EVPaddy

Жыл бұрын

actually there are some rules, although I only ever heard about them when I watched a video meant for foreigners.

@himfalathiel4012

Жыл бұрын

I was taught in high school, for example, that loan words are usually neutral.

@keyem4504

Жыл бұрын

@@himfalathiel4012 Yes, might work as a rule of thumb. But often, if there is an equivalent German Word, you'll use the same gender. E g. "die Box/Schachtel".

@akl2k7

Жыл бұрын

​@@EVPaddyYeah, a few of those rules include -e being mostly feminine, -ung and -tion being feminine, -chen and -lein being neuter. I guess you can blame most of the inconsistencies on the decay of the case-system from Proto-Germanic.

@berndtsoderstrom4664

Жыл бұрын

Synonyms may have different genders, such as der Wagen/das Auto.

It's always nice to hear these concepts explained by native speakers with a firm grasp on the linguistics behind it too. I actually found Italian endings more difficult than French/Spanish/Portuguese ones. Not sure why, haha!

@DoraEmon-xf8br

Жыл бұрын

As a French native speaker, I have troubles with some Italian gendered endings. I ’’know’’ the basic rules and even though most gendered words share the same gender in both languages, I sometimes end up messing up.

@EVPaddy

Жыл бұрын

@@DoraEmon-xf8br Italian is more difficult than Spanish and French for me, too.

@necromanzer52

Жыл бұрын

But it's also important to never assume someone has a firm grasp on the linguistics just because they're a native speaker as they often will only know the correct way to say something because it sounds right.

@darrendin2050

Жыл бұрын

@@necromanzer52 Hence why I specified that, mate.

@divxxx

11 ай бұрын

@@necromanzer52 I don't think he provided good information in this video. He talks about the use of "she" in English as the same thing as genders in Italian. It's not. The use of "she" carries a specific meaning of a "personification" of the object. You don't consider the object as such, but almost as a real person. In Italian we do not consider objects as people even if they have masculine and feminine genders. Moreover he says that the gender of a noun resideds in the article. That's just silly. Articles, adjectives, pronouns, verbs and everything that will refer to that noun agree with the noun itself. The fact that many endings of these words do not reveal the gender has to do with the history of the language (languages are not rigid structures, they change and ofted they do it irregularly). Saying that the gender is derived from the article is not only wrong but it's also absolutely useless, because when you are in doubt with the gender of a word you are exactly struggling with the use of the right article (or adjective, and so on). Of course if I see "la mano" and I know it's right I can tell it's feminine by the article, but if I see "mano aperta" I can get the same piece of information by the adjective. Still though, if I don't know the gender of the word, I cannot produce the agreement with the noun. Quiz: what's the gender of "l'eco" (the echo), and what's its plural form?

Portuguese has words that change in meaning by changing the gender, also: a cara (the face - feminine) o cara (the dude/guy - masculine) What I found more confusing is when cognates are similar but have different genders in a different language: o leite (milk - masculine - Portuguese) la leche (milk - feminine - Spanish)

@lloydgush

11 ай бұрын

Worst part, "o cara" can be sui-generes, like dude in english. If you use "a" it can get a completely new meaning of an endearing term, instead of a general "someone". Same with "a bicha" but in reverse.

@fixer1140

9 ай бұрын

O nariz La nariz

@davidp.7620

7 ай бұрын

Isn't "o cara" just short from "caralho" and that's why it's masculine though?

@frederickluschin9709

7 ай бұрын

@@davidp.7620 No, I don't think so, especially as I have heard it used by people who would never use that word. A quick search returned this, suggesting that it has to do with "cara" in the sense that the face represents an individual: "Os vários dicionários que consultei incluem essa aceção de cara (’indivíduo’) juntamente com cara ’rosto’, que vem do grego kara, ou latim cara, ou grego via latim (Houaiss, Infopédia, Michaelis, Aulete). Isto sugere implicitamente que cara ’indivíduo’ evoluiu de cara ’rosto’. Uma possibilidade que me parece plausível é que esse cara venha de expressões tipo cara “(de) qualquer coisa”, tal como cara linda, cara estanhada, cara de pau, etc. Há dois usos destas expressões-como vocativo e para referir um indivíduo-que têm grandes semelhanças com os usos de cara ’indíviduo’ e que parecem ser mais antigos. Comparemos os dois usos."

@davidp.7620

7 ай бұрын

@@frederickluschin9709 estaba errado então. Eu achava que seria a forma curta de "caralho" porque em galego por vezes diremos "o carallo ese" como "esse cara"

The important thing to keep in mind with grammatical gender is that the grammar existed first; ascribing gender to the grammatical concepts came later.

@bonbonpony

11 ай бұрын

I recommend George Lakoff's book "Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind" ;)

My father in law's mom is from Italy, but she basically stopped speaking the language in elementary school. If starting speaking in Italian her teacher would start smacking her knuckles with a ruler. (1920s US). She would often come home with bloody knuckles. I'm so glad they stopped doing that by the time I started school. For the first several years of my life I spoke an odd hybrid of Swedish and English.

I don't know about Italian, but in my native language (Portuguese), nobody thinks of boxes as women and phones as men. It really is just a grammatical category and you could name it anything else (category, class, etc) without changing how the language works. I like gender in language: it is useful for anaphoric structures for example and it makes languages generally richer and more expressive, but we should not confuse it with the social concept of gender

@atlas567

11 ай бұрын

Até porque em português quem tem GÊNERO são palavras, coisas e objetos, já quando se trata de seres vivos tem SEXO ou é macho ou fêmea

@um_internacionalista

11 ай бұрын

Same here, I never think twice about the gender of a thing I’m saying or hearing

@mayo1259

11 ай бұрын

@@atlas567 Não, acho que as pessoas definitivamente têm género, muitos milénios de história certificaram-se disso. Simplesmente não é a mesma coisa que género gramatical

@atlas567

11 ай бұрын

@@mayo1259 Humanos e outros seres vivos tem SEXOS e apenas 2 ou é macho ou é fêmea simples assim

@rogeriopenna9014

7 ай бұрын

​@@mayo1259gênero significa categoria. A palavra não existia relacionada a comportamento e sexo até os anos 60

I see where you're going : people confusing grammatical gender (substantive category) and biological gender (sex). It's an issue french feminists are pissing us off with whatsoever the amount of time we're spending explaining them the concept of neutral plural... Small tips for French learners : not all nouns ending with are feminine but almost all feminine nouns ends with . There are exceptions like "la voix" (the voice) but they're a tiny minority. Also, all nouns ending with affix -ail are masculine, there is, as far as I know, no exception. But all ending with -aille are feminine, no exception. So basically you got a bunch of suffixes which have a masculine and feminine version : -ail and -aille, -on and -onne, -et and -ette, -al and -alle. Thus when a noun ends with double graphic consonant and it is feminine, sure thing. Almost every noun ending with -tion, -aison is feminine too. But almost every one ending with -eau is masculine. Hope it helps you.

@bonbonpony

11 ай бұрын

It's still nothing when compared with attacks of those people on Esperanto, to the point of accusing L.L.Zamenhof of sexism, just because of how grammatical gender works in the language he constructed (feminine forms are created from masculine nouns by using an additional infix -in- before the noun ending -o). Some people even dismiss this language the first time they learn about this feature :q

@americafy9195

11 ай бұрын

@@bonbonpony The whole language is constructed like that, I still have nightmares of all the affixes you're supposed to remember to be able to form the words on your own...

