Fun fact: The word "neuter" in german is "neutrum" which comes from the latin combination ne utrum. Ne utrum translates to "none of the other two". My latin teacher in germany told me that. Oh by the way latin also has 3 genders.

@RobWords

3 жыл бұрын

That's a glorious fact! Thanks

@MegaJohn144

3 жыл бұрын

Swedish has Masculine, Feminine, Neuter, and Non-Neuter. But, mostly everything is Non-Neuter (den) or Neuter (det).

@maxybg

Жыл бұрын

So basically neutral

@orangie8426

Жыл бұрын

Whew... That's a relief... I was just a bit worried that these people were walking around thinking... That object is male... and that object is female... and that object got its balls cut off!!!

@Hubert_Schoelnast

Жыл бұрын

The Languages that derive from Proto-Indoeuropean language provide all in all 4 genders: "masculine", "feminine", "utrum" and "neuter". But no language uses all 4 genders. English has just one gender for nouns, which has no official name, but I think it is most similar to utrum. Italian has two genders (masculine and feminine). Swedish also has two genders, but they are utrum (mainly used for things that live, like men and women but also for animals, gods and ghosts) and neuter (for non-living things). German is an example for a language with 3 genders (masculine, feminine and neuter). Some African language even have more than 20 genders (Swahili has 22). But when a language has so many genders, you no longer call them "genders" but "noun classes". And I think that also for European languages the term "noun class" describes the concept of this feature much better than "gender", because the term "noun class" describes clearly, that it is a grammatical feature of nouns, not a property ob the objectes named by the nouns.

My native language (Faroese) has 3 genders (masculine, feminine and neuter) and my 2nd language (Danish) has 2 genders (common gender and neuter), and my 3rd language (English) has none. Things just got easier as I progressed through my language learning, lol.

@craftah

9 ай бұрын

genders aren't hard especially if you are a native speaker

@John-qd5of

9 ай бұрын

You could technically say that there are hints of the 3 genders of Old English. He, she, and it refer to male beings, female beings and objects, respectfully. By contrast, Turkish has only one genderles pronoun "oh." The writer Orhan Pahmuk wrote that when he was a little kid, he thought that Allah was female. This was because in Turkish, there is only one genderless pronoun: "O." Therefore, there was no obvious sign what gender Allah was.

@JonK...

7 ай бұрын

​@@John-qd5of😂😂😂 I suppose he was misgendering his god!! 🤣🤣🤣

@estebancorral5151

3 ай бұрын

You have my sympathy. The harsh cold winds of the Faroe Islands would be Purgatory for me.

@Lemonz1989

3 ай бұрын

@@craftah Not if you’re a native speaker, no, but it can be quite difficult when you’re learning a new language, because the grammatical genders don’t always make sense, and the same words have different genders in different languages. For example, in German, a knife is neuter, a fork is feminine and a spoon is masculine, while in Faroese they are masculine, masculine and feminine. :)

As a native Spanish speaker myself, having realized English objects are non-gendered was something that relieved me. When I studied French, the whole gender assignment towards objects was super natural, but just like the apple example, Spanish and French disagree with some other examples, such as account (compte: Feminine in Spanish, masculine in French) or vehicle (voiture: Masculine in Spanish, feminine in French). In times of doubt, I just look it up and that's it. 😊

@thetightwadhomesteader3089

3 ай бұрын

es cierto. Solo se inglés. Estoy aprendiendo español. No es fácil de recordar. la serpiente, el agua

@casualweekday-ytshadowbang2469

3 ай бұрын

Meanwhile, German has a Neuter gender for words, thus an apple is... feminine (apparently).

@thetightwadhomesteader3089

3 ай бұрын

vaya, la señora manzana. iqual en español. la (the feminine) manzana. la mesa, la silla, femenina etc.

@FrankBrennosTheGreatest

Ай бұрын

As a native French speaker learning Spanish ATM, the difference in gender doesn't bother me when the words are completely different (la voiture, el coche) but when they're similar it really messes with my brain (la vidéo, el video / la couleur, el color / etc.) haha!

@dulcedeprado7991

Ай бұрын

​@@thetightwadhomesteader3089 agua is actually feminine 😂.

Found your channel yesterday...the how to read French one. I'm really enjoying watching these, you present them so well. I've always been interested in language and it's origins. I speak Italian, Greek and terrible French. Words are fascinating and there is so much here I didn't know. Thank you, I'll keep watching.

I came from Hong Kong, Cantonese (Chinese) and English are the 2 languages I speak for most of my life, and none of them have grammatical genders. Imagine my face when I saw: Le La, Un Une when I started learning French. It was and still is such a nightmare

@RobWords

3 жыл бұрын

I'm learning German and adding a third gender DOES NOT help.

@jandron94

2 жыл бұрын

Languages are all about repetition, mimicking and unconscious memory. If you have a steady immersive learning of French then it comes in naturally (like walking, cycling, swimming, etc.). 5 year old French kids are fluent in French, so why not you ? Also what you need is an optimistic perspective, a will to learn French for a reason that stimulates you : the culture, arts including "bande dessinée" (comics), the cuisine, wines, fashion, the history, the musicality of the language, it's sofistication and "superiority", the French people, professional perspectives, a distinct and unique "French" view on the world, etc. Try to be (for a while) of the same mindset as the French : it may sound ridiculous but the French are genuinely persuaded that they live in the most beautiful country, that they have the best "art de vivre" and that they are the most civilised people on earth (with the most civilised language !). Of course if you are force-feeding yourself with the language then it becomes a nightmare... As an example I woud recommand you watch around 5 times (!!!) a French movie you really like and gradually repeat and (mimick!!!) dialog parts... Also the immersive part is important : you could spend a weekend eating french food, listening to French music, radio, news, reading in French, watching French movies, news, talking with French people, commenting in French KZread posts, etc. basically LIVING IN A FRENCH BUBBLE. Don't ask yourself too many questions, enjoy a glass of tasty French wine and let the French language slowly and pleasantly come up to you head...

@Vanaditz

2 жыл бұрын

@@jandron94 beautifully said. This even helped me

@patax144

Жыл бұрын

@@RobWords while as a Spanish native speaker I am used to genders, and while learning French and Portuguese it wasn't that big of a deal even if the words that were a different gender than in Spanish confused me, I am starting to learn German soon, I hope the third gender does not mess me up.

@elainechubb971

Жыл бұрын

@@patax144 I don't think it will. I learned German in my middle teens, and these were the hardest things about the language for me: verbs (several conjugations, as in Latin, plus very many irregular ones); case for nouns and adjectives (subject, object, possessive, dative); two forms of the adjective (strong and weak); a rigid word order (again, as in Latin). It meant a lot of rote learning, of declensions and conjugations. It was more like learning Latin than learning French--but at least with Latin I didn't have to attempt to speak it! That said, the language is very rich and has some beautiful poetry. I hope you will enjoy your studies!

In Finnish we have a lot of difficult weirdness, but some things are so logical it’s weird it’s not more common: 1) No gendered objects 2) not even he or she, just ”hän” for anyone 3) almost never any silent letters 4) every alphabet is always pronounced the same unique way. For example ”i” is always [i] (like english letter E), not context sensitive like english ”Titanic”

@murkotron

Жыл бұрын

nevermind all the agglutination

@TragoudistrosMPH

Жыл бұрын

🤔 If your people hope to conquer the world, I may defect so a reasonable language takes hold 😉

@Shutendoji

Жыл бұрын

Finnish is relatively young as a written language so it doesn't have all this historical baggage that English does. Compare it to the Latin alphabet used for Turkish, which was developed in the 1920's and is also nearly completely phonetic like Finnish

@Notacet

Жыл бұрын

@@murkotron yes in that sense we’re horrific😅

@wyatttomlinson3475

Жыл бұрын

Finnish has no gendered objects? Interesting! Did it used to have genders, like English did?

@5:00 Persian also did away with gender at about the same time. It's completely genderless and highly simplified! It seems that when a language gets used by many different peoples to communicate with each other, it gets simplified along the way.

I've just discovered your channel and I am absolutely thrilled about it. I love everything related to language and each of your videos is so informative and well done...also (or even particularly) for non-native english speakers as I am. Even the comment section is on another level. Looking forward to inhaling every word. Thank you so much. I am absolutely thrilled!! 😆

I had a bit of a hard time learning German because of the gender mismatches between it and my native language. I never realized how learning English was actually so simple before starting to study German. German feels like learning English with the difficulty slider cranked to 11.

@musicloverUK

Жыл бұрын

Yep, x the difficulty of German by at least 3 for Polish! 7 declensions and even people's names change their endings!

@Neil070

Жыл бұрын

German is actually simple, once you have studied and got used to French genders and the word order. Unlike English it is logical and doesn't have umpteen different pronunciations for the same letter groups, we have umpteen ways to pronounce "-ough" for example

@veronikaczr1105

Жыл бұрын

@@musicloverUK same goes for czech and many slavic languages

@laislyra5512

Жыл бұрын

@@Neil070 can I complain about German word order? Ok, good XD The "logical" word order imo would be "subject, verb(s), object, complement". That way you answer "who did what, to whom, and how". You add the words from the most important to the least important. Now, in German, when you have two verbs in a sentence, you can't simply add the complement in the end, you have to think beforehand! I mean, who does that? Do Germans always know every sentence before they say it?

@mizapf

Жыл бұрын

The subject is not necessarily the most important part of the sentence, and this is perfectly reflected in the German V2 word order (verb as the second topic of the sentence). Thus you can put the object in front if you want to stress it. "Den Mann sah ich nicht, aber die Frau" - "The man I did not see, but the woman". What do you mean by "two verbs"? Composite forms like "habe gesehen" (have seen)? In this case, the "habe" occupies the V2 position, and the other parts of the composition are appended ("Ich habe den Mann nicht gesehen"). Of course, you have the verb in mind when you start speaking.

