Is grammatical gender the most pointless linguistic feature?

>>1688534
Yes.

>>1688534
>tried to learn a language can't understand grammatical gender , muh it's thier fault go learn fucking crybaby

What the hell is "non-sex-based" as opposed to "no gender"

>>1688622
There are languages with no genders, at all, even for living things (i.e. Hungarian, Filipino).
Then there are languages who use genders but only for persons & animals. (i.e. English, Chinese)
Then there are the autistic cunts that put genders on every fucking noun conceivable (i.e. much of fucking Europe).

>>1688622
Languages that have noun classes which aren't associated with masculine and feminine. i.e. Mapuche, which has classes for animate and non-animate but not for masculine/feminine.

>>1688631
>>1688632
thanks lads

>>1688631
It looks like the map is wrong. The Philippines and Japan should be switched.

>>1688534
no, because human interaction is inherently about gender relationships, and like any aspect of grammar, it reduces noise in the signal, you fucking retard

lemme guess you fucking got frustrated with first year french or german. fag.

>>1688631
I never understood why a chair or battle in spanish is a woman, and things like a tree or a clitoris is a man.

>>1688653
east asian languages don't have grammatical gender. the chart is correct.

>>1688667
It really should be called grammatical genre. But English is amess with its borrowings so...

>>1688534
>most pointless linguistic feature
>grammatical gender
That's not declension.

>>1688673
Japanese has gendered pronouns attached to sex. Filipino does not.

>>1688681
>Japanese has gendered pronouns attached to sex
That's not grammatical gender.

>>1688683
Then why is England and Scotland red? English has no grammatical gender.

>>1688681
1. japanese doesn't actually have true pronouns
1.a. even if they had only gendered pronouns, that doesn't effect the grammar
2. no other noun is gendered unless the literal word for man or woman is put in it
2.a. no verbs or adjectives have gendered inflections
2.b. this is the same as every east asian language

>>1688689
english has vestigal gender inflection as a remnant of frankish and french

actor/actress is an example, where doctor is a counterexample.

>>1688616
>>1688534 (OP)

>tried to learn a language
> can't understand grammatical gender ,
>"muh it's thier fault"

go learn fucking crybaby
There, i fixed it for you

>>1688534
Why do we need this?

>>1688681
>anon doesn't understand the chart
>anon speaks filipino
>anon doesn't understand grammar
ITS ALL STARTING TO MAKE SENSE

maybe /his/ needs flags

It's beyond retarded

For you faggots who speak gendered languages look up Bantu noun classes

That's how dumb you look to us

>>1688755
It's the flip trannies I bet.

>>1688761
bantu noun classes evolved because wandering niggers in the jungle needed a system to classify referents based on use among hundreds of lil' blood tribes that might stab each other if they said the wrong thing.

indo-european languages are highly synthetic and needed a mechanism to cut down on noise, and so they developed genders.

it's a little different

what language do you even speak, anyway? your post is /his/ incarnate

>>1688755
Chart is still plain wrong though, Flips dont even have gendered pronouns.

Measure words are pretty pointless as well.

>>1688779
Maybe it's accounting for the Spanish loan words?

>>1688678
Declensions > syntax-based grammar.

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>>1688779
it's not determined by pronouns, it's determined by inflection you fucking little brown sexy tranny creampie machine REEEEE

http://learningtagalog.com/grammar/nouns/gender.html

(it's probably the spanish influence. they mgiht be specifically referencing filipino instead of tagalog)

>>1688802
Flip here: we just use loanwords and attach them to our native grammar structure.
>Spanish.
La mesa. (the table)
El libro. (the book)
>Filipino
Ang mesa
Ang libro

>>1688796
measure words tend to occur in highly analytic languages with bounded morphemes

I really feel like a lot of these questions would be solved by tiny little (HEY RETARD) bubbles next to trouble spots in text books. not calling you a retard. the state of education is despicable, is all

>>1688806
No fuck off.

"Whom" will die out in our lifetime. The English language, too, should declare independence from the rest of Europe.

>>1688825
>wants to get rid of whom
hey thanks for turning my languae into newspeak, jackass

I bet you think it's good that they teach hunger games in high school instead of shakespeare or joyce

>>1688534
No you retarded anglo subhuman

>I'll bring my friends!

Ok! (It's a bunch of female but he doesn't know and comes unprepared)

>>1688972
When someone says "I'll bring my friends" this could be fucking anyone.

>>1688996
Yes it's retarded as fuck

>I'll bring a friend

>male or female????

Retarded anglos

>>1689005
>>1689005
>I'll bring my friends!

>Rich friends or poor friends?
>Cool friends or nerd friends?
>Friends I know or friends I don't?

Retarded humans.

>>1688667
You're conflating using grammatical gender to express natural gender with it's other purpose of being useless. A chair isn't a woman, it just is called feminine because feminine nouns also refer to feminine people or animals.
>>1688678
How is declension pointless? It's extremely useful since it just directly states what grammatical case it is.
>>1688825
Whom is retarded because it's one of the last remaining features of previous declension after English long parted with it.

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>>1688972
>>1688996
>>1689005
Esperanto solves this by having a specific prefix for referring to females. Another example of how good of a language it is.

btw does anyone know why this pepe is brown with a buzz cut?