@bonbonpony

11 ай бұрын

@@americafy9195 Strange. When I first found about this language, I was delighted by its simplicity and how well-organized it is (affixes and correlatives being its major upsides for me). Hmm… Perhaps it depends on how one learns it?

@americafy9195

11 ай бұрын

@@bonbonpony Well, I was thirteen and not very hardworking.

Fun fact: like some other Germanic languages, Old English nouns had three grammatical genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter. English gradually lost grammatical gender between the 11th and 14th centuries.

Actually, there is one Romance language that has not only masculine and feminine nouns, but also neutral nouns: Romanian. Greek, German, Icelandic and most Slavic languages also have three grammatical genders.

@bonbonpony

11 ай бұрын

Polish has that too (belonging to the Slavic family). But Polish is a bit an odd-ball here, because in plural it has two entirely new categories: "męskoosobowy" (masculine personal), which is purely masculine, and "niemęskoosobowy" (non-masculine personal), which is kinda like a mix of feminine and neuter, in that there's only one pattern of endings for this second category that doesn't distinguish feminine from neuter. No idea why did it evolve that way.

@felipepicolo

11 ай бұрын

I think classical latin (not vulgar) also has three grammatical genders.

There's a constant buzz or very rapid clicking on the background noise. To me, sounds like something vibrating near the camera.

@AnubisTheMaster

Жыл бұрын

Mothman

@Sousabird

Жыл бұрын

At first I thought my head phones were giving out.

I was about to ask how the word "mano" became feminine since it comes from the Latin manus, which I just assumed was masculine 2nd declension based on my high school studies decades ago. But then I looked it up and saw that manus is actually a fourth declension feminine noun. So it's always been feminine. Well, at least since the Romans. I guess I could ask how Latin got this weird 4th declension but that's going way down a linguistic rabbit hole.

@lorenzociocca4891

Жыл бұрын

Hi there, I looked this up a couple days ago, from the information I gathered it appears that the Latin second and fourth declensions, though they share some endings (to the point that words such as domūs happen to use forms from both through hyper-regularization) actually come from distinct noun classes in PIE. The Latin second declension groups together o-stem nouns in PIE, whilst the fourth declension comprises of nouns with the u/w stem. Hope this helps! Cheers from Italy😊

@keithkannenberg7414

Жыл бұрын

@@lorenzociocca4891 So they were distinct in PIE but then evolved to have similar sounds/forms by the time of Latin. Makes sense. Thanks much for sharing that!

@stefanodadamo6809

Жыл бұрын

Manus ad ferrum!

@SchmulKrieger

Жыл бұрын

​@@keithkannenberg7414no, manus is still a feminine word, it also has a different declension paradigm. manus, manūs, manui, manum, manuū.

@akl2k7

Жыл бұрын

​@@SchmulKriegerHe didn't say it wasn't feminine

Immersion is important in acquiring a language. Memorizing words and phrases is not much. You have to put them into context. Therefore it is less about learning and rather living the language through context. As someone interested in languages and other cultures, I have listened a lot to Italian and Spanish songs in the past, so I can perhaps understand what is said to some degree. My reading and vocabulary is perfect. I know the text and poetry of many Italians songs by heart. But I'm not used to put words together in and everyday conversation.

When you talked about Italian natives correcting people, I could only think about a seminar in the university where the professor railed against a Mexican student who had written "il stato". "Il stato, non suona! È LO STATO!". (Every seminar started with 15 to 30 minutes of critique of our Italian. Having only had one semester of Italian before this, it was a minor miracle that we gave him anything coherent!)

Great video. This is particularly timely considering that there seems to be a push coming from the Anglophone sphere to add alternate articles to the romance language to reflect certain gender ideologies. Il/elle/ iel. Personally I hope that this push is rebuked and the structure of the various languages remains in tact.

@bonbonpony

11 ай бұрын

There's a nice video rant by languagejones precisely about this subject (it's quite recent, so I'm sure you'll find it on his channel).

@byronwilliams7977

11 ай бұрын

@@bonbonpony I saw it when it came out. I found it interesting what LanguageJones said regarding articles. I also don't think that the language should be Frankensteined and butchered to appeal to an ideology which is incongruent with reality, especially taking into consideration the lack of internal logical consistency. I personally will not be using made up pronouns in any language I learn. I respect that some folks feel out of place with their sexual orientation/gender/gender identity, however I will not obfuscate my descriptions of reality to appeal to their feelings of being ill at ease with reality.

@Nkrlz

10 ай бұрын

As a native speaker of a gendered language it's insufferable. The anglos are literally trying to break my language, to the point of disrupting the flow of regular speech.

@abiagio1

9 ай бұрын

I think these attempts will prove useless and fruitless, considering that they go against the very structure of Romance languages. In Italy using the schwa has been proposed as a means of getting over the opposition masculine/feminine: the only problem, with that, is that you have to remember to add the schwa ending to every adjective and other grammar bits pertaining the noun. You can do it out of courtesy when the other person asks for it, but doing it all the time would be a nightmare... And besides, there's nothing worst than making people feel ridiculous when they speak.

"What's a good way to imagine what it means when we say that a box in Italian is feminine?" There's an easy joke there, I'm sure of it.

@bonbonpony

11 ай бұрын

Because you put stuff in :J It's pretty much the same basic idea as with "male" and "female" types of plugs in electronics: the "male" plug is with the sticks, and the "female" plug is with the holes ;) As for more abstract ideas, there's kind of a pattern in many languages as well (if they have grammatical gender at all), that things that can encompass or contain stuff within it (like pieces of land, countries with their boundaries, vehicles etc.) or that are sources of stuff (that is, stuff can come out of them), are usually feminine, by analogy with a woman carrying a baby inside and giving birth to it. On the contrary, things that go in, attack, pierce, move forward etc., are usually masculine, by analogy with men and their tools or weapons.

In Polish (and most other Slavic languages) we don't have articles, so it's probably even harder for a learner to guess and memorize the gender (in Polish we have masculine, feminine and neuter). Although it's true that many words ending with -a are feminine (I wonder what's the connection with romance languages), and those ending in -o or -e are usually neuter.

@pierreabbat6157

Жыл бұрын

The connection is that they both inherited it from late Proto-Indo-European. (Early PIE apparently had animate and inanimate and hadn't developed the feminine yet.) Slavic languages dropped the -os that marked masculine nouns, so they end in zero (or -ъ in OCS and old Russian).

@akl2k7

Жыл бұрын

The ending is more consistent with the gender in Slavic languages, from what I've seen studying Russian. One suggestion for irregular nouns (eg. The Russian word for mother, мать), is using a possessive (моя)

@davidmandic3417

11 ай бұрын

@@akl2k7 Or a demonstrative, e.g. Croatian: ta noć 'that night' (fem.), taj dan 'that day' (masc.). Another way is to learn nouns together with an adjective, since they agree in gender too and that helps to get used to the noun's gender and agreement, e.g. dug dan (a long day) - duga noć (a long night). This works for any gendered language, I suppose.