I remember learning about this at uni. You summed up a whole lecture in about 7 minutes. Amazing video, Rob!!

@RobWords

3 жыл бұрын

Thanks Emma! And thanks for watching 👍

@I_Have_The_Most_Japanese_Music

Жыл бұрын

This guy is riveting; should start his own cult if he hasn't already.

@lordpetrolhead477

Жыл бұрын

@@I_Have_The_Most_Japanese_Music he’s got loads of videos on TikTok, been watching them all afternoon whilst sitting in the sun in the garden 👍

@I_Have_The_Most_Japanese_Music

Жыл бұрын

@@lordpetrolhead477 😄

@user-yp3oj5se1i

Жыл бұрын

Who was the teacher that took so long then? te he

Great video, I studied English, German and linguistics at a French Uni many moons ago, and still to this day I am fascinated by languages and their interaction throughout history, the forgotten links, the etymology of words etc. I have added this video to my favourites needless to say! Thank you for posting this.

@opalfruitcake

Ай бұрын

I feel like I could have written this post because you have articulated exactly how I feel about language! It is so interesting and I wish I studied it at university.

@MrChickennugget360

Ай бұрын

great video until the end.

This is a very well done production in many aspects. Clear narrative, informative and light hearted. Fun watching.

Mind blown. Not about the gendered language (although that's cool), but about blond/blonde. As a Canadian, I assumed one was the British spelling and the other American, because... well, so many other words have that. :D

@davidashton2361

Жыл бұрын

Likewise. I'm British and thought the same thing. I picked up a smattering of German whilst in Germany with the British army, mainly to pursue my hobby at the time of RC modelling. I could make myself understood, but was very much aware of my language shortcomings. I found the native Germans were very sympathetic to my pathetic attempts and were very helpful. Most Germans do speak english anyway, but seemed to regard an Englishman attempting to speak to them in their language as a compliment. After all, most English men EXPECT 'Johny foreigner' to speak english because it's regarded as the international language.

@richardlilley6274

Жыл бұрын

Ditto about the blond / blonde... Public education ' is an oxymoron

@james-p

Жыл бұрын

Yes, blond/blonde is standard Yank usage - but unfortunately too many of us Americans are ignorant of the proper usage 😕 Owen Wilson is blond, and Scarlett Johansson is blonde.

@verenamichel2447

Жыл бұрын

I'm German and I kind of assumed the same!

@crazy808ish

Жыл бұрын

So the question then becomes, which do people actually in Canada or the UK?

The most confusing thing for me when learning German, was how “die” (feminine) turns to “der” (masculine) in dative! Spanish has el and la, but those remain the same, no matter what case you use. German is on a whole other level! 😂

@evamarspanish7815

Жыл бұрын

We have genders and plurals, but no cases in Spanish. The hardest bit for English speaking learners is the Spanish conjugation, but again many languages have proper conjugation. English is quite an easy language to learn quickly enough to understand and make yourself understood in normal basic life: no genders and very simple conjugation in all tenses. The best bit of Spanish is how the rules have very few exceptions and the language itself is quite helpful once one puts some effort into learning those rules. Also, we don't bother with ridiculously confusing vowels: 5 vowels, 5 sounds, always the same. As simple as that.

@billybobhouse9559

Жыл бұрын

@@shaunmckenzie5509 I'm not sure I agree it's an ugly language. It sounds nice to me but very fast!

@evamarspanish7815

Жыл бұрын

​@@shaunmckenzie5509 I guess that taste needs to be respected, but bad manners like calling another language "very ugly", not really. Personally, and many also agree with me, I find that a limited number of vowels, such as in Italian and Spanish, not only sound nicer and clearer but will also make it easier to learn. Also less spitting than German or English speakers, and easier to understand as not tons of mute letters as in French.

@evamarspanish7815

Жыл бұрын

@@shaunmckenzie5509 There, there, finally learning to at least hold insults! Your social skills are improving, you are welcome. The main difference with Italian is the hard "J" sound and that comes from Arabic, 8 centuries of invasion leave their mark. But then also with Celtic and Germanic languages, of which we have dents too.

@pierrefley5000

Жыл бұрын

I don't quite agree with that description. It's not that "feminine" articles turn "masculine" in German, it's that none of the definite articles are unique to a specific combination of gender/case/number. Logically, you might expect 24 distinct article variants: 3 genders × 4 cases × 2 numbers (singular, plural) = 24. But in reality there are only 6 different definite articles in German, each occurring in multiple positions of the full table: der (6), die (8), das (2), des (2), dem (2), den (4). Sure, "die" is the article for feminine/nominative/singular, but it is also used for feminine/accusative/singular as well as nominative and accusative plural for all three genders. Similarly, "der" is the article for masculine/nominative/singular, but it is also used for feminine/genitive/singular and feminine/dative/singular as well as genitive plural for all three genders. (Is it a good system? No. Does it make sense? Also no. But hey, it's how the language works.) At least in the plural table you get some simplification, but in the opposite way compared to Spanish: Instead of articles staying the same across cases, German plural articles stay the same across genders. For example, "den" is the dative plural article regardless of whether the noun is masculine, feminine, or neuter.

Fascinating, informative video, Rob, thank you! At school, I often inwardly sighed when we had the added work of all those noun genders in learning Latin, French, and German. And, then, the added burden of tying in the all those correct adjectival agreements! But, to be fair, it was nice when they started being more & more automatically fixed in the mind, and we (well, mostly!) got it right ;-) . Japanese, on the other hand, was refreshingly different in that regard (plus, I was even younger then, and more receptive, probably with better brain plasticity or something, lol). 🙂

Really enjoy your channel, and even more so, now that I am learning Greek. You make sense of the chaos!

You referred to blond/blonde at 4:53 as an exception in English. It's not an exception. It's a part of a special rule where borrowed words (in this case, from French) are used as in their source language until the time comes when they're fully assimilated into English. Some other examples of French-borrowed inflected nouns or adjectives are fiancé/fiancée, divorcé/divorcée, and né/née. In all cases, pronounced the same, but written differently.

@weebunny

Жыл бұрын

The English word "naive" started as one of these. It was borrowed from French also - naïf (masculine), naïve (feminine). Eventually its French origin began to fade from collective memory, and now "naive" (without the dieresis) is the most common form of the word in English, at least in the US, where I'm from (I'm not sure about elsewhere). I can say, for example, that my brother is naive about his kids' behavior when he isn't around, and it wouldn't be incorrect - except for the fact that I don't have a brother.

@harrisaxer2651

Жыл бұрын

And they will be assimilated. Resistance - as we all know - is futile

@davidbio1

Жыл бұрын

Maybe for people who has English as native language don't see this, but for me, for example, English is almost another latin language. You have so many words I can understand, not because I studied English, but because is almost the same, or sometimes is exactly the same word in my language. In your comment there are many words I recognize very easily. Referred, exception, part, special, case, used, language, time, assimilated, examples, adjectives, pronounced, differently. All these words are almost the same in Portuguese.

@DougRayPhillips

Жыл бұрын

@@davidbio1 English is descended in a general way from Latin, yes. Our technical terms are pulled pretty much straight from Latin or Greek. Our everyday stuff is Latin-influenced also, but not quite as clearly as in the Romance languages (Italian, Spanish-Portuguese-Romanian, French etc.). Because Great Britain (where English was formed) was conquered and ruled in whole or in part by the Romans, but also by the Vikings and by Viking descendants such as the Normans. Therefore, we often have two common words for things, one from the Romance thread and the other from Germanic.

@joegrey9807

Жыл бұрын

@@davidbio1 The base words are Germanic (Anglo-Saxon), and the more subtle complex words are Romance (Norman French), add in a different branch of Germanic (from the Vikings), Latin and Greek for technical stuff, a bit of modern French and other European languages, and words from the countries we colonised, and then mash it altogether, simplify the grammar, randomise the spelling and pronunciation, and add a lot of idioms, word-play and slang, and you've got English. What's interesting is that we often have pairs of words with slightly different meanings from Anglo-Saxon and French - the differences often reflect the Anglo-Saxons being ruled by the Norman French, so peasants farmed cows and sheep, and the gentry consumed beef and mutton.

I love the style of your videos, they're so casual yet professional. Please keep making more!

My first language is Spanish . I use to love telling my over protective mom that I was hanging out with my friend because in English friend doesn’t have a gender like in Spanish. So I would say it and act like I already gave her enough information 😂

@Matthewgb204

11 ай бұрын

That’s awesome

@pawelzielinski1398

10 ай бұрын

So when you read a headline in an English paper: "Teacher had sex with student" you really have not many details what was going on. In Polish the same headline would clearly indicate the gender of both people involve in the situation. Same with German. English creates ambiguity.

@briandhamby

10 ай бұрын

​@@pawelzielinski1398yes it creates ambiguity in situations where the gender is of interest, but I'd argue that the majority of the time it's actually superfluous information and therefore creates not only needless complexity in the language, but also keeps this silly idea alive that people's gender is so core to their makeup that it needs to be taken into consideration in every circumstance.

@victorfergn

7 ай бұрын

hmmm I think you get the main piece of information in 'teacher had sex with student' xD@@pawelzielinski1398

@victorfergn

7 ай бұрын

@@briandhamby nah, if you are native speaker...then you don't have to learn those genders... besides having a crappy spelling system is even worse and it's way more stupid because people can actually do something about it and they don't. It takes the Japanese like 20 years to learn how to spell college-level words... in Italian, Spanish, Finnish, etc it only takes you half a year.