>>1689061
I'm not sure why declension for pronouns is inappropriate. it makes language a lot more clear. the inconsistency is really only hard for ESL people

>>1689068
Who isn't really a normal pronoun and there's no need to say whom over who in any situation.

>>1689076
there's no need to make the I/me distinction, but if you can't, I'll still think you're a retard.

stop acting like mao zedong and trying to rape our language, you fuckhead

the only people who can't do these things are 80 iq idiots. I hardly think we should rearrange our society to cater to people who eat paint

>>1689081
>there's no need to make the I/me distinction
Fug you're right. All we really need is a distinction between the normative and the genitive pronouns, shit, we could do that just by adding an 's. The accusative case is useless when the object always follow the verb.
>stop acting like mao zedong
Interesting you say that. I can easily see English becoming an analytic language very soon.

>>1688717
*OLD ENGLISH

>>1689064
Because esperantists are incredibly militant

>>1689093
some people think liason or articles are too hard.

any time someone complains who isn't ESL I think they should probably just be gassed, desu

grammar is a perfect idiot detector that's built into language.

in fact, of the few constructed languages alive, they always start off simple, but inevitably become more complex because without grammar rules shit's fucking unclear. people also just invent grammar rules on purpose in order to confuse stupid people and show off how much smarter they are. this literally happened with bahasa indonesia and it only took 10 years.

you can't just gut grammar you don't like.

>>1689106
So the pepe is a reference to ISIS?
>>1689110
Do you mean French liaison? If so that's not a grammar rule, it's just because Frenchfags care about have a pretty sounding language and be removed with minimal ambiguity. How are articles hard? They pretty simple and signify a grammatical concept, although are unnecessary.
>grammar is a perfect idiot detector that's built into language.
Languages do not evolve intelligently. Sometimes there are simply unnecessary, meaningless parts.
>you can't just gut grammar you don't like
Sure you can. English dialects and creoles appear all the time that does just that. Language evolves for the needs and desires of the speakers. People got tired of conjugating verbs so now we're just stuck with a couple instead of the many of other Western European languages.

>>1689123
english has liason too. if you don't notice it...

>meaningless
that's the ENTIRE point of them. intelligence is the ability to do arbitrary work.

I'll tell you a mental task that is't very arbitrary: eating. but cows can do it.

>getting rid of grammar
>sure you can
you just ignored my fcking relevant example of why you fucking CANT

you probably don't understand the history of constructed languages though. they fail to meet the needs of communication every single time.

by mandating simpler vocaublary and simpler grammar you're just forcing smart people to speak on the same level as idiots.

seriously, read about the history of bahasa indonesia.

>>1688534
>Mirativity, initially proposed by Scott DeLancey, is a grammatical category in a language, independent of evidentiality, that encodes the speaker's surprise or the unpreparedness of their mind.

>>1689130
>that's the ENTIRE point of them. intelligence is the ability to do arbitrary work.
The point of language is to communicate, grammar is an integral part of that. If the point of language is just being an autist about rules then you're speaking something autistic like Lojban,
>you just ignored my fcking relevant example of why you fucking CANT
You can get rid of certain parts of grammar, not all of it obviously. I can conflate I and me simply into me and because of the way English is I can do that and be perfectly understood; if I did that with a language like Latin with a free word order, then I wouldn't be understood, because English isn't Latin.
>you probably don't understand the history of constructed languages though. they fail to meet the needs of communication every single time.
That's not true at all. I could speak to you in Esperanto right now and beyond my limited vocabulary, I'd have no problem expressing myself.
>by mandating simpler vocaublary and simpler grammar you're just forcing smart people to speak on the same level as idiots.
No one said anything about eliminating words or changing ways you can express yourself. It's about standardizing certain things. If Mandarin started developing into a fusional language it'd make sense to standardize anything that formerly belong to its more analytic past.

>>1689146
language is as much a tool of peacocking as it is about communication. if you haven't figured that out, you're beyond saving.

if you intentionally hobble expressive potential in a language, people WILL find ways around it. in french people literally speak backwards just to show how cool they are, and in bahasa indonesia people needed to invent referent particles and declensions because the grammra was too fucking free to the point it as incomprehensible. the took it further and now bahasa indonesia has dozens of regional dialects with MORE complicated grammar than their regional languages.

you NEED to put grammar into a language otherwise it become incomprehensible.

it's the entire reason east asian languages have bounded phonemes.

mandarin was standardized, and there were rules behind it. you might note that in doing so they did NOT make it simpler outside of the character set.

>>1689159
>language is as much a tool of peacocking as it is about communication
Yet if I started talking in Early Modern English thou would callest me a faggote. Have verbose prose is nice but it's for literature, not for communication. When people care more about communication than seeming smart and being anal about rules, language changes.
>if you intentionally hobble expressive potential in a language, people WILL find ways around it
And simplifying and regularizing grammar to be standard with the rest of the language isn't doing that. You're not bitching about us no longer speaking Middle English.
>because the grammra was too fucking free to the point it as incomprehensible
Sounds like the grammar didn't serve the purpose of communication so they changed it. If you were in Indonesia would you be bitching about those changes, saying it's not proper Bahasa?
>you NEED to put grammar into a language otherwise it become incomprehensible.
I'm not saying remove grammar, I'm saying standardizing it doesn't change anything except make it easier for people to learn and to communicate.
>mandarin was standardized
I'm talking about a hypothetical future Mandarin that has undergone extensive language change.