@bonbonpony

11 ай бұрын

@@pierreabbat6157 Can you show an example with a couple of such words, and provide some historical evidence that it has actually happened that way?

@khajiithadwares2263

11 ай бұрын

Wait, you guys have to memorize each noun id? In romanian we just count them and we also get the neutral. Singular/plural, even though endings on the actual words may vary (random -ie/e -uri/i of hell) the article that is placed before the word is always either un/doi or o/două; if mismatch then its neutral. Hand - o mână / două mâini = two hands (feminine because = o, două) Flake - un fulg, doi fulgi = two flakes (masculine because = un, doi) Pen - un stilou, două stilouri (neutral bc singular msc / plural femin) Leg - un picior, două picioare (neut) Eye - un ochi, doi ochi (masc) The definite article "The" Eye/Pen (ochiul)(stiloul) changes ending to +UL in case of masculine (un dobitoc, one nimwit becomes "dobitocul", THE nimwit.) This reminds me of the -oglu endings in turkish, or the -um endings in latin. For definite article on feminine nouns, the ending changes from -ă to -a. (o mașină, one car becomes "mașina", THE car.) As for the weird swiggles: ș = sh -- ț = tz (like the TSK sound) â is A sound made on the top of the mouth, UH sound. (înalt = uhnalt (tall)) ă is A sound made with the back of the mount, AH sound. (mutt > maht) The clear A sound remains phonetically consistent, we dont get to pronounce "car"as"cuh" or "care" -> "ker.. we always pronounce it A as in pAckage.

Suddenly I remembered all those struggles my foreign students went on when learning Italian. Good memories!

When I was learning English for first time and I was around 14 years old, I used to teach my dolls and my baby sister, that couldn't speak yet 😅 Even when studying for school I always readed the books pretending I was teaching to someone else. It really solidify things in your brain much easier. 😊

Hi! I really enjoyed this video, even if I am a native speaker it is interesting to see our language from a different perspective, and it made me think about nouns that have both feminine and masculine form in a way a never thought of before. It seems to me that feminine are used for “smaller” things while masculine is used for the “bigger” counterpart, as in scatola, scatoletta, scatolone or porta and portone. But also in tree and fruit as “il melo” and “la mela” 🤔

In spanish you can still find a glimse of the Neutrum. Esto - Este - Esta (N - M - F) Eso - Ese - Esa (N - M - F) Lo - Le - La (N - M - F)

Lord knows the world could use a reminder between the difference of masculine and feminine

Thank You very much for this video ! 😊

I don't know where my daughter would be placed on the "language nerd" scale, but it would be far higher than me. She talks about romance language grammar and in particular gender rules in terms of how they relate to classical Latin syntax. That makes a lot of sense to me, but it doesn't do me any good personally because I don't know Latin. However that kind of analysis also works for some pronunciation quirks in modern romance languages, when ordinary syllabic emphasis rules seem to be violated. According to her, that's often because the base Latin word had an additional syllable whose only remnant is the modern pronunciation.

The Metatron would help many by doing a deep dive on gender in Italian. I, for one, am perplexed by the nouns that are masculine in the singular and become feminine in the plural. As soon as I get comfortable that “I found” is always “ho trovato” and does not change, I am completely flummoxed when “I found her” is “l’ho trovata”. I am not the only one who gets lost trying to figure out when nouns change grammatical gender because of biological sex- and when they don’t. Save us!

In Romanian we have neutral (like in latin) and the gender of words is easyest to determine using the numeral before it at singular and plural. Example: A man (bărbat) = un bărbat (one man) - doi bărbați (two men) = masculin A woman (femeie) = o femeie (one woman) - două femei (two women) = feminine An object (obiect) = un obiect (one object) - două obiecte (two objects) - neutral (always masculine singular and feminine plural). It is a very easy and funny way to determine this and we learn it in school when we start grammar. One other way is that masculine tends to end at singular in consonants (with little exceptions like father - tată) while feminine in vouls. Neutrals though are trickier because this rule does not apply. They can have both terminations. So the first method makes it clear. 🙂 So Italia (the country) is feminin in Romanian (all country names are), Italian language also (italiană), an italian man is masculine (italian) and an Italian woman is feminin (italiancă). But...if I use Italia to define an object it becomes neutral. Example: an italian bridge = un pod italian (one italian bridge) - două poduri italiene (two italian bridges). 🙂 Verbs on the other hand do not have genders in Romanian (like in latin). All genders are acting the same: bărbatul merge (the man walks) - femeia merge (the woman walks) - motorul merge (the engine works/is functioning). 😉

that tip you gave at the end is just me answering my mom in french, spanish, and latin.

Grammatical genders have always confounded me. As Raf says, it is quite easy to see the gender of a noun that represents an inanimate object from the final vowel, the article, agreement with adjectives, participles etc. But that is not the same thing as recalling its gender when speaking or writing - and that is something over which I have a complete mental block. Clearly there are some rules, such as "-zione" nouns are feminine, and "-ma" nouns from Greek are masculine, which I do rely on. But when it comes to other nouns, I simply cannot recall that it is, for example "la banca" rather than *Il banco". I think part of the problem for anglophones such as me is our vowel reduction in unstressed syllables. Somehow the word is remembered as /bankǝ/ - where /ǝ/ could be , , or . I have yet to find a reliable method to register grammatical gender in the speech centres of my brain.

In Latvian generally if it ends with s or is its masculine, a or e then femenine, but there are exceptions like sirds (heart) or govs (cow) they end with s but are femenine, you just have to know it, there are no articles in Latvian. I don't think there are ones that are masculine and end with e or a, except puika which means boy, but it is a loanword from finnic languages which iirc don't have grammatical gender.

Me, being completely fluent in two romance languages: hmm... yes, fascinating...

In Spanish, the article does not quite have the final word either because of the following quirk: if a noun is feminine but starts with stressed 'a' (maybe also ha, can't think of any examples), it's definite article (which should be "la" (fem)) changes to "el" (masc). For example: "el alma oscura", "el agua clara", "el águila blanca". I think this arose as a way to avoid the cacophony la + a; which other romance languages solve by simply contracting it into l'a. Thanks for the vid, interesting stuff!

Pienso que las diferencias y las similitudes entre español y italiano son interesantes.

As a spanish speaker I don't think we really see objects as feminine/masculine. I think grammatical gender it's just a way to make words rhyme better.

In Brazilian Portuguese,in the supermarket example,we only change the noun itself: ( I ) Eu vou ao supermercado (You) Você vai ao supermercado (He) Ele vai ao supermercado (She) Ela vai ao supermercado (We) nós vamos ao supermercado (You plural) Vocês vão ao supermercado (They) Eles/Elas* vão ao supermercado * For all non-latin/romance speakers,yes we do differentiate a bunch of woman from a bunch of men while speaking.We only use VOCÊS(you plural)if the group we are talking to has men and women together

BTW could you make a video someday about Italian reflexive forms, especially in connection with their impersonal use? (E.g. "in _quali si voglino_ dui termini continui della") I remember having a hard time when trying to translate one old mathematical text from 1603 due to frequent use of such forms in it (and different spelling of some words definitely didn't help either ;q ). I roughly had an idea of what those phrases might mean, but I'd like to make sure that I was correct.