Being an American, living in Germany and learning German, I find your videos very interesting to see the similarities between German and Old English. Frawe and Frau.. fascinating

@johaquila

Жыл бұрын

These similarities are of course not accidental. The word "Anglo-Saxon" refers to the Angles, who lived around today's border between Germany and Denmark, and the Saxons. Saxons in this context refers to those Saxons who lived on the North Sea coast of today's Germany and the Netherlands. Their dialects were early forms of German. When these people colonized/conquered Britain, the language evolving from their dialects became the new prestige language of the island, replacing the old Celtic languages. This is why Old English (also known as Anglo-Saxon) was extremely similar to Old Low German (the contemporary form of German spoken near the coast) and also to Old High German (the contemporary form of German spoken further south, ancestor of Standard German). The Celtic languages had some influence on English, mostly simplifying it but also adding a weird complication: Obligatory use of 'do' in negations. Then the Vikings came from Scandinavia and gave a slight north Germanic touch to English. Then French-speaking Vikings came from the north coast of France and brought a large supply of French vocabulary to English. By the way, the word 'frouwe' (standard Middle High German spelling) actually means noble lady. Over many centuries, Europeans have had the tendency to refer to women as if they had a higher social status than they actually had. This made the words gradually change their meanings. Today, in German a Frau is just any woman rather than a noble lady, and in fact, in some contexts politeness requires saying Dame instead even for a woman who is neither noble nor particularly refined. What was once the standard word for a woman, Weib/wife, has become the German word for a vulgar woman and the English word for a married woman. Similar things happened in the Romance languages.

I have heard a theory that the reason English grammar became greatly simplified was a direct result of the Norman conquest. The Normans couldn't be bothered to learn Old English, but they still needed to communicate with their subjects, so a creole or pidgin English emerged that was simpler for both to learn, and the "new" English eventually replaced the old one. Am I right or was the eventual loss of genders in English unrelated to William the Conqueror?

@dannyarcher6370

Жыл бұрын

Yep. Look at Afrikaans which creolised from a huge number of languages thanks to Dutch settlers, Malay and Indian slaves, Bushmen and others integrating into the same society. Afrikaans is incredibly easy to learn and has a very efficient grammar system. For example, it only has one form of 'to be'.

@geroutathat

Жыл бұрын

Yes, Anglo-Norman is the actual language used then, however old english already had oddities from the german mother tongue of the anglo saxons, its a northern german language, but it seems to have picked up odities from the people the anglo saxons killed, the native britons of England, and then merged with Anglo-norman.. for example, the video says there is no gender, but "it" is the neuter gender, and English has that. A language with no neuter gender refers to everything as "leave him/her on the table" not "leave it on the table", some languages have no "it"

@hoi-polloi1863

Жыл бұрын

Theory I like is that the creolization happened, but it was due to interaction between Old English and Old Norse... the genders didn't quite match up between the two (a given word might be masculine in one and feminine in the other), so they just got rid of the whole schmeer.

@YourCreepyUncle.

Жыл бұрын

This is a false theory, as English is not a creole at all. Simplification does not equal creole anyway.

@justanotherguy2824

Жыл бұрын

This simplification of the grammar is a blessing for everyone who learns English as a foreign language. On the other hand the Norman conquest also brought many French words into English, increasing the vocabulary significantly. The basic vocabulary of English you need to learn is quite big. E.g. when referring to the animal suus scrofa domesticus English uses "pig", "swine" and "hog" in parallel for no real reason. To make it even more confusing when it is going to be eaten it becomes "pork" (from French). And secondly, with these changes in the spoken language and the Norman-French influence, the spelling of English became a complete mess. English spelling almost lacks any logic, for many words you have to memorize both, the pronounciation and the spelling. This is why spelling contests exist in English speaking countries. In most languages (Spanish, Italian, Hungarian, Slavic languages ...) such a contest would be completely pointless as the spelling strictly mirrors the pronounciation.

English is, in some cases, quite similar to Plattdeutsch (Low German), which has been recognized as its own language, just like Frisian. Plattdeutsch just has one article for feminine and masculine words, as well: de. Sounds rather similar to "the", if you ask me. And if you have something neuter, then you just say "dat", quite similar to "that". But you can say "de" also, as far as I know. So it's "de Appel", "de Beer" and "dat/de Water". Just like "the apple", "the pear" and "the water" in English.

@kbm2055

Жыл бұрын

Frisian seems to always get the label of closest to English, but I always thought Low German gets overlooked in that regard. I've noticed in Dutch cognates with English words that have the "th" sound end up being a "d" so I assume this is often the case with Low German as well. Of course at one time I believe all the Germanic languages had the "th" (dental fricative) sound, now it's just reduced to English and Icelandic.

@Ulkomaalainen

Жыл бұрын

@@kbm2055 Low German certainly is closer to English than High German is to English, arguably even closer than Low German is to High German due to missing the vowel shift. And there are many Low German words which are "English" and not "German", like (Standard) German "wie", which is "as" in English, also is "as" (pronounced differently though) in Low German.

@Gizathecat2

Жыл бұрын

My grandparents spoke Low German and when I visited relatives in Germany I found their accents easy on my ears. When my grandparents spoke English they had Low German accents.

@Venejan

Жыл бұрын

To my ears, people from Schleswig-Holstein, where the original Angles came from, speak German like English people do. Sometimes when I hear a British or American person speaking very good German, I can't distinguish them from residents of, say, Flensburg speaking their native tongue.

@penelopehunt2371

Жыл бұрын

Like Afrikaans

Your English is so polished, it's music to my ears.❤

See, this is one of the reasons why I like learning East and Southeast Asian languages; very few if any have grammatical gender. And this coming from a Spanish speaker, who’s used to it. 😅

@khunphraeokha

7 ай бұрын

Good luck with the tone.

I read that with the collision of Norse and Anglo-Saxon cultures there was a simplification of grammar as the languages were melding and changing each other.

@pamplemoussejus7583

2 ай бұрын

Yes I heard that on the excellent history of English podcast.

@stevegreen8262

2 ай бұрын

I saw a video about language that said something similar.

In traditional Westcountry dialects, countable objects like a newspaper or a stone can be referred to as "he" or "him" and mass nouns like sand or water are referred to as "it". I don't know whether this is a relic of the gender system or a later development after gramatical gender was lost, but I used to hear it regularly when I was a boy; "Pass 'im 'ere, youngun."

@RobWords

3 жыл бұрын

No way?? I had no idea. Thanks for that!

@tonymaries1652

2 жыл бұрын

My neighbour, who has lived in the West Country all his life, does exactly that. A plant in his garden is 'im and the coal, for he still has a weekly delivery, is 'it'. It doesn't seem to bear any relationship to the gender in other Germanic languages. For example in modern German 'plant' is 'die Pflanze' (feminine). So what I read about the male /female genders in Dutch being rolled into a common gender rings true for English as commonly spoken in the West Country.

@ThePayner11

Жыл бұрын

I am from Somerset and have never heard of this before.

@alexengland-shinemercy

Жыл бұрын

My partner is from the Forest of Dean, his family do this too.

@greenmachine5600

Жыл бұрын

Perhaps it's a feature of the Celtic language

Very interesting and incredibly well explained! Congratulations, I loved the video!!! 😀

I took a course in old and middle English when I was at school. I distinctly remember that I had to memorize different forms of the indefinite article for three geners, three numbers (sigular, dual and plural) and 5 cases (Nominative, Genitive, Dative, Accusative and Ablative) in old English. They definitely existed at one point, and then only two forms remained. (Just like singular and plural forms of some nouns like man/men. )

Im shocked this channel doesn’t have more subscribers. You explain things in such a clear concise way which is also fun to watch. And your videos are super high quality. Good work man!

@RobWords

Жыл бұрын

Well that's very kind, thank you

@30035XD

Жыл бұрын

It's the non-blinking, creepy smile face that makes people run away.

@jonb6417

Жыл бұрын

I agree, but not everybody is a languages nut like we here appear to be. It seems that most of us also have abilities with several languages, hence the multilingual comments written, read and responded to in whatever language seems the most suitable, and we are therefore in a minority because of that too.

In Norwegian, particularly in "bokmål" (the Danish based written language) we're in the process of merging the masculine and feminine grammatical gender (neuter is not endangered). We tend to use the masculine indefinite article "en" for both masculine and feminine (traditionally using "ei") while still using the appropriate definite suffixes "-en" for masculine and "-a" for feminine, but this is also slowly merging to just "-en". But there's a new trend were the feminine article and suffix is used for any gender as a sort of diminutive instead. So we might end up with two genders common gender and neuter like has happened in some other Scandinavian dialects, but with the feminine markers retained with a new grammatical function.

@RobWords

3 жыл бұрын

Woah, this is worth a video in itself. Thanks.

@EricaGamet

3 жыл бұрын

I was going to say, isn't this how Swedish is? I'm currently learning Swedish and learned that they used to have male/female and now have common and neuter genders... neither of which says "gender" to me, but maybe there is just no other good term.

@SteinGauslaaStrindhaug

3 жыл бұрын

@@EricaGamet yes, in Swedish masculine and feminine is completely merged into common gender. (in most dialects at least, could be some where it isn't. After all we have dialects in Norway retaining a full case system, so why not)

@SteinGauslaaStrindhaug

3 жыл бұрын

And yes, grammatical gender has nothing to do with social gender or biological sex. It's just called that since the grammatical phenomenon of "gender" in Latin happened to have two genders associated loosely with biological sex. And they named the phenomenon.

@X3rCobraz

2 жыл бұрын

I'm English but I'm learning Bokmål, and I was super happy when I learned that you can treat feminine words like masculine, its much easier for me to learn this, because remembering all of the genders is so confusing! They are especially foreign to me because we dont have them! If I'm being honest I still dont see the point in genders, it just adds unnecessary confusion in my opinion, but I've only been learning for about 8 months so what do I know?