>>1689175
jesus christ this board is awful

I'm done talking to you. if you're not intentionally trying to be an idiot I feel sorry for you

>>1689186
You seem upset anon. Are you alright? Surely a retarded argument about language isn't whats making you upset.

Is Bahasa really that complicated?

>>1688689
> English has no gender
He / she
Dog / bitch
Bull / cow
Cock / hen
Etc. Etc.

>>1689005
> Friend
> boyfriend
> girlfriend

>>1689239
Not grammatical gender. Anglophones don't mark groups nouns into certain categories and apply different rules to those categories.

>>1689239
He said "grammatical gender", not "has no words pertaining gender".

>>1689197
Not according to the standardized language, which is incomprehensible, so one one uses it.

Every island was forced to make the best of it, so they started implementing jungle rules into it taken from local languages, like anon above's example of above of having 15 different noun clasifications. A lot of it was just done so that smart people could show off. But now every island has its own language again. It's fucked.

>>1688667
>clitoris
Well, the clitoris is homologous to the penis, look up the embryology of them.

>>1689256
Can you give me some concrete examples of such new variations?

>>1689186
You're the biggest idiot of all.

Could anyone actually tell me what purpose gender serves?

I can see it being useful for homophones, akin to tones or stress (male oogabooga is dog, female oogabooga is chair), but not much else. But then I'm only an American after all.

>>1689315
As a Finn i dont even understand the reason for gender pronouns. Knowning someones gender is such useless information most of the time that i have to wonder why it even needs to be said constantly.

>>1688534
No.

It prevents autismos like trannies and whatever homofaggots are calling themselves now in the west.

>>1689326
You're right imo. It'd make more sense if there were a set of 3rd person pronouns that refers to different people being referenced, e.g. one pronoun refers to the first person referenced, the second refers to the second, etc. Kinda like how you can differentiate between two people by saying "he" and "she" but not between two guys or two girls.

I don't know of any language that has this idea.

>>1689342
While that sounds really autistic I think Malagasy has a really complex system of relation or something like that.

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>mfw Polish has five genders

>>1688622
there are languages in Africa where words end with certain phonemes based on whatever you can eat a thing or not

>>1689349
No, I don't mean relation, I just mean pronouns that basically mean "that guy" "the other guy" and "the other, other guy" and so on. Basically just a way to say which guy of a few you're referring to.

>>1689315
I've had a few Spanish-speaking friends tell me that it's largely just a matter of helping sentences 'flow,' sort of? Not in its origin or intent, mind you, but in its actual function.

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>>1689342
There should be something like a genus for each geometrical form.

"The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog"
then becomes
"roundthe tetrahedronquick roundbrown cuboidfox jumps over roundthe planarlazy dodecahedrondog."

>>1689357
That sounds like an immensely useful way to pass on knowledge. You would immediately know what you could or couldn't eat in the wilderness based upon something as universally carried down and used as language.
>>1689368
That just sounds autistic. No different that other gender systems with a bunch of genders, I guess.

>>1688665
top kek nigga

>>1689371
Aww, shucks. I thought you were referring to my geometrical forms idea, when the 4chan-X desktop notification said:
>That sounds like an immensely useful way to pass on knowledge. You would immediately know what you could [...]

>>1689383
topkek

I don't see how that could pass on anything other than an autistic knowledge of different shapes.

>>1689315
Well i often find english bothersome for its inablity to distinguish genders, it such a useful piece of information : " a friend is coming over ", because i don't know the gender i can't say " when is he coming ? " or " is she hot ? " beause i have first to ask for this piece of information. Same thing with animals.

Also i'm pretty sure gendered languages influence our world view and how we think/perceive stuff. For example in romance languages the moon is feminine and the sun masculine, it makes sense for me : The moon is shy, pale and small while the sun is bigger, powerful, and brilliant overall.
But in german the moon is male and the sun female, and so my german friend ( and i have to precise female because there's no word for " female friend " ) completely disagreed : the sun is motherly, nourishing, etc.. while y engish friend ( female aswell ) called my language mysoginist;
And she might have a point, romance countries might be a more prone to machism because some traits are in our languages inherently feminine and other inherently masculine, and germanic languages and therefore countries who have an other kind of association and where things can be neutral, a-gendered, are probably more easily convinced by feminism

>>1689388
What about Francophonic countries? Aren't quite a lot of modern feminist thinkers from France, Algeria, and so on?

>>1689388
You're, French, right?

>>1689388
>Well i often find english bothersome for its inablity to distinguish genders, it such a useful piece of information : " a friend is coming over ", because i don't know the gender i can't say " when is he coming ? " or " is she hot ? " beause i have first to ask for this piece of information. Same thing with animals
You're just dumb; obviously what confuses you is lack of information provided, not language ability. Clearly in this case the person that has a friend doesn't feel that their gender is important to note, which is probably a same-gendered person. In any case, English covers this by using 'they' as the genderless singular pronoun if you don't intend on determining gender.
However, you miss the humor of asking "is she hot" anyway without that information. Language is so much more complex than writing a scientific study that eliminates all context for the sake of autism. Funny that English became the singular tongue of scientific publications anyway.

>>1689315
It's to help tie adjectives, demonstratives, determiners, etc to the noun they modify.