Just a little note about "the box" ("la scatola"): the masculine form "lo scatolo" doesn't exist in regular Italian. It's a dialect form of the word sometimes used in the South (so I understand why Raf is using it). Living in the North of Itay I had never heard that usage before and it sounded very strange, to me, so I had to look it up in the dictionary (and I couldn't find it, so I googled it!). Strangely enough, though, the augmentative form "lo scatolone" (the big box) is widely used (maybe even more than the feminine form "la scatolona") and it is correct in regular Italian. Looking up in the dictionary, though, I discovered that the same word "scatolo" when shifting the tonic accent (word stress) from the "a" to the first "o" becomes... a chemical substance! LOL Languages are alway entertaining!

@russko118

Жыл бұрын

anche io non avevo mai sentito scatolo sinceramente, mentre scatolone si è usato normalmente

@fiore7939

11 ай бұрын

Scatòlo makes sh*t smell bed. It's true.

@fiore7939

11 ай бұрын

​@@russko118Vero. Scatola, scatolone, scatolona. Scatolo... mai sentito. Toscana.

I find Italian to be a rather interesting language. I love how it sounds. My vocabulary is not great, but occasionally when I say Italian words to an Italian I get asked if I am Italian. Consequences of working in Italian restaurants most of my life I guess. I came across a gender exception a few months ago, it really was a surprise as I was taught in school that the ending vowel determined gender. Your explanation about the article was rather helpful. I keep thinking about studying it seriously, but I am prioritising Japanese at the moment.

@matteo-ciaramitaro

11 ай бұрын

Yea some gender exceptions are remnants of the latin neuter il dito le dita (fingers). Others are some weird insistence to preserve greek gender. il problema il drama

Nice vid as I'm currently learning some Italian (although I'm a spanish native speaker so feminie/masculine words comes natural to me). But there is a weird background sound

As an Spanish native speaker, the gender of a noun it's just an integral part of what it describes. The article rule also has exceptions, for instance if the article begins with "a", using "la" before sounds bad, so we use "el": "el agua, el águila..." However, they will always be femenine, the plural article is preserved.. "las aguas, las águilas.." also when the mention is not explicit "¿Me la das?". I don't see a rule without exceptions, you just learn the gender of the things when you learn they exist...

@y0sita

11 ай бұрын

Even more, I cannot think of a genderless object, even if I say "the pencil", I'm thinking of it as a "he". This is also why it is messed up when other languages have the gender swapped, in my mind it makes no sense.

Rote memorization may be boring on its face, but it's also more efficient, and it can be very rewarding if you use a program to track your progress. I made digital flash cards of the 5,000 most frequent German words. I give myself 12 new entries a day (and work on translating in BOTH directions, because behavior-analysis research suggests that people don't automatically learn, for example, to go from English into German just because we've learned how to go from German into English for a particular word; same research also suggests that learning the native-to-foreign translation first results in the best generalization). The flash card program I use (Anki) spits out a nice little pie chart that shows how many words I've mastered, as well as several other numerical and graphical feedbacks. Because entries appear in order of frequency rank, I'm also getting the most useful words soonest. I have been doing the same thing for Russian, Spanish, Latin, Dutch, Pennsylvania Dutch / Palatine German, and Norwegian, and with each one I'm sure to include some kind of marker to flag what gender the nouns are. Since Russian and Latin don't have a true parallel to the word "the," I use the demonstrative adjectives этот/эта/это and ille/illa/illud. Since Norwegian uses a gendered suffix to indicate definiteness, I use the indefinite articles en/ei/et. That way I'm pairing an authentic grammatical form with the word every time I see it. And the bonus of creating 5000 flash cards in Russian is that you learn the Cyrillic keyboard VERY WELL.

Linguistically speaking the article agrees only in the noun's gender. On the other hand, mano comes from Latin manus, and manus is still feminine, even when it ends in -us. Because -us could have all genders in different declension classes. manus > mano is u-declension, while tempus (neuter noun) ending in -us, is o-delcension the same as dominus (masculine noun), but masculine and neuter nouns have still a different declension paradigm.

When I went back to learning Spanish, I quickly remembered that words ending in -ma were masculine. I think -pa as well, but that's something I only recently came across. I think lately I've also bumped into a few French words that baffled me because they were written feminine but the article was feminine or vice versa. On the plus side, as long as I hear it frequently for a while, I default to what sounds right. It's just the first encounter or two that are confusing.

@pierreabbat6157

Жыл бұрын

Nouns ending in the suffix -ma (which is neuter in Greek) are generally masculine, but there are some exceptions. "Broma" is feminine because it has completely changed meaning (the meaning in Greek is "food"). "Diadema" is feminine I don't know why. And then there's "coma": "la coma" (punctuation mark) is from "κομμα" (piece of a sentence, etc.) but it's feminine. "el coma" (unconsciousness) is from "κωμα" and is masculine as expected. "la coma" (part of comet, optical aberration) is from "κομη" and is feminine as expected. "Paloma" doesn't end in the suffix -ma and is from Latin. "Karma" is from Sanskrit, not Greek, but it does end in the suffix -ma and is masculine.

Very interesting, even if as a French I have no problem with that. What can be confusing sometimes is the cases when the word is in one genre in French but in the other in Italian (and "word" is a good example btw "le mot"/"la parola" or "(une) l'assiette"/"il piatto").

The Italian motion verbs such as "sono andato" have vestiges in English: "I am done" etc... In Italian past participles are treated as adjectives so this explains the gender agreement.

What I find particularly charming about Italian is that they also decline reflexive attributes, such as in te stessa vs. te stesso. This actually conveys additional information as you can learn something about the person saying this you otherwise would not have known. BTW, I wonder if you noticed yourself, but even if the words coming out of your mouth are English, your hands continue to speak Italian. Are there masculine and feminine ways to do this as well? And finally, @1:14, when talking about Germany, you show a picture of Munich. How very Italian! 😂

I think it would be very useful to stress that grammatical gender is primarily a syntactic property. The article is surely an explicit marker of gender, but I'm pretty certain that it should also expresses itself in noun-adjective agreement as well. Gender is still a property of the noun, it's just that endings are not a reliable marker in all cases, while agreement (be it the article or an adjective or a participle that agrees with the noun) is a sure indicator. Also, concerning gender agreement in past tenses of verbs, I'm guessing that in your example, "andato/andata" is a participle while the main verb conjugated being "sono", right? So "andato" would behave as a nominal element, like an adjective, and stay the same regardless of person, e.g. "sono andato" 'I (m) went', "sei andato" 'you (m) went', "e andato" 'he went', etc.? (I know zero Italian, I just looked up the conjugation paradigm for essere in Wiktionary)

I don't agree with the first part about boxes being a girl and phone being a boy, I think it reinforces the concept that grammatical gender is much more than a grammatical concept and that it is strongly linked with biological sex which is not true and a very misleading and common misconception. It's best to stress every time that it's just a grammatical concept or you will have males offended if you refer to them with feminine adjective because the subject of the sentence is "persona"

I've read that the reason Italian has some words that sound masculine while being feminine, is because they come from Latin(or Greek? Can't remember), and that language treated gender a little differently

@night_fiend6326

Жыл бұрын

Latin. That being the language of the Roman Empire. It then evolved to Italic and then Italian.