Well done: easy to understand, and slowly--helpful, when you are explaining something that I would consider "difficult".

This was such a fun watch, subbed!

I am so much in love with your videos. In my country India, Hindi is not gender neutral, it has two genders for everything, Sanskrit has three, while some languages are gender neutral too, for example, Bangla (Bengali) is gender neutral. When a Bengali speaking speaks Hindi, they find it very troubling to fix gender. More trouble is when a "Marathi" speaker and a Hindi speaker exchange notes, because both aren't gender neutral, but things that are feminine in Marathi are masculine in Hindi. So interesting.

@thoutube9522

2 ай бұрын

Wow, that is amazing. It perhaps demonstrates that there's nothing intrinsic about choice of grammatical gender.

@pawelzielinski1398

Ай бұрын

@@thoutube9522 yes, but it seems to me that in many languages nouns that end in A are feminine. I know only few European languages, so please correct me, if I am wrong.

@thoutube9522

Ай бұрын

@@pawelzielinski1398Yes, perhaps there is something intrinsic in that. Or maybe it's because many Western European languages have Latin roots. I'm not sure if that's true of Slavic languages.

@pawelzielinski1398

Ай бұрын

@@thoutube9522 What is true? Latin had immense influence on Polish. Until at least XVI century that was the language used in any serious literature (poetry and prose) and science. The most famous Polish scientist of these days was fluent in Latin. His seminal work was also written and published in Latin and had profoundly changed how people perceive our place in the universe. My wild guess is that about 10-15% of Polish words have Latin roots. Maybe more. And when it comes to law or medicine or theology/church affairs it's probably much higher. That's why it has always been easy for me to recognize the meaning of so called "difficult" English words (as they are the same or very similar in Polish because they often have Latin or Greek origin), but the real challenge was with native Germanic words in English.

@thoutube9522

Ай бұрын

@@pawelzielinski1398 I had no idea. Excuse my ignorance, and many thanks for correcting me.

I am hooked after just two explanations! You are showing just how fascinating the history of language is! Love your style of explanation. If you had been my teacher at school I just might have learned to speak a second language.

@asherroodcreel640

Жыл бұрын

Yeah but he takes fucking forever

as a hungarian, i really appreciate that english also doesnt have object genders (tho it has gender pronouns which give you guys quite a trouble nowadays), and although i speak german quite alright, i really dont know the gender articles. I totally gave up on french not in small part because of the gendered objects. Recently im very enthusiastic about japanese, beacuse it not only doesnt have genders for objects, theres also no plural form of nouns, and also you dont need to inflect verbs to match the person, so its great!

@AChapstickOrange

3 ай бұрын

The Japanese were always way ahead of the curve. :)

@Melih_R_Calikoglu

3 ай бұрын

As aTurkish person speaking a god blessing non-gender language, I appreciated the non-genderless of English more, when I began learning French and German later in my life. In Turkish we also do not have "he-she-it" we just have a simple "o" and "onlar" as "they" in plural.

@coujo65

3 ай бұрын

but Japanese like Hebrew and I’m sure many others have different words for “I” as in me, based on two genders.

@Cjnw

3 ай бұрын

*` **#Ő** vibráló""*

@Flint_Ironstag

3 ай бұрын

And only two irregular verbs in the entire language. I seriously preferred learning 2000 kanji over having to deal with irregular verbs, noun cases, gender, articles, verb agreement, and all that crap

Excellent!!!!👍🏼 Mercy beaucoup🌻 that such amazing information is explained so calmly and with such a sweetly quirky twist (a Janus Apple??? Who knew???)🎉

As a native Russian, I can say that genders in German are extremely difficult as they don't have define rules. You have to remember a gender for every word. Also, old English had the same approach. The only way is to remember a gender for every single word. In Russain, it's way more simple. You can always define gender by a word's ending even if you hear the word for the first time.

@arthurhenriqued.a.ribeiro2078

2 жыл бұрын

You can reliably guess the gender by how the word ends in German though, can't you? Like how -e is often feminine and -er is often masculine?

@user-lt4kh9ot1y

2 жыл бұрын

@@arthurhenriqued.a.ribeiro2078 If I'm not mistaken it works approximately for 70% of words. So the main problem of the approach is you can't rely on it. For instance "Name" is not femonine. There are cases when the sense of a word differs depending what gender you use, for example "Mark". It can be feminine or neutrum and it impacts on the word meaning. In Russian it's just impossible.

@RazvanMaioru

Жыл бұрын

@@user-lt4kh9ot1y Another example is "See" which can be either masculine or feminine, depending on meaning (m: lake, f: sea). And the masculine article "der" is used as a feminine article in other cases (dative and genitive). Much less intuitive than word ending agreement

@itsgiag

Жыл бұрын

In Spanish, too - there are only a few exceptions, those of which are easy to learn.

@juanausensi499

Жыл бұрын

@@itsgiag As an Spaniard myself, i think they are 'easy' for native speakers but a nuisance for anybody else. Yes the general rule is that words ending in 'a' are femenine and words ending in 'o' are masculine, but not only this has exceptions, there are lots of words than don't end in 'a' or 'o'. There is also the rule of no putting 'la' before some words that start with 'a'. For example, 'el águila calva', where 'águila' is feminine, 'calva' is the feminime form of the adjective 'calvo', but 'el' is the masculine definite article.

So once upon a time I decided to take classical Greek in college. Completely kicked my ass .... but would absolutely do it again!

@szk4023

Жыл бұрын

In the French school system, Greek used to be taught as a mainstream course. That went away only about 40 to 50 years ago I think. However, today, latin is still taught as an option. My son's studying latin in the French school system. Although I hated languages as a kid, I now think that's so awesome. In the US system, you're generally stuck with only Spanish or German. However, you sometimes get more options in the French school system, such as Italian or Portuguese. I'm guessing it's simply because France is in Europe after all. English doesn't count as a foreign language in the French school system (i.e. it is mandatory). So students may end up studying up to four languages, such as my son: French, English, Spanish and Latin.

@josephcoon5809

Жыл бұрын

@@szk4023 French and Spanish are sibling languages and are descended from Latin. While still no easy feat, it should be noted that learning is best done when ideas already have a natural connection between them. Most formal education treats each subject in isolation when there are many commonalities in the abstract. In my opinion, this treatment of knowledge does a disservice to the general public by creating schisms between ideas that would otherwise be connected. It prevents creativity. Take Hedy Lamar, for example. Very little to no formal training in the sciences, yet she was able to combine player piano technology with wireless communications to give us the frequency hopping encryption that is so ubiquitous today that nobody even stops to give thanks to a disgraced actress from the thirties for giving us secure wireless communications everywhere we are: WiFi, Bluetooth, Cellular. All of this was possible because she wasn’t constrained by formal “education.” She was free to let ideas mingle in her mind unlike somebody who constrains themselves within the confines of their expertise. The mind is amazing. Just think, a baby learns to see color within two months after birth. The brain naturally develops millions of simple languages to help describe the reality outside and to mold it to the simulations ran in our minds. People never stop to think about how “color” is just a symbolic language the visual cortex “speaks” to the prefrontal cortex to describe the electromagnetic ripples that tingle the photoreceptors in the retina. Light is the physical reality, and color is the language created to describe it. Want a good exercise to demonstrate this? Try describing “blue” to somebody that has been blind their whole life. It’s impossible. Their brains never developed the language of color, so they have no way of translating your words into an experience they’ve never had.

@veroniquejeangille8248

Жыл бұрын

@@szk4023 Latin and Greek do not count as "foreign languages". They are dead languages. When I was in high-school (in Belgium, in the early 1980s), I had two foreign languages (Dutch and English), about 3 hours/week. On top of that, I had Latin (6h/week) and ancient Greek (5h/week). I think basic Latin (2h/week) is still the norm in the first year of high school, then it becomes optional. But I'm not quite sure.

When I was in the US Army stationed in Germany, I was told to say "duh" if I didn't know which article to use because the Germans would know what I meant. What you didn't cover in here is that depending on the part of speech or tense, those basic der, die and das, would morph into several other articles, such as dem and den, among others (been years and I can't remember them all).

@FransceneJK98

19 күн бұрын

Sorry but if you’re gonna learn German, you’re gonna have to learn all the articles in different cases. You can’t go around it.

@throatwobblermangrove8510

19 күн бұрын

@@FransceneJK98 But if you're only going to be there a couple years and want to get the main point across, you're not going for fluency.

@michaelwurthner8505

14 күн бұрын

In German, my mother tongue, it must be most confusing for those about to learn German, that feminine article "die" becomes "der" (exactely the masculine form) when used in the Dativ case: "Die Schule" ["the school"] becomes "in der Schule" ["at school"] / "Ich gehe zur (zu der) Schule" ["I'm going to school"] .

@throatwobblermangrove8510

14 күн бұрын

@@michaelwurthner8505 I studied German in high school for two years (before transferring to a school that only offered Spanish as a foreign language option). I found articles the most confusing part of the language. I had less trouble years later studying Russian in university, and Cyrillic is much different from just adding on some umlauts or an Eszett. I enjoyed studying foreign languages, but have never become fluent. it's difficult when there's no one to practice on.

I know we are told they are masculine, feminine, and neuter, but that is misleading. They are, I think, just forms of articles that someone somewhere decided sounded best with the word they are modifying. Like in German, if the noun ends in -e it almost always gets the so-called feminine article. That’s why they tell you that you need to memorize nouns with their article and let the sound of the two words together get into your brain, as opposed to trying to make sense out of it.

"Wifmann" being male makes sense from a German perspective. It seems to be a composite of wif(?) and "mann" in the sense of human. In German the article always follows the gender of the second part of a composite.