Imagine English had grammatical gender, fox was feminine, and dog was masculine, and the feminine with marked with -a and masculine with -o.

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog becomes:

Thea quicka browna fox jumps over theo lazyo dog.

Now say, you wanted to move lazy to the front of the sentence, maybe or meter or emphasis. You could still tell its saying the dog is lazy because it agrees in gender.

Lazyo thea quicka browna fox jumps over theo dog.

With only 2 or 3 genders there's still lots of room for confusion, but most older Indo-European languages also had to agree in number and case, making it less ambiguous.

On the extreme end there's Bantu languages, like Swahili which has 14 genders and also marks the gender of the subject and object on the verb, allowing them to have completely free word order without any cases.

>>1689410
>Clearly in this case the person that has a friend doesn't feel that their gender is important to note,
"Clearly"? I'd say that that's one possibility, but it certainly isn't "clearly" the case. Maybe he was just short on time and it was more important for him to note that the person is a friend, rather than someone fuggable.

>English covers this by using 'they' as the genderless singular pronoun if you don't intend on determining gender.
Can you give an example?

>However, you miss the humor of asking "is she hot" anyway without that information.
You're missing the point that other languages could've included that information easily. In French and Italian, for example, if he said that a friend was coming over, he'd know which gender the friend has.

>Funny that English became the singular tongue of scientific publications anyway.
Which most likely has more to do with the sociology of modern science, rather than the compatibility of science and the English language.

>>1689186
>try to have a discussion with you
>in every post act like an autistic faggot calling people idiots and retards while everyone else simply replying to your posts
>get blown the fuck out at the end and can't respond
Loving
Every
Laugh

Do you guys with grammatical gendered languages have words with more than one accepted gender?
In Danish we have two genders, for example:
En kat - A cat
Et hus - A house
Then there is the word hamster.
Et hamster, sounds wrong to me, but plenty of people are saying that rather than en hamster.

>>1689457
Yeah in french we do, even if most of the population use the same gender because otherwise as you said it sounds "wrong"

>>1689457
So does this mean gender isn't all that important after all?

>>1689457
Basically most of the words derived from the third declension in Latin have developed into two-gendered words in Romance languages, because most of third declension's words were neuter gender. Eventually neuter gender dissappeared and speakers often used masculine or femenine gender for those words. Some words simply adopted a single-gendered form depending on the common use of the speakers. For instance, in Spanish, the word for bridge is "puente", used as a masculine; while in Galician (ponte) is a femenine word. And it produces some grammatical incongruences like "el puente/la fuente": both words should have the same gender but in fact they don't.

However there are still some words that can be used in both genders like "mar" (sea), "azúcar" (sugar), etc.

Why do anglos get so triggered by grammatical genders? Its weird, I like to think this is an american kid throwing an autistic fit because he failed Spanish at school.

>>1688667
Clitoris and árbol are male sounding words. Silla and batalla are female sounding words. You just won't understand if you're not native and not used to it.

>>1689892
specially since they use that retarded she/he thing for no reason and only in the 3rd person

>>1689884

Never heard "la azúcar".

>>1689917
>azúcar. Puede ser masculino o femenino, el azúcar, la azúcar. Es más general usarlo como masculino: azúcar refinado, azúcar moreno.

http://educacion.ufm.edu/se-dice-el-azucar-o-la-azucar/

>>1689884
>Basically most of the words derived from the third declension in Latin have developed into two-gendered words in Romance languages, because most of third declension's words were neuter gender
Most third declension words weren't neuter, it's just that the masculine and feminine were identical, so you couldn't tell a word's gender just by its shape, which caused a lot of confusion in daughter languages.

>>1689884
>For instance, in Spanish, the word for bridge is "puente", used as a masculine; while in Galician (ponte) is a femenine word. And it produces some grammatical incongruences like "el puente/la fuente": both words should have the same gender but in fact they don't.

Puente used to be femenine in spanish as well, you can read the Lazarillo for a famous example.

>>1689457
Un dragée
Une tentacule
Un échappatoire
Un oasis

>>1689433
The only reason it isn't clear to you is because you're humongously autistic. There are pretty clear signifiers as to the gender of the friend as the person to whom you are replying had already stated. In any event this point is practically moot because the ambiguity can be easily alleviated simply by asking "are they a boy or a girl?"

>>1690276
>are they a boy or a girl?
>why are you interested anon, I though you had a gf?
>nah I just want to use the proper pronoun

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>>1688534
>Is grammatical gender the most pointless linguistic feature?

Linguistic features don't exist because we deem them pointless.

They probably had some reason to be there in proto-variants of most languages; maybe verbs inflected differently in very ancient languages depending on whether you actually were talking to or if you were a woman, versus a man or an object, but that these effects have gradually disappeared, and the only thing that is left is the superficial.

That said, in many languages, like my own, grammatical gender is mostly intuitive. A girl is feminine, and a boy is masculine for example, and a tree is definitely neuter.

>>1690295
>That said, in many languages, like my own
What language is that?

>>1688534
For people who speak a language with a grammatical gender, is "pointless linguistic feature" masculine, or feminine in your language?

>>1690305
>What language is that?

Norwegian.

>>1690310
Feminine in latin languages

>>1690359
By "latin" I meant "romance", sorry

>>1690310
>is "pointless linguistic feature" masculine, or feminine in your language?