@omp199

11 ай бұрын

@@night_fiend6326 Latin evolved into Italian. "Italic" is the name of the branch of the Indo-European language family to which Latin and other related ancient languages such as Umbrian, Oscan, and Faliscan belonged.

Professor Metatron!!! I want to ask you a question in a long time now! Maybe it will be a little random and bias one: you ever interact/want to learn the Hungarian language or ever heard of it?!?!?!?

When the suffix don't match the article in Italian, Spanish or Portuguese, it's usually because of etymology. Manus was feminine in Latin. It is still feminine in all romance languages despite the ending being usually what one would consider masculine. A mão, in Portuguese. However, a papaya fruit is O MAMÃO... masculine. notice the end is just like the word for hand. UM Mamão (one or "a" papaya) creates a cacophony that sounds just like Uma Mão (one hand, a hand)

Speaking of gendered languages, there is an awesome video debunking the MYTH that the gender of languages change how speakers of each language think of words (the myth that Spanish speakers think of a bridge as delicate, elegant, because it's a feminine word, while German speakers consider it robust, strong, because it's masculine) The video shows the original research, with tons of citations, was actually never published in peer review and it's full of bias and flaws and contradictions.

Puoi nominare le eccezioni che cambiano genere da singolare al plurale. Esempio: l'uovo - le uova ; il braccio - le braccia

I think something that should be noted is that the terms "feminine" and "masculine", although still in use, can be misleading as to the origin and main purpose of grammatical gender. It's not that speakers of gendered languages first invented a "male" and "female" form of nouns and eventually started anthropomorphizing every object. Nowadays it is believed it was the other way around (at least in PIE languages), the noun classes existed first, and started to be used for things with natural gender later. So the term "feminine" should be understood as "the category of nouns that we ALSO use for actually female things" rather than "the category of nouns that we use for female things and ALSO for things we somehow imagine as feminine" Consider that "person" in Spanish is always "La Persona", even if you are talking about a man. Also consider than in German, a diminutive formed with -chen or -lein becomes neuter, regardless of the original gender. Even if we are talking about a person or animal. Milk is masculine in Italian and feminine in Spanish, even though both languages come from Latin and share a common cultural heritage. It's not that there was an ancient flame war between Spain and Italy over the femininity or masculinity of milk. As stated on the video gender is mostly useful for disambiguation. In Spanish "cuchillo" is a knife while "cuchilla" means kitchen knife or blade in general. "Silla" is a chair while "Sillón" (masc. aumentative) is an armchair. Another useful feature for disambiguation is agreement: If I say in English something like "I had the crown in the briefcase but I lost it" (sorry for the dumb example), you don't really know if "it" refers to the briefcase or the crown. In Spanish "I lost it" would be "la perdí" or "lo perdí" depending if I'm talking about "la corona"(the crown) or "el maletín"(the briefcase). So even though it's annoying to learn it's not merely some random classification you memorize and serves no purpose, that would be conjugation groups for verbs 😆

The floor is a boy, the light is a girl. In Spanish. In German, a girl is neuter. Hmm.

Your comment on correcting errors when foreigners make mistakes, as well as the suggestion to talk about a thing that you're learning, reminds me of children going around with whatever random new thing they've found and saying things about it, and having parents correct them. It seems like a natural method for learning a language, and very different from classroom learning.

@bonbonpony

11 ай бұрын

Yeah, you learn by making mistakes and having them corrected by those who already got it right. Unfortunately, people these days often think that mistakes are bad, something that one is supposed to be ashamed of, so they'd rather cut off their hand than admit to a mistake. And that's why it is so hard for people these days to learn anything. They've lost the ability to learn from their own mistakes, let alone other people's mistakes.

I don't speak Italian (it's already in the to-do list), but I'm curious if there are also changes in the feminine/masculine articles regarding plural. In Spanish, we say "el arma" (the weapon), but it's changed to feminine in plural (las armas). Are there cases like this in Italian?

@isha0086

Жыл бұрын

Yes, we do! An example is the italian for finger: il dito (singular, masculine), le dita (plural, feminine). The same goes for the words egg (uovo, uova), arm (braccio, braccia) and others. What’s even better is that sometimes a word, take braccio (arm) or cervello (brain), can have a plural in both genders (i cervelli, le cervella; le braccia, i bracci): the thing is that each gender of those plurals has a slightly different meaning 😅

@atlas567

11 ай бұрын

​@@isha0086No Português é mais simples não há grandes mudanças significativas nos plurais dos artigos O, OS , A , AS , NO , NOS , NA ,NAS , mas estes últimos se referem a lugares geográficos 👉 Estou NA Itália, estou NAS plantações, estou NO REINO UNIDO, estou NOS Estados Unidos e pra quase todo tempo verbal , já os primeiros é pra indicar o gênero de coisas e objetos ou seres vivos no singular ou plural 👉 A mesas ,AS mesas, O cavalo, OS cavalos, já quando se trata pra indicar o sexo dos seres vivos é um pouco mais complicado, já que a fêmea e o macho podem usar palavras muito diferentes HOMEM= MULHER, CAVALO=ÉGUA, BOI = VACA , LEÃO= LEOA , já outros só se troca o O pelo A no final da palavra GATO=GATA , CACHORRO= CACHORRA , LEOPARDO= LEOPARDA , PATO= PATA , GANSO= GANSA , já outros como jaguar é obrigatório o uso dos artigos O ou A antes pra indicar o sexo porque são as mesmas palavras pra macho ou fêmea O JAGUAR= A JAGUAR , O JACARÉ= A JACARÉ, então os sexos dos seres vivos é mais complexo um pouco pra indicar se é macho ou fêmea e tem que indicar porque a língua exige e principalmente as pessoas falantes da língua logo são as que mais exigem a definição

@matteo-ciaramitaro

11 ай бұрын

There are a bunch of these that come from the latin neuter. There are an absolute ton of these in Romanian too, which is why people say it has a neuter gender, but it's not so much neuter as it is a class of words with 2 genders.

The most confusing thing about Italian so far is when to use "sono", "ho" and "è" in past and present tense. It's almost case by case.

The rule that the article always indicates gender doesn't always apply in Romance languages For example in Spanish 'el agua', meaning the water is feminine although the article appears to be masculine. There are many examples such as this in Spanish, such as 'el hambre' the hunger, 'el ala' the wing etc.

Come visit Italy, you'll all be tourists. In Italian the word "tourist" translates with "turista." Altough always ending with an A, it can be either masculine or feminine depending on the article used. If you're a man you'll be "un turista," if you're a woman, you'll be "una turista." What about the plural? A group of male tourists is a group of "turisti." A group of mixed sex tourists, still "turisti." A group of female tourists, however, is a group of "turiste."

@forbidden-cyrillic-handle

11 ай бұрын

Female exclusive plural. Is it privilege or warning?

@qwmx

10 ай бұрын

I feel special!😂

I can appreciate how it works in Italian, because it works similarly in Spanish, which is my native language. However, one baffling exception came to mind: water (agua). This is a femenine noun, with a masculine article. For instance one would say “El agua fría” (The cold water) in which the noun’s gender is not dictated by the article and even goes on to lend its gender to the adjective. The reason for this weird exception is phonetic: “el agua”, sounds better than “la agua”. I know that French has a similar rule, whereby an article can be changed if its vowel ending clashes with the same vowel at the beginning of the following noun. So, as much as grammar is important, in romance languages the “rule of cool” also applies and if something sounds horrible (like “la agua”) then it’s ok to - dare I say it? - gender swap.