@ulujain

Жыл бұрын

Wif = woman (cognate with German weib) - mann = human. Wifmann = female human. A male human adult was "wer" (where we get werewolf)

@gamingnscience

Жыл бұрын

If I had to guess the literal meaning might be “with man” or “wifed to man”? Which eventually got shortened to wife?

@ulujain

Жыл бұрын

@@gamingnscience I gave the definition above. "With" is "mid" in Old English, hence: midwife. Wifmann means female human.

@__lasevix_

Жыл бұрын

@@ulujain damn, old English considered women mid. Very based

@100ironclaw

Жыл бұрын

@@gamingnscience i think and correct me if im wrong, old english words for man and woman were "wer" and "wif" with "mann" being the neuter term for any individual. over time "mann" became the gendered term for masculine individuals with "wif" combining with "mann" to become "wifmann" or feminine individual. "wifmann" is in effect the origin of the word woman. we still see the use of the term "wer" for a masculine individual in cases like werewolf which is a man-wolf or a wolfish man. also "wif" can be found in terms like wife, a female spouse.

For me, the worst part of German isn't even the genders per se, or even their declensions, but rather how every single word in-between changes in very specific ways, you have to put an "n" there, an "e" there, an "r" there, it's a nightmare. I don't think I'll ever be able to speak German without sounding like an obvious foreigner with a botched grammar but so be it, I have accepted it and still want to learn it.

@pawelzielinski1398

10 ай бұрын

I will never be able to speak English without sounding like an obvious foreigner, but I am OK with that.

@mainlander3920

10 ай бұрын

@@pawelzielinski1398 I guess that part is probably inevitable, but your English grammar seems pretty solid.

@shamicentertainment1262

3 ай бұрын

I think you just need enough exposure and correct practice so if you say ich liebe meine Hund und meine Vater, it sounds weird and you naturally correct it. I think partly a noun you learn needs to feel like the gender it belongs to, so that I’m a sentence you get a feeling of what changes need to occur if it’s masc, fem or neuter

@FransceneJK98

19 күн бұрын

It’s the same with Arabic and Russian. Good luck in your studies!! Don’t give up

@ScottKnitter

17 күн бұрын

I'm trying to sharpen up my German, and having forgotten noun genders is the worst challenge. There are some patterns I remember, but there was a reason why teachers had us always give the article when saying a noun: das Haus, die Brille, der Bleistift (I think). There's a book called Der, Die, Das written by a guy who did some computer analysis to try to find more patterns, but basically the only solid way to remember them all is to learn them with the nouns. And Germans grow up doing that, so they're just natural to them.

You know this is doggone fascinating stuff, thanks for doing this. It is interesting and entertaining.

In Portuguese it is very easy, usually the genders of words ending in -a are feminine and nouns ending in -o are masculine. For example "mesa" (table) is feminine and "morro" (hill) is masculine. Easy peasy!

@gaborhertelendy9428

Ай бұрын

Yes, but what makes a table woman and a hill man? If i put a table on a hill, can they have a kid?

@aldalab

24 күн бұрын

​@@gaborhertelendy9428A mesA O morrO It's about matching sounds not about men and women

@shadowmoon1657

14 күн бұрын

Except for the huge amount of words that doesn’t end in “a” or “o” (o cabide, a verdade, o lençol, a mão, o amor) and the ones that end in “o” or “a” but have opposite genders (a modelo, o clima, o dilema, a tribo, a radio)

@gaborhertelendy9428

14 күн бұрын

@@shadowmoon1657 Makes no sense

@williankc

8 күн бұрын

@@gaborhertelendy9428 absolutely no one in portuguese cares if it is masculine or feminine. Its not about giving the object a sexual gender, its about matching sounds.

So glad YT recommended this channel! I have so often wondered about weird plurals in the English language and about when it stopped using genders. Rob explains things so clearly and precisely - with a brilliant touch of humour thrown in! I live in Italy so am very familiar with masculine/feminine and asking permission to give someone the "tu" (or the "thou" 😆). Thank you for the great education and entertainment 👏👏

Wow, I had no idea the English language used to have genders. Thank you for the very informative and also entertaining video! As a side note, Romanian also has 3 genders. The neutral noun is masculine when it is singular, but feminine as a plural.

I've actually shited myself into learning new European languases of late. I cannot tell you how immensely your video's have helped me to make sense of some of the more difficult concets and differences between these newer languages (to me) and plain ol' English. I didn't even know Blonde and blonde was a gender assignment. I thought it was just two different ways of spelling the same thing O.o Magnifiqué!

As an English language learner myself, I really find it much more helpful than other European languages that English doesn't have genders of objects. and I’ve always wondered why English is like that. So this video was really interesting for me and I really enjoyed it. Thanks a lot for sharing this useful and intriguing information.

Fascinating stuff. Love the series. I only speak two languages English and Profane. Profane does away with many parts of speech like adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions and interjections and really only retains nouns and verbs. Sometimes it is best to be simple to get your message across.

@andrew_koala2974

Жыл бұрын

These profane words have often been referred to as Language enhancers As for me - having learned five languages by age five and adding other later - I can comfortably curse in ten languages if need be - however I refrain from cursing where possible. The advantage to speaking two or more languages = even when one in not fluent - is listening to the conversations of others - particularly when these people don't know or suspect that someone around then understands the language - A is said in Spanish Pared tiene oidos

@Blurb777

Жыл бұрын

@@andrew_koala2974 What languages did you learn and who taught you FIVE languages by age five? Well done!

@davidashton2361

Жыл бұрын

When I worked in Saudi Arabia with my small team of TCNs, I felt it was my duty to instruct them in art of speaking english colourfully. To wit 'fxxxxxxg this!' and 'fxxxxxxg that!' and 'txsspxt!' and 'wxxxxr!' etc. I like to think I had enhanced their chances when applying for their next employment during interviews. A likely scenario springs to mind .... Interviewer - "Do you speak english?" Applicant - "Fxxxxxg right, I do, cxxt!"

@_NekOz

Жыл бұрын

@@Blurb777 It's not completely unheard of. Kids are ridiculously good at picking up languages through exposure, certainly good enough to pick up at least the basics of multiple language if there is a wide and consistent variety of languages.

What a wonderful video, and it's extremely rare that people take the time to pronounce German words properly. It seriously means a lot to us! Thank you! Subbed!

Having only just discovered your delightful linguistic channel, I can only now comment. I was born and raised in the Netherlands, but taught myself to read English when I was 3, and my mother taught me to read Dutch when I was 5... Anyway. I once had a Dutch teacher in school and he invited questions we had about the language that he hadn't covered. So I asked why ships and cars - for instance - were called 'she' and 'her' His unbelievably rude answer - that stopped me in my question-tracks completely - was that 'anything you can put something 'into', with a rude gesture, was called 'she' or 'her'. Dutch is a very quirky language though, and I believe people who say that it's one of the hardest languages to learn, because where it does have rules, there usually are more exceptions to those rules than 'followers'!

@BUTTERVISION

7 ай бұрын

No way bro said 👉👌 💀💀💀💀💀

@stevetheduck1425

2 ай бұрын

Heard that German builders have the place a window is put ( a space ) in one gender, and the window itself another.,

There is a tendency that grammar is simplified when different cultures with different languages are merged into one culture. It makes sense, since there are so many people that have to learn this new language. The case of English grammar seems to be no exception. Thank you for a very interesting video!

When I was learning Portuguese, I really got to experience the confusion of gendered words. It's actually kind of fun to think about the relationship of similar words that have opposite genders (for example: shoe is "calçado" and sidewalk is "calçada" -- it's almost like they're mating, physically and linguistically).

@heimdall1973

Жыл бұрын

In Slovene, an example of standard ending is: najstnik (m) = male (or unspecified) teenager najstnica (f) = female teenager Sonce (n) = Sun Sončnik (m) and sončnica (f) by word formation both mean "the Sun thing". But: sončnik (m) = a parasol sončnica (f) = a sunflower

@jacobopstad5483

Жыл бұрын

@@heimdall1973 Hm. Fascinating. Both are related to the sun so it makes sense to link them linguistically. I just wonder how the original namer decided that a parasol should be masculine and a sunflower should be feminine. Anyway, thanks for the info!

@heimdall1973

Жыл бұрын

@@jacobopstad5483 The same word construction turns krog (m) = solid circle into krožnik (m) = plate (to eat from) and krožnica (f) = circle edge. dim (m) = smoke dimnik (m) = chimney (or flue) dimnica (f) = smokehouse What makes any of these objects male/ female, I haven't a clue.

@jacobopstad5483

Жыл бұрын

​@@heimdall1973 Oh, cool. I get the connections but I wonder what they would call a square plate now

@davidp.7620

Жыл бұрын

In Galician we have some words like that. For instance, "dedo" means finger but "deda" means toe.

Fascinating as ever! Other Germanic languages are also in the process of losing their grammatical gender- in Dutch, Danish and Swedish they still use neuter but masculine and feminine have merged into 'common' gender. Perhaps a similar thing happened in England in the Middle Ages. When I was studying Spanish and German at the same time, I had a similar feeling when it comes to the genders of objects not matching up. In German you say 'der Tisch' (masculine) for a table and 'la mesa' (feminine) in Spanish, I can see a situation where the English simply gave up with gender once Norman French had been introduced.