Neuter.

Remember: articles, cases and tenses, pointless as well.
You don't need in language at all. Follow Chinese example.

>>1690377
Chinese not have plural either

>>1688776
Triggered?

>>1690387
Of course. Plural very pointless.
Chinese have counter though, may also be pointless.

>>1690400
Counter?

>>1690233
Yeah I know it was in femenine gender before. Some words stayed like that, for instance "fuente" (fountain). But the fact is that those words were originally masculine nouns in Latin. Third declension words suffered alot of changes because there were neuter words in it, so Vulgar Latin speakers had several troubles to use them in a proper way.

So, we can all agree this stuff is useless but, lentition and Eclipsis are totally not stupid, right guys? ;-;

>>1690406
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_classifier
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_classifiers
That seems quite retarded 2bh

>>1690406
In English you not say "I have six paper", do you?
You say "I have six PIECE of paper" instead.
Chinese like that for everything.
"I have six long-thin-thing of chopstick"
"I have two heavy-object of computer"

>>1688534
>implying language was invented.

This thread is over 100 responses long now, and I'm not going to read the whole thing. If someone else already mentioned it, apologies.

The gender-articles system of course has nothing to do with actual biological sex (well sometimes it does, but quite seldom). Basically, languages first distinguished between animate and inanimate objects (basically, if the object has a spirit or not -- a stone has no spirit, but a mountain does; a piece of firewood has no spirit, but a living tree does, etc.). This was important to people whose religion was animistic (or shamanistic). Later, animate objects came to be further split into feminine/masculine principles, though again this gets pretty clusterfucked as languages diverge and the original 'principle' is no longer remembered or agreed upon. Grammatical genders change pretty arbitrarily, because it rhymes better with frequent collocations, etc.

Early (ie. Old) English had a gender system, along with case inflections, but slowly dropped these between the 10th and 4th centuries. (Really that makes it Old English, obviously). You'll be familiar with them if you've ever heard thee, thine, you, thou, etc.

As an anglo learning German (I've lived in the country for 6 years now), it really is the most annoying part of the language. I'm nearly fluent in all matters, except for grammatical gender. Apart from a few guidelines for some classes of nouns (plurals always 'die', diminutives 'das', technological things often but not always 'das'), there's really no order to it. Unfortunately, to conjugate cases correctly, you again need the right grammatical gender. You just kinda get used to using der/die/das, rather than actually remembering what is what. To be honest, I don't even care anymore, I just use whatever article feels right, and let the listener figure out my mistakes (my accent isn't strong, but I don't sound native German).

>>1689432
Swahili has noun not gender cases.

>>1690447
>languages first distinguished
How do we know about grammatical features of early languages?

>>1690285
That never happens.

>>1690474
I'm pretty sure asking about the gender of the person you want to refer to also never happens in the first place.

>>1690447
>>1690460
And furthermore, how do we know every early language worked in the same manner? I assume you're only refering to Indo-European languages, aren't you?

>>1689482
It's not 'important' in the way you're probably thinking of it. Asking if it's important is irrelevent. It simply is what it is, and 'important' insofar as what people just speak from the time they're old enough to do so. Don't look for logic or patterns in language. Some exists of course, but there is just as much exception to frustrate you.

>>1690494
He probably heard someone talking about the evolution gender in Proto-Indo-European and misunderstood them thinking they were talking about the earliest languages.

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>>1688534
>He always thought of the sea as 'la mar'
>Some of the younger fishermen, those who used buoys as floats for their lines and had motorboats, bought when the shark livers had brought much money, spoke of her as 'el mar' which is masculine.They spoke of her as a contestant or a place or even an enemy. But the old man always thought of her as feminine and as something that gave or withheld great favours, and if she did wild or wicked things it was because she could not help them. The moon affects her as it does a woman, he thought.

Is this anything like how Spanish grammatical gender actually works?

>>1689388
>Also i'm pretty sure gendered languages influence our world view and how we think/perceive stuff
The evidence is pretty clear that grammatical gender has little bearing on for example strength of patriarchy (compare Finnish and Korean) or other sex-based cultural elements. It's a red herring and so all that macho romance language, feminist germanic etc is rubbish opinion.

>or example in romance languages the moon is feminine and the sun masculine, it makes sense for me
Exactly, it makes sense for you because it's the language you're raised in. Your 'logic' is not universal though, but subjective and relative. For those whose language has the Sun as feminine or the Moon as masculine, I'm sure they'd also say it makes perfect sense.

I'm an Anglo, and know German and (by now very rusty French). I'm a teacher nowadays and took linguistics as a minor for 2 years before switching out (didn't see a need for it).

>>1690529
'la mar' is pretty common tho, kinda like a poetic name for the sea

>>1690460
Because those languages are either recorded on stone/paper/vellum, etc or can, to an extent, be reverse-engineered based on their daughter languages. The further back you go, the more vague this becomes, so you can take it with a pinch of salt, but linguists as a whole are a pretty conservative bunch not prone to wild fanciful theories, so I'd tend to trust 'em.

>>1690494
>how do we know every early language worked in the same manner?
Obviously this would be a pretty stupid assumption.