@matteo-ciaramitaro

11 ай бұрын

both feminine el and la developed from an older spanish for ela, so in a way you could think of el agua as el'agua. This is basically how italian deal with feminine una before a vowel being pronounced the same as masculine un. un albero e una notte però un'estate It's interesting how our writing systems affect the perception of this.

@SorcererLord

11 ай бұрын

I don’t think “el agua” sounds better than “la agua” is a justification. It only sounds better to you because that’s the correct form and how you’ve grown up hearing it. If the correct form were “la agua” that would sound correct to you too. In fact, this Spanish “el” which functions as a feminine article is present for all words where the first syllable is both stressed and sounds like an “a”, what we call tonic in linguistics (la a tónica). That’s why it’s the exactly the same case with “el arma”, “el hacha”, “el águila”, “el ala” and many others. I think the reason this evolved was to make it flow better because saying “la agua” for example you’ve got two a sounds and almost have to stop between them to separate the sounds, whereas that issue is solved with “el agua”

@bonbonpony

11 ай бұрын

@@SorcererLord I think the reason might lie in phonotactic rules of the language. If Spanish had glottal stop (a short contraction of your vocal folds, stopping the air flow and vibration for a short while), then "la agua" might work, because there would then be a glottal stop separating the two "a" sounds from each other: "la·ʔa·gua" (ʔ is the glottal stop which begins the 2nd syllable). Otherwise, the two vowels would have to merge in a liaison, which would make it sound like a "long vowel", but this would require Spanish to distinguish short and long vowels, which also is not a phonotactic feature of this language. Either way, it still might have sounded awkward and less natural, less "easy on the tongue" than just "e·LA·gua". Does this sound like a better justification for you?

@SorcererLord

11 ай бұрын

@@bonbonpony I mean it’s essentially a fancier version of what I wrote ha! How the glottal stops are difficult to differentiate because Spanish is a syllable timed language and thus doesn’t have them really. However, this feminine el is only present before words which start with a or an a sound where the first syllable is stressed. In other a starting words where the first syllable isn’t stressed then there’s no problem using la, i.e. la arena, la araña

@DaveHawthorne-lk9mz

8 ай бұрын

Spanish is only syllable timed with the core peninsular speakers: less than 40 million. The intonation of the other 400 million is different as is the pronunciation. Castilian pronunciation became prescribed in the 16th century and remains unnatural; literally a fantasy of the RAE.

It's not only with "motion verbs". You forgot about cases where the object comes before the verb: "Le ho viste ieri", "l'ho mangiata stamattina".

@sabrinasambo7570

Жыл бұрын

Yes but in that case the verb is conjugated according to the object gender, not the subject one....

@flaviospadavecchia5126

Жыл бұрын

@@sabrinasambo7570 yes, and?

As a Portuguese speaker it's no surprise to me hand in Italian is a feminine word. In Portuguese it's the exact same.

One thing I always wondered about and my Italian teacher told me "the language wills it so" is this: why LO yogurt (for example?)

This is not true for Spanish, though. Some words starting with a get the article ‚el‘ although they are feminine. i.E. you say el agua because l‘ doesn‘t exist and la agua would sound strange to Spaniards, I guess. As soon as it‘s not a a anymore, agua gets back to fully being feminine, i.E. el agua, but las aguas.

@DonPaliPalacios

Жыл бұрын

Indeed, "el" is the form the feminine singular definite article takes if it goes right before a feminine noun that begins with an accented a (with some exceptions). It's still a feminine article, the evolution of the feminine Latin demonstrative in that specific phonetic environment (illa aqua > ela agua > el agua), even if it happens to look and sound the same as masculine "el". There's an additional rule that if a word comes between the article and the noun, the article takes its more usual form "la": "el agua fría" but "la fría agua". Originally every feminine noun starting with a- took the article "el". You can see old texts with things like "el arena". One oddity remains of this: some speakers make "azúcar" take "el" and feminine adjectives: "el azúcar morena", while others will say "el azúcar moreno" or "la azúcar morena".

@rogeriopenna9014

7 ай бұрын

That's bizarre. Good thing I speak Portuguese. A água, as águas, da água, das águas, etc

No, it's Ho mangiata una mela, with transitive verbs the participle should be in accord with the object. As in the causative L'ho fatta bruciare (la torta). As for the article... well, Mano destra, the noun carries grammatical gender as part of its lexical properties even without article

Greek has the same concept but with neutral and without exceptions. Every masculine ends in ς Every neutral ends in ο And every feminine ends in α or η In ancient Greek,however,there are exceptions like η ναυς(the ship)although they are limited

1:50 This is the first time I've heard them described as "motion verbs" in any of my Romance language studies, and to me it would be confusing to label those verbs as such because there are a good number that I wouldn't associate with motion but still use the auxiliary "essere": Sono diventato/a un fan di Metatron. Mi sono reso/a conto che... (a reflexive verb, so dependent on the speaker) Mi sono piaciuti i tuoi video (not reflexive, so dependent on the object) And then when a direct pronoun is used, the past participle's ending is independent of the speaker: La mela, hai detto? L'ho già mangiata. (not "mangiato") A proposito dei tuoi amici, li ho visti al supermercato. (not "visto")

Um... where's the link for those rings?

So random question, is your internal monologue still Italian with all the languages you've learned or do you think in a mix of languages pulling the most appropriate words for exactly what you're thinking from each language?

@um_internacionalista

11 ай бұрын

Usually a polyglot thinks in the language they're speaking. However, some words stick to some things/feelings we personally believe a language express them better.

@bonbonpony

11 ай бұрын

@@um_internacionalista Strange: English is my second language, and yet I often catch myself thinking in it, because it can sometimes be quicker and more efficient (English words are usually shorter and more packed with consonants than in my native language, so it takes less time to "utter them in my head" - _if_ I'm uttering them in my head at all, because I can also think in no language whatsoever, with just pure thoughts and pictures, which is always the fastest). Or when there's a word in English language that better describes some idea and there's no good counterpart for this idea in my native language, or I can't think of a good translation from the top of my head. So long story short, I think that it depends on a person.

1:43 isn't this because 'andato/andata' is more like an adjective rather than a verb? i mean, a participle, to be precise? looks similar to how the -ing form works in English. although no, wait, the previous one also looked like that. seems like there's more to this.

Would learning Italian or Spanish before French help me with knowing when to use un/une in French? I just started learning Italian for my anual skivacation in South-Tirol and polishing up my French at the same time, but i just have no clue on wich words are feminine or masculine.

@matteo-ciaramitaro

11 ай бұрын

genders in italian tend to be obvious, but sometimes not. I think learning Italian has generally been helpful when hearing Spanish and Portuguese words that don't end in a or o and trying to determine the gender, but if your goal is to learn french I feel like learning an entire other language first is not the best strategy. There are also some genders that are different between french and Italian so that may trip you up When you learn a word, write it with its translation and article like a bunch of times to practice. la notte night la notte night la notte night Also if you decide to do this, learn italian as it has the highest lexical similarity with french. This means the written languages look more similar than french looks like Spanish.