@RealConstructor

Жыл бұрын

I like it that in Dutch we call common gender, commuun genus (dutchified Latin) or zijdig (sided) and neuter is called onzijdig (non-sided). But what I think is strange, it was also in the video, that diminutives are always neuter. In Dutch we ‘de man’ (the man, common gender) en ‘het mannetje’ (the little man, neuter) and ‘de vrouw’ (the woman, common gender) and ‘het vrouwtje’ (the little woman, neuter). The strange thing is that if we did the same as in English (they don’t use or don’t have a diminutive) and use the little man, literally ‘de kleine man’ in Dutch, it doesn’t change to neuter, it stays common gender. This in contrary to ‘het mannetje’ which is neuter. So in English it is in both cases the little man while in Dutch we can use ‘het mannetje’ en ‘de kleine man’ which have different genders.

@romanr.301

Жыл бұрын

Another example: “sun” is masculine in Spanish (el sol) and feminine in German (die Sonne), while “moon” is feminine in Spanish (la luna) and masculine in German (der Mond). Apparently, in Arabic, like German, “sun”(‎الشمس - ash-shams) is feminine, while “moon” (القمر - al-qamar) is masculine.

@gwirgalon3758

Жыл бұрын

@@romanr.301 I agree with the Arabic and Deutsch, as women are constant in their presence and shining warmth, as it were, men (look down, lads) are constantly changing, including from full to...insomma, è evidente vero? ; )

@revanchistyes8033

Жыл бұрын

In Danish the “gender” is between et and en. It’s not technically called Gender and it isn’t assigned to be masculine or feminine, but it works the same way.

@luksavat7750

11 ай бұрын

English lost all its genders in a similar process that leads vulgar latin to lose its neuter gender (that's why all romance languages, except for Romanian, have only 2 genders). The reason is very simple: Phonological change. Genders are usually marked in the end of the words. As soon as the native speakers of some language start to reduce the words and eat the end of them (something very common in English), genders are lost. So, for exemple, in Spanish is, in general, the vowel "a" that indicates the feminine gender, while the vowel "o" usually indicates the masculine gender. Chica alta (tall girl) Chico alto (tall boy) If, for some phonological evolution, Spanish native speakers start to reduce vowels in Spanish and end up eliminating the final vowels in the words, then there won't be any distinction between both genders, so no genders anymore. Chic alt That's also the reason English and the Romance languages lost their cases.

I just discovered this channel. It's fascinating. And a fun fact, in Spanish we also have a neuter article: "lo".

You are so entertaining! Also so intelligent! Thank you. Fascinating subject.

Great video! My language is Slavic, and we also have three genders, but no articles at all. Both nouns and adjectives have to be in the same gender though, as well as numbers, which my British friends say is maddening. :-)

@RobWords

3 жыл бұрын

Whaa? Are all numbers the same gender?

@m00n3east5

3 жыл бұрын

​@@RobWords It all changes 😄 For instance, you would say "Vidim dva siva psa" (I see two grey dogs, where dog is masculine), but also "Vidim dvije sive mačke" (I see two grey cats, where cat is feminine). All nouns, adjectives, pronouns and numbers are always declined, which means that they all change slightly depending on the case that they're in. And we have seven cases 😂😂

@RobWords

3 жыл бұрын

@@m00n3east5 Oh good grief 🤯! That doesn’t sound like a language you could just "pick up as you go along".

@m00n3east5

3 жыл бұрын

Yeah, I guess not 😄

@volkhen0

3 жыл бұрын

@@RobWords it’s easy when you speak other Slavic language. English doesn’t have genders but I always think of genders in my native tongue. For example, hammer must be masculine ;) and camera is feminine because of a ending. That rule is true for Slavic and Italian language. Just like with names - Anna, Alexa, Joanna you know that these must be names for girls.

Thank you so much for your contribution. I was really laughing after about thirty seconds into the video since we have this problem in Belgium in French and Dutch and it can be very frustrating. All the best from Brussels. 😀

I appreciate your share of knowledge on these subjects

As always, your video is really interesting and entertaining for a somewhat nerdy non-native English speaker like myself, who had the wonderful opportunity of growing up withing the rather gender-less Hungarian language :)

Well, you are pretty much brilliant. Not only do I find your content fascinating, but your style of presentation, the cadence of your voice, and your unmistakable English accent make it all unexpectidly entertaining.

@amiraelt

Жыл бұрын

Agree👍

In Portuguese, due to the difficulty of communication between Europe and South America in the XX century, many recently imported words were adopted in different ways, for example in Portugal 'a console' became 'uma consola', in the feminine, but in Brazil it became 'um console', in the masculine.

Love your channel. This is just so great😊

New subscriber here. I love watching your videos as they capture my imagination, thank you!

I've been slowly working through all the videos on this channel, I do love all the quirks of our language. At a glance, our language seems so different from every other European language, but when you turn back the clock, those differences aren't so pronounced. I do like how "that" survived its initial meaning and became a pronoun for distant objects.

My understanding is that Middle English was basically a creole, starting as a trade language between English speaking natives and Old French speaking Normans. Grammatical genders and cases were lost because creoles tend to jettison as much as they can to make them simpler and easier to learn and use. Modern English emerged when the ruling class gave up French as the language of law and government and began speaking English; this may have been a major cause of the Great Vowel Shift.

@VK-sp4gv

Жыл бұрын

Very interesting, you made me look it up. It's called the Middle English creole hypothesis.

@seraphina985

Жыл бұрын

I think given the timing it is also possible that differences between how the Anglo-Norse and Anglo-Saxon cultures ended up settling on a standard gender for everything might have already been making things awkward. Seems plausible you could already have inconsistencies between the dialects there which had yet to be ironed out in the time since the Anglo-Saxons had taken over again. Then these French speakers show up in the 11th century with no doubt yet another bunch of inconsistencies between genders. Would seem to make sense also given it was the Northern dialects that seemed to get the idea of hey lets just get rid of that headache entirely first. Granted the other languages would all have been more similar almost mutually intelligible in fact but not identical, but if anything that would make the pattern easier for some monks or something to probably notice and maybe start to think of that idea. I say monks as they were frequently likely to actually be literate and spent considerable time reading, writing, and copying manuscripts so I'd imagine they would be better placed to notice something like this. There are certainly partial translations of scripture in English that go back far enough (7th century for some portions of the bible for example) to see this evolution over those centuries.

@Fledhyris

Жыл бұрын

@@seraphina985 I'm with you except for the monks! While monks would be best placed to record and analyse the evolution of language, I highly doubt they would set the trend. Language evolves as it is spoken - by the common majority - hence our widely differing regional accents and dialects. Also, given the general attitude of the typical British working man or woman, the idea of them trying to speak 'like those daft posh monks' makes me giggle.

@seraphina985

Жыл бұрын

@@Fledhyris I meant that more in the sense of them noticing and raising awareness then the people deciding that all this palaver every time a different rich b****d takes over the local castle is a fools game.

@captvimes

Жыл бұрын

Also the Normans were basically christian vikings who spoke norman french and would have understood other viking dialects so yea proably made it easier all round to jetison the unecessary.

You used German, French, and Spanish ad examples for comparison when talking about English and as someone who speaks all these languages, it was a treat to see the comparisons made. I rarely see videos about languages where they compare equivalents of X language to Y language to Z language. I love it. Can you please do more on this topic? Old English? Also, spellings have changed a lot from 12th century to 16th century. I read the Geneva Bible of 1560 and they write the “u” as “v” and omit some vowels etc. thank you for this video!!! I’d love to see other languages compared. Dutch-Afrikaans; Farsi-dari-Arabic; Aramaic-Hebrew-Arabic; Russian-Slovak-Serbian-Croatian-Bulgarian. Etc ❤

Fascinating! Thank you for your explanation.

Fun fact: the correlation between object genders in German and Portuguese is almost perfectly negative. Hence, we in Brazil use that when we want to make a caricature of a German trying to speak Portuguese. Just turn the V's into F's, "ão" into "on" and switch all genders. Kind of like the backwards Я for Яussian.

@RobWords

Жыл бұрын

Brilliant!

@johaquila

Жыл бұрын

I guess you are overstating the negative correlation a bit. Between German and French (which should mostly have the same genders as Portuguese) the same applies. Some of the most prominent offenders are Sun and Moon (the Sun is masculine in Romance languages and the Moon feminine, and in Germany both genders are reversed) and the large number of French loan words ending in -age in German, which for some reason all became feminine in German even though they are originally masculine. Except of course for 'la plage' (beach, feminine in French), which doesn't exist as a loanword in German, and is translated by the masculine noun 'der Strand'.

@TheSandkastenverbot

11 ай бұрын

​@@johaquila Alle haben kapiert, dass das ein Witz ist. Nur der Deutsche wieder nicht 🙄

@johaquila

11 ай бұрын

@@TheSandkastenverbot Als Witz bezogen auf ein fast zufälliges Verhältnis wäre es langweilig. Was den Witz gut macht ist doch gerade die Tatsache, dass das Verhältnis eben wirklich nicht zufällig ist sondern bei Substantiven ohne natürliches Geschlecht (sowas wie Frau oder Ochse) die beiden Sprachen wirklich öfter das entgegengesetzte Geschlecht haben als dasselbe. Wer das nicht weiß, unterschätzt aber den ursprünglichen Witz, und deshalb hab ich mir erlaubt die Pointe zu erklären und ein bisschen weiter auszuführen.

@Kryojenix

11 ай бұрын

What do you mean about the backwards Я??? That letter is pronounced "yaah".

Loved the look, feel, and editing/graphics of this vid. Great info:)

@RobWords

3 жыл бұрын

Cheers Nick!

Usually, I'm very precise with spelling, but blond/blonde is the only one I interchange... I assumed it was like theater/theatre or color/colour (which I'm certain you taught me about recently but I don't remember anything about all of a sudden!

Greek people: Your shirt is a pen!?

Commonly misspelled in English is the loanword "fiancé." It's often misspelled because English speakers don't understand that "fiancé" refers to a man, and "fiancée" refers to a woman. This distinction is quite useful and efficient, avoiding the need to actually use more words to explain the gender of a person getting married.