>>1690520
I was indeed talking about Indo-European languages actually, but didn't specify. My bad. Same is also largely true for Finno-Ugric languages as far as I recall. But it's a fairly sound principle overall, and I don't think an unfair assumption for human groups in general. Would be interesting if I knew more about Aboriginal Australian, Negrito, or Andaman Islander languages, for example. Tamil is also another pretty primitive language on the Indian Ocean coastal route that early human settlers took.

This might seem paradoxical, because it kind of is, but the older or more 'primitive' (or in todays age: isolated) the language, the more complex it tends to be. Before humans had material cultures, they had social cultures, all the complexities of which could be reflected in the language. They didn't have to worry about their Tinder profiles

>>1690529
There are two "classic" grammatical genders in Spanish: masculine and femenine. But this is not completely true and even native speakers don't know it; we have other genres: neuter, common, epicene and ambiguous. «Mar» is an ambiguous word, so it can "be" masculine and femenine.

>>1688534

No. That would be articles.

t. slavsky

>>1690568
Finno-Ugric languages don't have gender.

I don't think you realize how transient languages are. Most languages hardly resemble the state they were in 1-2 thousand years ago and are completely unrecognizable even further than that. Assuming Tamil even is related to the language of the first humans that migrated there 60,000 years ago or whatever it would tell you nothing at all about it.

Also linguists generally agree that all languages are equally complex, just in different ways. For example whereas Old English was morphologically complex modern English is syntactically complex.

>>1690640
Indefinite articles are unneeded and can just be assumed, but definite articles give an important aspect of information. It says whether you're talking about something specific or general. The difference between:
>a man talked to me today
>the man talked to me today
>man (in general) talked to me today
Is a pretty big difference.

I bet you'd hate to study French with their obsession of using articles for nearly every single noun.

>>1690795
You could just say "that man"

>>1690806
That would imply a specific man that you are pointing to (Either literally pointing with your fingers or metaphorically).

>>1690806
Which is how the articles in the Romance languages evolved from Latin.
Also what >>1690837 said.

>>1690654
I know they don't have gender, and I didn't say they did. Instead they have even more complex system of marking what is in relation to what (agglutinating suffixes, multiple cases, etc), without the use of gendered articles. This does the same thing as marking key information or to note relationship between grammatical participants. It's abstract nowadays because we don't care if a tree/river/wind has a spirit or what kind of spirit, nor do we think that maybe how we talk about it matters to the tree/river/wind spirit. Ancient people obviously did care.

>I don't think you realize how transient languages are.
Um, I think I do and is precisely my point: languages change. In this case, grammatical 'gender' is a relic from a time when such things were important enough for their speakers to be marked in the language. Duh.

What is your background with linguistics?

>>1690843
>what's your background in linguistics
Yours is obviously autism

>>1688534
No it helps distinguish the sex of the person being described.

>>1690432
> In English you not say "I have six paper", do you?
You can, if 'paper' means 'newspaper' or 'journals'.

> I have six papers
> I have six newspapers

>>1691012
>hurrrrr duurrrrr I can't answer so uh, i'll just scream AUTISM, yea, that'll throw everyone off!
In other words: rekt. Just leave /his/, you salty moron.

>>1691075
Indeed, although it's informal, and because its implied. "I'll have six waters" also really means glasses/bottles/orders of water, etc. This doesn't really change the count/non-count rules, although it does confuse learners of English.

>>1690310
It's neuter

>>1690654
>all languages are equally complex
nigger

NIGGER

YOU FUCKING NIGGER

>>1689175

>thou would callest me a faggote

no one can have read and appreciated any classical english literature and produce this kind of ungrammatical imitation of it. this man is a philistine who doesn't like hearing language he doesn't understand and wishes to have the language maimed and limited to the point where his sci-fi fan fiction has as much stylistic merit as anything else.

>>1689175
Anon would calls me a faggot

>>1688717
But there were no female doctors until well after the rise of modern English.

>>1691815
What's ungrammatical about it?

>>1691058
Not that hard without it at all.

>>1691510
Why are you so triggered?

>>1688678
Declension is useful af

>>1688851
>hey thanks for turning my languae into newspeak
>I hate natural language progression

>>1689186
Man, I'd like to see how upset you'd get when you see how much modern European languages have changed from older ones

>>1691864

should be 'thou wouldst call'

>>1691928
languages are not all equally complex

I'm triggered because people like you think it's possible to even establish criteria and a confidence interval to establish complete and ABSOLUTE uniformity of any given quantity in a variety of circumstances

that's literally not even possible, but you people just go and say this shit

>>1692359
I thought about that but it doesn't seem that 'would' is ever inflected, neither is the verb that follows it, which is a bare infinitive. So it'd just be 'thou would call'.
>>1692376
Why do you think they're not equally complex?

>>1692399
...

are you serious?

NOTHING is uniform. ANYWHERE. EVER.

do you even understand what is entailed in establishing uniformity?

yuo don't even have the slightest clue what you're talking about, unless you can establish a framework around it.

humans are not uniform. brains are nto uniform. culture is not uniform. complexity of the above is not uniform.

languages are literally NOT uniform.

jesus fuck.

>>1692417
Obviously they're not uniform but as far as I can tell all natural languages are capable of expressing any idea or subject; some as just better at it than others. Finnish declension is really complex and elaborate but it cannot say anything that an anglophone using prepositions couldn't say. Finnish is has complex declension while English has complex syntax and a large number of prepositions and auxiliary verbs. Or for instance the complexity of Spanish conjugation is performed through auxiliary verbs in English. The complexity is relative to the speaker.