02:36 The problem usually doesn't lie in the fact that language has genders even for inanimate objects, but in figuring out which of the two (or even three) genders applies to a particular object, and why this particular gender and not the other (which gets even worse when you consider that different languages assign different genders to the same objects). And if the only answer is the usual "you just have to memorize it", then I could only say that it sucks by design :q (And this comes from someone whose native language has grammatical gender too.) I personally think that using the names "feminine" and "masculine" with respect to grammatical gender is very misleading, because it makes the student think that it has something to do with biological gender, while in reality it's more about groups of declensions a particular word belongs to by their grammatical structure. Even if it might originate in correspondence with biological gender (at least for animate nouns to which biological gender might apply), it evolved into just another way of classifying words by their morphology into several groups of declensions (sometimes more than two), so that it could be used later with pronouns as pointers referring to previously mentioned things and avoid repetitions.

I'm very interested in learning how romance languages began doing this as they evolved through the ages. I assume the few times English does this, pretty much with just boats and planes - cars go either way; a lot of girls and some women (most of us outgrow personifying cars) will refer to their cars as dudes; sex toys go either way too, because of maritime tradition from centuries ago. Very VERY few women were on ships (maybe like 2 pirates and that's nearly it) - idk, though. It's probably not that deep and just comes from our French influences, realistically.

I wouldn't agree that gender "resides" in the article, it "resides" in the noun, as an inherent trait of the noun, it is /indicated/ by the article and any other words which must agree in gender, and the ending of the noun may hint at the gender or it may not, depending on the etymology, but I don't think it's necessarily wise to teach gender as something which is visible or forced onto a noun by some other word in the sentence, I see it more as one of the entries in the long list of inherent attributes of a noun (such as meaning, register, and the variable traits such as number and definiteness)

In Serbian and Hebrew where there is (kind of) a rule to tell the gender of a noun the gender of a noun is reflected in an adjective. Therefore, you take a noun and give it an adjective and then you can tell with 100% accuracy the gender of a noun. 😆

A question from a spanish speaker: Spanish has some nouns that are feminine, but start with the letter "a", forcing us to avoid the feminine article in the singular form. For example, the word "águila" (eagle) is feminine, but we say "el águila" if singular, or "las águilas" if plural. Does Italian have this too?

@abiagio1

9 ай бұрын

We don't have it, because we solve the sound problem (a clash between vowels) differently: that is, with an elision, signalled with an apostrophe: l'aquila (el aguila).

In Ukrainian and Russian we conjugate all the verbs according to subject’s gender :)

Che gelida manina...🎶

It’s weird to say that the article determines the gender. The nouns has a gender, and the article simply follows it

Here's a dumb, not very well thought out joke in Bulgarian: "Words like washing machine, kitchen and vacuum cleaner are feminine, but words such as couch, tv and sleep are masculine"

As a Greek I find it fascinating how true it actually is the fact that we do imagine even objects as boys or girls... It makes our languages so much more interesting!

@qwmx

10 ай бұрын

HOW DO YOU KNOW? HOW DO YOU? I MUST KNOW! jokes aside, that is interesting and makes for interesting conversation in theorising (and playful theorising).

Is there a movement to de-gender Italian? There are people trying to make other people use gender neutral articles in Spanish (that don't traditionally exist).

Anello... Ah, that'd be where "annulet" comes from, I suppose?

Sorry Metatron, I'm an English speaker, the first language I tried to learn seriously was German. The word for woman, Frau, is in the feminine gender, but the two words for girl , Fraulein and Madchen, are neuter not feminine. Since adjectives have to match the gender and case of the noun it's das Freulein not die, etc. The problem with your explanation is that Italian seems to have some [sometimes bizarre] connection to gender in the real world, but German either doesn't or is extremely haphazard about it. In point of fact, Korean was easier for me to learn than German precisely because there is no gender issue. Explaining linguistic gender to me is like explaining the difference between red and blue to a blind person. Yes, the wavelength is different, but what is that? It makes no difference that English may have had it, once upon a time, or that we have some vestigial remnants in pronouns and that people sometimes refer to ships and cars as she and her rather rather than always it. Not only is gender almost absent from modern English, it is becoming even more absent as people are starting to replace he and she with they: traditionally "Today Rob has his birthday party." currently "Today Rob has their birthday party." Traditionally "Every soldier must take care of his gun." Currently "Every soldier must take care of their gun."* *Changing it to "every soldier must take care of their guns" is still confusing though a bit better, but the US government has mandated that using the singular male adjective "his" is pejorative because there are female soldiers, and "their" must be used. This is an example of military bureaucratic stupidity!!!!! The logical problem is that making the pronoun plural implies that there is only one gun for the soldiers, which might be rational for an artillery or tank crew; whereas making both referents plural suggests that every soldier is responsible for every other soldier's guns. This is absurd! The logical and most correct change would have been to make the entire sentence plural "All soldiers must take care of their [or their own] guns."

One funny thing is that some words change gender if they are singular or plural. Like "dito" who means "finger". We have "il dito" singular that is masculine, but "le dita" for the plural that is feminile. Aaaand there are some dilects where this rule is not used (like mine, Tuscany) so we say "i diti", a masculine plural. Just to not confuse people 😂

@xolang

11 ай бұрын

That's a remnant of the neuter gender in Latin, where the plural form ends in an -a.

Lo anello -> l'anello. Lo albero -> l'albero. Lo abate -> l'abate. Unfortunately people often think words like those above are the contraction of la anello, la albero, la abate. I am sorry you have not been paid by KZread. Your videos are interesting. When I was 13 I did not speak a word of Italian. I did not know this language. I studied very much and finally I learned it very well. English had genders like German, masculine, feminine and neuter. All current English words are former masculine feminine and neuter words. Italian derives from the language spoken in Florence. If Sicilian poetry and poets would have existed and worked even after Frederick Ii's kingdom, Italy probably would have selected Sicilian language of Palermo and not Florentine one. Now Italian would be current Palermitan language which even you consider and think it is only a dialect. Even Florentine language was only a dialect before it was selected to represent Italian national language. Do not forget that. Best regards. Good luck. I like your English pronunciation.

Interesting that italian has only femininum and masculinum since latin has neutrum also.

Question: do all romance languages share the same Masc/Fem forms. For example. Is "phone" masculine in Spanish and Portuguese as well?

@RenanRufinoTrue

Жыл бұрын

In portuguese "phone" is masculine too, but i don't know if it is the case for all the other languages.

@sabrinasambo7570

Жыл бұрын

Definitely not. For example the noun "sea" in iIalian is masculine (il mare) while in French it is feminine (la mer), and there are many more. I found much less differences between Italian and Spanish (sorry I don't speak Portuguese)

@RenanRufinoTrue

Жыл бұрын

@@sabrinasambo7570 in portuguese sea is also masculine(o mar)

@bilbohob7179

Жыл бұрын

@@sabrinasambo7570 Funny thing, in spanish is both "el/la mar" still I think with slight diferent meanings. "La mar is totally generic and undefined, and El mar is more specific"

@atlas567

11 ай бұрын

​@@bilbohob7179in portuguese " O MAR "

#HoldIt I am a native Spanish speaker... I think it's a nightmare. The -o/-a endings are as a rule of thumb very useful with some exceptions: mano is also female in Spanish, but they are not so common. Words ending in n and z are female. Papa is funny: it has two meanings depending on the gender. Male "papa" means "pope" (sometimes it also means "dad"), the female one means "potato" and "papá" means "dad".