@sebastianjoseph2828

Жыл бұрын

Just like the blond(e) example RobWords used, this is because it comes directly from French. And because it started as an adjective and had that masc/feminine adjective modifier on it. A fiancé is someone you're engaged/betrothed to.

@Prodigious1One

Жыл бұрын

Oh, yeah, and the name, René (masculine] and Renée (feminine].

@julietardos5044

Жыл бұрын

That was the other one I thought of too. A lot of people get the spellings wrong.

@Cafeallday222

Жыл бұрын

I told my husband this as soon as we got engaged because I knew he wouldn’t know lol

@octoberboiy

Жыл бұрын

Ok I did t know this at all. I guess the spelling could be different though but not the way you say it.

My wife’s cousin married a French girl and, when I was learning French, he explained to me that you need to learn the gender right from the start. Just like in the USA you need to say not just the name of the town but also the state that it comes from, like Paris, Texas, or Nashville, Tennessee (as opposed to Nashville, Indiana). So you always learn “une baguette” or “la table” instead of baguette or table. It’s been a useful trick for me.

@Dracopol

Жыл бұрын

Yes, since you almost always have to stick a definite or indefinite article in front of a noun, might as well learn it as a pair of words and that will clue you into gender.

@Fledhyris

Жыл бұрын

This naming states thing makes total sense within a broad context, so that people know where you're referring to; and if I went to the States, I would tell people I was from Manchester, England, for the same reason. But do people use them locally, too? If you live in Tennessee, and took a trip to Nashville in the same state, would you still tell everyone 'I'm heading up to Nashville, Tennessee' or would you shorten it because it's then assumed you mean the closest city of that name?

@dinkster1729

Жыл бұрын

@@Dracopol Except if there's an vowel in front of the noun, then, you only have l' so you have no clue as to gender. A better idea is to make your la or le sound alike so you are not heard making a mistake. LOLOL!

@dinkster1729

Жыл бұрын

@@Fledhyris Right! I once told my 80 something mother that my son was headed by ship--he was in the Canadian Navy Reserves and stationed in Halifax, Nova Scotia--to Sydney. "Australia?" my mother asked, sounding worried. The Olympic Games had just been held there so I guess my mother had Sydney, Australia on her mind. "No," I laughed, "Sydney, Nova Scotia!" The ship didn't even get that far. Too much ice.

@mandolinic

Жыл бұрын

A useful trick, which sadly doesn't work in Latin which has neither definitive nor indefinite articles...

Super!! As Spanish, we also (of course) have moved on a lot...particularly since we became 'democratic'. Politics are also the road to allow things to be 'accepted' mire easily as society develops and accepts or chooses to 'let go', be free...Look at all the English words in modern Spanish! Technology, Art, Sports, Politics etc...I.LOV E YOUR VIDEOS!! 7:16

I imagine that some language change came about with the growing use of movable type and its consequent facility for broadening access to knowledge. That, alone, could call for a more distinct standardization of the language so as to reach the masses on a single level.

A car being a girl in French took me so long to get used to.

@markio1105

3 жыл бұрын

I'm pretty sure the term "car" used to be masculine in Italian until D'Annunzio said it should be feminine in 1920

@FuelFire

3 жыл бұрын

It's the same in russian. 'Машина' [Mashina] is a feminine noun because it ends on A. All nouns that end on A are feminine.

@markio1105

3 жыл бұрын

@@FuelFire In Italian, the term "car" and "machine" are the same, so that's probably why "car" was masculine at first. D'Annunzio made it feminine talking about how similar the car was to feminine characteristics and stuff, which probably tied into the "Futurism" cultural movement he was very involved in.

@Mike8827

3 жыл бұрын

Italian : Che bella macchina! 💖🏎

@AngeloTelesforo

2 жыл бұрын

In fact it can be both in Portuguese. In Portuguese we also have three words o carro (masculine), a viatura (feminine) and o automóvel (also masculine). Carro e automóvel being the most used.

This is so very interesting. I'm a native English speaker, who's studying Japanese, which is another genderless language (outside of the myriad of ways to say "I", but that's a whole other ball of wax 😅), I have really zero frame of reference for how gendered language works. It's so cool to learn this history to my native language. People already say modern English is difficult, I guess they should be glad we have what we do now instead of this old English. 😂

@dodgeplow

Жыл бұрын

You must've heard Spanish even if you're not fluent - lots of gendered examples there.

@georgeandrews1394

Жыл бұрын

@@dodgeplow This is assuming they have frequently encountered and have enough of an interest in Spanish to have some sense of the langauge beyond 'this sounds like Spanish'. For example, I sometimes watch Japanese TV, but I didn't know that Japanese doesn't utilize gendered language much until just now. However, I do know about Spanish's gendered articles because I learned a few words and phrases online as a kid (and I took a couple years of French).

@dodgeplow

Жыл бұрын

@@georgeandrews1394 An assumption, but I'd think he'd have heard plenty of it. It's the language spoken by the second most number of people on this planet after Mandarin Chinese. If he's in the Americas or the UK it'll be fairly present in typical culture. Now if he's in Oceana, less likely, but plenty of international movies and other culture media make it a frequent encounter to English speakers.

@sirati9770

Жыл бұрын

Japanese has word classes aka genders. They define what counting word you must use for correct Japanese. Also in Japanese it's best to avoid saying pronouns whenever possible. Either by just dropping them or replacing them with a name or proper noun

@GraveUypo

Жыл бұрын

old english would probably be easier because it seemed way more well-structured. you'd learn rules instead of doing everything case-by-case, word-by-word like modern english.

I have studied some german as dutchie and it was and is still very hard to use the right gender of the words. In the Netherlands we use „de“ or „het“ but it has nothing to do with the gender of the word, since we don‘t use that either and actually no one in the Netherlands has to know the gender of a word, for me it feels randomized if you use „de“ or „het“

Thank you for bringing Old Norse into the history of Old English! Sometimes teachers/writers skip straight from Old English into OE + Norman French and ignore the couple of centuries when English inhabitants and Danish or Norwegian newcomers interacted. A couple of points: first, for Americans, blond/blonde spelling is a little different. Adjective (for men or women) is blond; noun for women only is a blonde, whereas a man would be a blond (not often used). Second, in Old English, the personal pronouns for the third person (he, it, they) began with "h," but the endings made it clear which word was which. But when the various endings began to blur into one, probably because of the influence of Old Norse (as this video says) and then of Norman French, confusion arose, and English borrowed "th" for the plural (they, them, their) from Old Norse and "sh" for the subjective form of the feminine singular (she)--but "her" was retained, possibly because it wasn't too like "him: or "his." Quite commonsensical! Where the "sh" came from is not clear; probably not directly from "seo." Finally, "Man" in Old English basically meant "human being"; a male man was a carlman, and a female man was a wifman--carl meaning a man, and wif a woman or wife. "Carl" was used in the Middle Ages as a term for a man (male), but in time "man" came to be the preferred word. And "man" was dropped from "wif." Lastly, in American English there's a further step where "she" is now almost never used for countries and seldom for ships (or cars) except by people who are in the business and/or cling to the time-honored usage!

@MrTrilbe

Жыл бұрын

Were or Wer was also the old english for human as in werewolf and wergild, man(person)-wolf and man(person)-price

@alanthomas2064

Жыл бұрын

Possible Carl descended from germania kerl.

@MrTrilbe

Жыл бұрын

Well I got my own bit wrong wer or were means an adult male not a human, Carl or kerl is the origin of the term churl, meaning rude and/or peasant, early middle ages would have been ceorl a social rank just below Thane and above slave or indentured servitude??? So I wonder if OP confused what in essence is a Freeman (ceorlman or carlman) for male human instead of free person

@elainechubb971

Жыл бұрын

@@alanthomas2064 I am pretty certain the various words were from the same original Old (or Photo) Germanic root. OE also had the word cheorl (I may be misspelling this!) which gave us the modern English churl--but it wasn't derogatory, it meant a man of the ordinary people, not a nobleman (eorl, or modern earl) and not a slave, just your common-or-garden commoner.

@missharry5727

Жыл бұрын

@@elainechubb971 I think your computer corrupted proto into photo? Autocorrect is a flaming nuisance, as an Aussie would say.

My two first languages are Spanish and Portuguese, so I kinda take all of this gender mess for granted. It helps that genders on ES and PT tend to agree, but it's still that kind of complexity you learned as a kid and dont think too much about. I don't think i would be able to learn another language with genders.

@FluxTrax

Жыл бұрын

.."o planeta"...

@Blankult

Жыл бұрын

My native language is also portuguese and i never really thought about that, certainly would make learning another language with genders way harder.

@fraufuchs9555

Жыл бұрын

@@Blankult em português e espanhol não faz tanta diferença o gênero. Você vai entender mesmo que a pessoa diga "o caneta" ou "os caneta". Mas em línguas como alemão faz muita diferença, porque os adjetivos não só concordam em gênero, número e grau como em português, mas também concordam com a função (declinação) se é do caso dativo, genitivo, nominativo ou acusativo. Em português a gente só preservou a declinação para pronomes, tipo eu, me e mim (eu sou. Ele me viu. Isso é para mim). Mas em alemão e outras línguas adjetivos e artigos também sofrem declinação. Só que para saber como declinar você tem que saber também o gênero. E aí pode acontecer de você falar algo incompreensível. Como se em português alguém falasse "livro, dar ele ela". Quem deu o livro pra quem? Está no passado, presente ou imperativo? Teoricamente alemão só tem três gêneros: der = masculino, die = femino, das = neutro. Mas na prática, você tem que escolher entre der, die, das, den, dem, des, a depender do gênero e caso, e repetir a mesma lógica para os adjetivos. Tudo concorda em gênero, número, grau e caso.