>>1692445
many african languages have 3 numbers. one, two, and many.

that doesn't sound "equally complex" to me.

declensions increase the complexity of the language. period. that makes it more complex.

some have more complex features than other languages. full stop.


you're wrong. accept that, now move on to the next point.

that is DIFFERENT from saying that the thoughts that all people think are equally complex.

do all PEOPLE have equally complex thoughts?

of course they don't. and with that, your stupidity should hopefully be cured.

>>1692506
>many african languages have 3 numbers. one, two, and many.
That's a case of limited vocabulary. They could still express '3' by saying '1 and 2' or '4' as '2 and 2' and so on; if anything counting like that could be seen as more complex than by having individual names for each number. Just because there's no direct English word for Schadenfreude doesn't mean that English is less complex than German.
>declensions increase the complexity of the language. period. that makes it more complex.
A Finnish speaker could say the same about syntax and prepositions and that declensions are less complex.
>some have more complex features than other languages
True, but all natural languages are capable of expressing anything expressable, just in easier or more difficult ways than another.

>of course they don't. and with that, your stupidity should hopefully be cured.
You really should stop being so insulting. It reflects poorly on you.

>>1692593
Or to put it differently; all natural languages can express anything the speaker understands, some just go about it with different methods.

>>1692506
>many african languages have 3 numbers. one, two, and many.

Which ones?
I think you are thinking of that Amazon people but they count in Portuguese now.

>>1689892
>Anglos
It triggers East Asians and Southeast Asians too.

>>1692606
It's quite common for Amazonian languages to have three or fewer terms for numbers and there are some like Pilagá where all the numbers are loanwords.

>>1688534
>Philippines.
>Sex-based grammatical gender.
We don't speak spanish anymore (or ever, really) and Im pretty sure only people & animals have genders in our languages.

>>1692628
>*even people & animals have no genders in our languages

fix'd

>>1692593
okay, how about the fact that many languages have built-in mechanisms for reporting common probabilty errors. for example, japanese and chinese have built in mechanisms for dealing with "he can probably do it" in the overwhelming statistical likelihood sense even if it's difficult, and "probably" in the sense that it is easy but not numerically likely.

these things are literally fundamental problems that high level bureaucracies have trouble dealing with, and east asian languages have built in solutions.

the fact that I needed to use half a paragraph to explain a mathematical concept n our language when it takes a single word in an east asian language, is proof that some languages are VERY POOR at describing certain things. so poor, in fact, that explainng these concepts in western languages is laborious and prone to error. Its not an accident that east asians are so much better at math than we are. it' built into their language.

now, again, I'll repeat, you are confusing language cmplexity with thought complexity. languages are obviously not uniform in complexity. you are arguing that since human thoughts are equal, human languages are equal.

again, the proof for your assertion is not true, and neither is the connection between them.

the fact you confuse the two is telling

recap, in this post, I just proved
1. some languages can express a paragraphs worth of information with a single word, therefore, languages are not equally complex
2. just because languages can all express similar concepts because of the architecture of the human mind, does not mean the languages themselves are equally complex. the fact that one must work harder is the very proof that it is less complex. in information theory this is called the entropy/hashing problem.

it is literally relaying less information. it is less complex. you can program a function in binary, or haskell, binary is LESS COMPLEX. end.

>>1692652
So basically schadenfreude?
Is that what you are flipping out over?

>>1692652
I never said that languages are uniform or they all work the same way. I said that you cannot look at languages in general and just say "yes, that's more complex than that". If you looked at specific sentences and subjects, you could do that, but as a whole it's impossible. Spanish has complex conjugation, Finnish has complex declension, neither are more or less complex as a whole to each other, or to English. Agglutinative languages are very good at getting a lot of information into one word, while fusional languages are good at getting a lot of information into one morpheme, to the exclusion of others. All children developing language skills at around the same age is proof of general complexity with languages.

If what you said was true you could specifically point to one language and say it's less complex in all or most aspects than most languages, and vice versa in showing me a more complex language than most others.

>>1692652
>1. some languages can express a paragraphs worth of information with a single word, therefore, languages are not equally complex
Doesn't this make Mandarin Chinese the 'simplest' by this metric, because it can express the most in the shortest space?

>>1692687
I DID just give you a specific example, but apparently you're stupid.

you think the only aspect of complexity in a language is declension and conjugation. in reality, the majority of the information in a language is expressed in terms of information theory. Complexity is the amount of information expressed on a per unit basis in bit terms, or the amount of information expressed within a single idea, in byte form. The latter allows minimal ambiguity, and allows a public ledger to be constructed according to criteria such as bit decay, reliability, etc.

fucking forget about declensions. they're not important, and they're NOT what linguistics actually concerns itself with.

read my actual post.

less advanced languages more closely resemble binary, not simply in terms of how curt it is, but the precision of function, which is a derivation from bandwidth constraints.

you THINK you're addressing complexity, but you're not. you're addressing the question "what color is sunday." you're completely off base.