It's interesting about grammatical gender also having some sort of "femininity" or "masculinity" attached to an object for native speakers. What is even more interesting is that the gender of an object can change between languages, such as "une table" (French, feminine) and "der Tisch" (German, masculine). I wonder if the difference is because the cultures view the objects differently, or because the grammatical gender came first (i.e. as a descendent of older gender categories that were not female/male, but animate/inanimate, for example) and influenced the perception of the object. It also wouldn't surprise me if the answer is both, with the reason depending on the specific object in question. It could also often just be a chicken-and-egg situation in many cases.

@vojtechdubcak6135

Жыл бұрын

There is evidence against what you're proposing - that the gender class of a word is determined by the characteristics of its referent. Sure, there indeed is a great overlap between biological sex and IE grammatical gender system, so the gender of words with human referents usually corresponds to the perceived sex of the referents. This overlap shrinks in words with animal referents (for example, in Slavic languages, complementary [male-female] pairs don't have members with equal markedness; e.g. CZ "kočka" ([female] cat) is unmarked, but "kocour" (male cat) is marked), "pes" ([male] dog) is unmarked, "fena" (female dog) is marked). And with words with inanimate referents the overlap is obviously non-existent. If the new IE gender system (M/F/N) had really spread over words with inanimate referents via metaphorical relations, these metaphors are now so obscured and unapparent to speakers that words with inanimate referents are in practice assigned gender arbitrarily from the referents' characteristics. Hence why you see the large discrepancy in gender of words with inanimate referents between languages (but not in the case of words with human referents). If gender were attached directly to concepts (signified/prototypes/ICMs/referents/denotations) speakers would be able to infer the gender of a newly discovered concept without knowing the associated word (signifier/morphological and phonological form). This doesn't seem to be true. Instead, the overriding factor that determines a word's gender appears to be affixation with morphemes specified for gender, and/or collocation with gender-specific modifiers (such as articles or adjectives inflected in concord with the noun's gender) and/or predicates. The words for "manliness" or "virility" in French are feminine. This is not because the French perceive manliness as feminine in its nature (it is its polar opposite), but because the suffix those words have is marked as feminine. Anyways, all this is explained in the video's description. I don't know why Metatron chose to make the description and the video totally different.

@bonbonpony

11 ай бұрын

@@vojtechdubcak6135 I think you might be interested in Geroge Lakoff's book "Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind" ;)

@vojtechdubcak6135

11 ай бұрын

@@bonbonpony My point is that the classes of the IE gender system are grammatical categories, not cognitive categories. Gender is a property of signifiers, not a reflection of the characteristic of signified. I think Lakoff's book is about cognitive linguistics, not grammar. But thanks for the recommendation nonetheless.

Explain the weird things from italian like "ne" "ci" "sià" please

Two questions on the subject 1: Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker made a point that "CIA" when used as a loanword in (Costa Rican) Spanish becomes feminine ("la CIA") because of the ending sound. If this is real, does it apply to loanwords in other Romance languages? 2: Certain verbs varying if the speaker is male or female was briefly mentioned. Japanese (or at least, Japanese fiction) has plenty of tomboy characters that adopt masculine speech patterns. Does that ever appear in Romance languages outside of deliberate deceptions (female character isn't just boyish but outright disguised as a male) and modern political nonsense?

@XofHope

Жыл бұрын

Yes, about the CIA. Not just because it ends in "a", which is the typical termination for female nouns, but also because agency/agência/agence is feminine. Not that I'm aware of. Nowadays I guess you have people who choose to speak as if being of the opposite gender because they're trans or are experimenting,, but traditionally and until very recently, no. A tomboyish girl is still a girl and a delicate boy is still a boy and people would look at them very weird if they used the nouns and conjugations of the opposite gender. If someone else referred to them like that, it was always as an insult.

@OBrasilo

11 ай бұрын

Yes, it's "la CIA" in Italian as well.

@atlas567

11 ай бұрын

Em português também é= A CIA e O FBI, CIA no português é uma palavra feminina e FBI é uma palavra masculina

@abiagio1

9 ай бұрын

As to verb endings changing according to sex (if that is what you're thinking of), that's not a thing in Italian, except for past participles. For example, "l'ho trovata": it means "I found it", but the ending -a signals that what I found is a feminine object. But it's important to note that the sex of the person who's speaking is irrelevant.

👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻

The best languages are those that have masculine, feminine, object gender, plural gender, plural masculine gender, and plural feminine gender :D

I've studied German, but to me it's still sometimes hard to memorise the gender of words, unless they make perfect sense. There are no genders in my language and it's hard for me to grasp why words need genders.

@holycameltoe124

Жыл бұрын

as a dutch person (we also have gender of words) german is completely crazy although our languages aren't that different in its basis, but the "der die, das, dem den ein einem einen einer" - I might have missed one or two - can be really confusing.

@andreasarnoalthofsobottka2928

Жыл бұрын

Wenn Du einen Kaktus nicht gießt, dann verdorrt er Dir. If this german sentence is said in the dialect of Palatinate, it appears to foreigners, that the male article is used 3 times in a row. Won'D in Kaktus ned giesch, no derrt' er Der.

@sabrinasambo7570

Жыл бұрын

Unfortunately there is no practical need for grammatical gender, so there is no meaning in asking why... 😉

@thorthewolf8801

Жыл бұрын

I learnt german in high school, I quickly learned that gender in german is basically anarchy, there are probably more exceptions than rule abiding words.

@andreasarnoalthofsobottka2928

Жыл бұрын

@@thorthewolf8801 There are rules w/o exceptions. Words ending with -tion, -ung, -heit und -keit are always nouns and feminine. (Like in Spanish words ending with -dad and -cion) Diminuatives are always neutre in German. Das Eichhörnchen 🐿️ Foreign words come into the german language with their gender. La/ die Nutella. Foreign language w/o gender come in with the gender of its translation: das Katana= das Krummschwert. There are more rules and of course educational videos on youtube about the topic.

@7:50.... il anello??? Really? Come on Raffaello, L' is the shortening for Lo, where the apostrophe indicates a vowel has been removed *after* the L. So it would be "Lo anello" truncated to "l'anello". "Il" is never truncated, in fact it is only used as an article in front of names that begin by consonants. As a matter of fact the article for the plural "anelli" is "gli" and not "i" which is the plural for "il".

The whole concept is hard for English speakers because English has no gender. English marks perceived biological sex in its pronouns "he/she/it". Hence a boy is he, a girl she, and a table it. For instance, German marks gramatical gender meaning "Mädchen" (girl) is "it" due to grammar not perceived sex. By the way, mädchen is neuter because of -Chen ending being neuter.

@forbidden-cyrillic-handle

11 ай бұрын

Interesting. In Bulgarian both "boy", "girl" and "kid" are neuter. We also have 3 grammatical genders.

Same thing works for Russian

I'm still very confused. Language exceptions suck. I want simple, straightforward rules!

Me, an Italian, watching the video for no real purpose other than entertainment while I have breakfast 👁👄👁