@LuisAldamiz

Жыл бұрын

Romance genders generally agree, not just among two so closely related languages as Castilian and Portuguese but also with Italian, French, etc. That's because Latin also had genders (although it had three, incl. neuter, now generally lost, typically into masculine form).

@mep6302

Жыл бұрын

My native language is Spanish. I've learned other romance languages: Portuguese, French and Italian. Most of the time genders are the same but when they don't, at first I tend to make mistakes. I still can't believe, for instance, milk in these three languages is masculine but in my mother tongue it is feminine. My mind is like 🤯 The milk (English) O leite (Portuguese) Le lait (French) Il latte (Italian) La leche (Spanish) This is just one example. I'm already used to these differences but it takes some time to get used to

2:42 i thought it says "he woes god crying"...

@plasmuds_

3 ай бұрын

i thought it said he was god crying

As an English language trainer in Germany I really appreciate how you clarified the comparison between the two languages. After all these years I still have the thankless task of reminding my clients that cats are not referred to as a "she" in English unless it is of course a female cat. I enlighten them to consider by contrast that in Spanish cats are referred to in the male gender.

I think the “she” for ships probably comes from a lot of interaction with the Spanish on the Atlantic in the 16th and 17th century. “La Fragata” and “La Caravela” would have been types of Spanish ships that would have been common and were feminine in gender.

@Teun_Jac

Жыл бұрын

Or it's just an universal thruth among sailors that something so loved but high maintanance like a ship, must be feminine

@johndododoe1411

Жыл бұрын

@@Teun_Jac Even without that stereotype about women, there is a near universal traditional of giving ships female or non-human names, like Elizabeth or Titanic.

@MrSkaDan

Жыл бұрын

Just to add to this, women bear children much in the same way ships bear passengers.

@tiagooliveira6935

Жыл бұрын

Caravela é portuguesa caralho!!!

@gettinhungrig2

Жыл бұрын

Also they have broad bottoms

The German word "das Mädchen" comes from the word "die Magd" (maiden, female servant), which turned into "das Mägdchen" and then got simplified to "das Mädchen", probably because in Northern German dialects, "g" [g] turns into [j], [χ] or [h], so people just omitted it completely. (Same with the English word "maiden")

@andreasrehn7454

Жыл бұрын

There is also Maid in both languages as in... Schöne Maid, hast du heut für mich Zeit...

@tsuikr

Жыл бұрын

If you grew up with such a language, there is a good chance your thinking would be all screw up!

@peterjansen7929

Жыл бұрын

@@tsuikr The grammatical features of languages must have consequences. Russian has far fewer irregularities than German, but it compensates for that with an overabundance of useless rules, so many in fact, that by the time people speak their first grammatical sentence they have already submitted to so much that an Ivan the Terrible here and a Stalin there won't be much of an additional encumbrance..

@Martina-Kosicanka

Жыл бұрын

In Slovak we also have a neuter for a girl. (To) dievča (it is read dyevcha)

@killtie15

Жыл бұрын

@@peterjansen7929 Nonsense)) All those rules allow to condense a ton of meaning, overtones and info into very short phrases. Of course, it does have its linguistic "encumbrances" and oddities, but that's common to most languages that evolved over a long time. In fact, I find it's much deeper and varied in the "flavour" of meaning it can express, much more so than our English. Which don't make things any easier for Europeans in general. But for example Hindi speakers do have a certain affinity with it, it kind of, in a very remote way, reminds them of Sanskrit, or so I've been told.

I love the fact that Vikings, the invaders, brought changes to language. So maybe also to the way of thinking. loved your video!

@user-ge5ce2rr6p

19 күн бұрын

Yeah, many words came from the vikings such as “they” and “skirt”

Your videos are really, really interesting!

That was most enjoyable! I minored in French in college, and took two semesters of German “for fun”, and a Latin class “for fun”. I had a fascination with languages at the time. Linguistics is a really convoluted pursuit, but your focus on discreet aspects encountered among English speakers is a good approach to understanding how English was influenced, and why it’s the universal language.

Thank you SO much... I have wondered about this for years... I had personally come to the conclusion that you suggest here - that as languages blended - and genders conflicted - they just naturally fell away. Cannot tell you how happy I am to come across your videos.

First impression of this channel: x 1.5 speed is a good info density.

Talking of boats, I think it would be great to see an episode on the etymology of sailing terms. This is because the meanings of words are all muddled up and different because of their function (ropes are never called ropes for instance) Its about how quickly a captain can convey meaning. One of the reasons I think that we have clung to boats being feminine is because on occasion you just need a distinct term to identify that you are referring to the boat as a whole . So you might say something like "bring her along side" rather than "move the boat next to the pontoon" because its almost twice as quick to say and you cant say "It" because it would be far to vague.

Besides gender-specific pronouns, the only other thing English has as far as gender is gender-specific nouns, like "actor/actress," "waiter/waitress," "host/hostess," etc. However, other languages I've learned such as French have a gender distinction for other types of people, such as "lawyer," "nurse," "spouse," "fiancé," etc.

@MrTrilbe

Жыл бұрын

Blond/Blonde says hi, ok technically it's a loan word, but it's an adjective and I think that last non-noun to be commonly gendered, I think the 90's saw it's end and the end of school teachers throwing a hissy fit over it at least out loud, but it's still technically a gendered word in english that isn't just a noun.

@rogercarroll2551

Жыл бұрын

The "ess" to distingush a female ":actor" for examble is on the way out. Using it in some circles is considered "bad form"' and anachronistic. There is also the more and more universal "-person" suffix. A female waiter is a waitperson, and even that moderation on usage will disappear. The being who brings your soup is the waiter, period..

@Cafeallday222

Жыл бұрын

A lot of these words will probably disappear, too. I know “actress” is being encouraged to be replaced by “actor” for all. We often just say “host” for everyone, too. I think it’s a matter of time.

@jeopardy60611

Жыл бұрын

@@Cafeallday222 here is the host of Jeopardy, Mayim Bialik. Back in the 70s, before Vanna, Wherl of Fortune had a hostess Susan Stafford.

@Cafeallday222

Жыл бұрын

@@jeopardy60611 yes, that’s what I mean. It’s a slow disappearance.

OH WOW THANK YOUUUUUU SO MUUUCH. I've been having difficulties understanding this one...thank you

Very nice. I'm subscribing✨

Great lesson. I've always been insecure about my knowledge of Polish genders when speaking. The only way to learn these in practice is to hear others using the language and engaging in conversation. Most Polish speakers from Poland get used to correcting my own Polish when they hear me speak 😕 (I was born in England to a Polish family).

Actually in Dutch, Het = Neuter De = Combination of masculine and feminine,, so we call it "common gender" But, thanks for this informative video 😁.

@RobWords

3 жыл бұрын

Oh wow, that's fascinating! If only we could all just have a common gender... Thanks for watching.

@arthurhenriqued.a.ribeiro2078

3 жыл бұрын

De because Der and Die basically matched up when they were "reduced" in Dutch? Like how Es became Het, Wort became Woord, Aus became Uit, etc.

@Carewolf

Жыл бұрын

It is easier in Danish and Swedish. Den (it) = common gender item, det (it) = neuter gender item, han (he) = masculine person, hun (she) = feminine person. Only items can be common gender though

@cycrothelargeplanet

Жыл бұрын

So meisje (girl) isn't feminine ...

@bigscarysteve

Жыл бұрын

@@RobWords Actually, English does have common gender--in the plural. That's why the personal pronoun for all plural nouns is "they." In the singular, we may not have grammatical gender, but we do have natural gender, so we have the pronouns "he," "she," and "it." In vernacular English, "they" has been used for centuries as a common gender pronoun in the singular when the sex of the referent in unclear. For example, "If someone took something, they must pay for it" in the vernacular, as opposed to standard English "If someone took something, he must pay for it."

Enjoyed watching and learning new things. 😊 I'm Filipino, and although many of our words are bequeathed to us by Spain, the native language does not have gender, especially the pronouns. This is why so many Filipinos, more often than not, interchange he and she when speaking in English. It is common to hear something like, "My son told her teacher that she forgot her assignment."

@RobWords

Жыл бұрын

Thanks for this! I'll listen extra closely to my Filipino friends to see if I can spot this.

@marcalexanderraison2724

Жыл бұрын

@@RobWords If your Filipino friends have been living in UK, or abroad for quite a while, or are quite educated, they may not have that issue. It applies more to people here in my country, especially those who are not proficient in the language which, regretfully, are quite a lot.

@marcalexanderraison2724

Жыл бұрын

@Victor K Yeah. I remember that from my Spanish back in university. 😊 Conjugation. O, as, a, amos, ais, an. And the ones for verbs ending in ER and IR. 😊 It was only years after I left uni when I met someone who told me that I need not use he or she in a sentence because the conjugation for third person makes it rather redundant. 😊

I recall my freshman year German class, our teacher, a native English speaker but someone fluent in German, pointed out the way that we use gender for ships in English. She also pointed out child/children and goose/geese to point out how irregular plurals work for the majority of German nouns.

@thetightwadhomesteader3089

3 ай бұрын

¡Interesante! Nunca lo supe.

@shamicentertainment1262

3 ай бұрын

It’s funny coz I’m a native English speaker but always find it strange when people gender a ship, or inanimate object. Learning German though you quickly get used to it

your closing words are thought-provoking and wonder about a linguistic perspective on the sociology of gender constructs.

When You said NEUTER, I was afraid it meant what we do to cats and dogs! lol! When I studied English Grammar, I never knew it had had genders. They just didn't teach us that. Your video is very educational, and interesting! Thanks for all the information about ancient English! ~Janet in Canada