>>1692696
mandarin and classical chinese are among the most complex in the world, maybe tied with english. their complexity consists of precision (which is allowed by brevity,) the large backend, and once again, the area in which the languages morphed in order to meet the needs of the people.

africans might have 12 different words for yam. that's all well and good. but african languages cannot make the distinction between types of testimony or their reliability. african languages cannot describe einsteinian relativity. they can't describe the difference between standard deviation and standard error. they simply CAN'T. they can say "that's not likely." or "that's really likely!" but that's NOT SD or SE. that makes them less complex. full stop.

>>1688534
It isn't really useless, as it allows to construct phrases more freely.

Gendered words were a corner stone of Ancient Greek and Latin.

Gendered words allows a speaker/bard to mess with syntax to create a rhythm or the emphasize certain words without botching the meaning of the sentence.

If I were to say Virtuous Kill Lion Woman Cowardly, it makes no fucking sense in English.

>>1692732
>mandarin and classical chinese are among the most complex in the world, maybe tied with english. their complexity consists of precision (which is allowed by brevity,) the large backend, and once again, the area in which the languages morphed in order to meet the needs of the people.
OK, but HERE your standard of complexity is:

>>1692652
>1. some languages can express a paragraphs worth of information with a single word, therefore, languages are not equally complex
50 characters of Mandarin Chinese can express much more complex concepts than 50 characters in English. In fact, if we set the barrier at 1 character, there's very few concepts English can express.

>but african languages cannot make the distinction between types of testimony or their reliability. african languages cannot describe einsteinian relativity. they can't describe the difference between standard deviation and standard error. they simply CAN'T.
Now I know you've got know clue what you're talking about.

>>1692732
I'm really having a hard time understanding you. Are you saying that complexity is the amount of information in a single word? What kind of definition is that? So some Amerindian languages are more complex than Mandarin because a single word can mean an entire sentence?
>fucking forget about declensions. they're not important, and they're NOT what linguistics actually concerns itself with.
Who are you to determine what linguistics is concerned about?
>mandarin and classical chinese are among the most complex in the world, maybe tied with english.
Does that that fit into the idea complexity is based onto information per word/sentence?
>africans might
I very much doubt you've researched into African languages at all, otherwise you wouldn't generalize thousands of languages in multiple language families so brazenly.

>>1692399

>I thought about that but it doesn't seem that 'would' is ever inflected, neither is the verb that follows it, which is a bare infinitive. So it'd just be 'thou would call'.

stop posting you unlettered millenial fuck.

>>1692827
one single chinese character can express a paragraph's worth of information in english. THIS is what I'm really getting at.

these concepts tend to be things such as distinctions in types of numerical data that you will only find in american english if you take a statistics class, but these words are BAKED into the core of the language and you can't be cnversationally fluent without them.

THAT is the sort of content that makes a language complex. you don't seem to get it.

I'll try and bring it down to your level.

explain entropy in an african language
"okay, see, mutumbo, things that are hot tend to get cold." he'll say "of course, are you stupid? did you really need a separate word for that?"

you can't EXPLAIN to him, with simple language, why entropy is different, and why it's more important. his language simply doesn't have the ability to express these things. if it gained the ability to do so, it would essentially be a new language.

FWIW chinese and japanese were sufficiently complex that they were capable of understanding the concept of entropy.

the sorts of words an african language might alck are NECCESSARY. consider: fundamental unit, this is one word you use for atom in east asian languages. an african language has a word for necessary, or maybe small, but fundamental? no. what about an abstract word like unit? no.

how do you describe an atom to an african, then? you can't, you have to teach them english, or french.

as it were, the japanese and chinese, upon gaining this knowledge from the west, made up words for the concepts because their language had become sufficiently abstract. but you can't honestly say a language that has to describe an atom as "really tiny indivisible science thing that has universal rules," as an 'equally complex' language. it's not. a language like that is not CAPABLE of conveying complex ideas because when you talk like that, shit gets muddled.

>>1692843
bit content can be carried at different information bands. a language can convey complex information at a morpheme level, it can convey complex information at a conceptual level. sufficiently complex languages tend to do BOTH, but of course in differing degrees, as expression gets more complex, and the need to reduce signal noise becomes more important.

you don't understand what I'm talking about because it's obvious you don't have a background in information theory/linguistics/computation theory.

>who are you to determine
I didn't decide this. actual linguists decided this. now go laugh at yourself

>info per word
it's not so much info per word that you should be focusing on, but the fact that as language becomes mroe complex, INDIVIDUAL WORDS come to take upon paragraphs or more of information of the nature of mathematical estimation, distributed ledger, risk evaluation, etc.

there are hundreds of examples, but another one where, if you don't have proper words for a situation, where things fall apart, is law.

in american law, we have a notion of rights. Are your rights FREEDOMS from the government interfering with you, or FREEDOMS to have the government enforce your ability to do something?

because ONE means that the government can't stop you from selling weed, another one GIVES YOU FREE SHIT if you fail to meet a standard. it's a BIG difference. Our language on this issue is muddled, and it leads to civilizational conflicts.

this same issue arose in ancient china, there was a faction called the nomialists. if you can accept the above propositions, you'll find their history very enlightening.

words define the bounds and relationships between ideas and action. sufficiently complex languages make publicly accessible high level ideas that are otherwise unavailable to most people.

if you assume otherwise, then thought, cognition, and science, somehow manages to function via an ethereal connection with the spirit world.

>>1690310
Το άσkοπο γλωσσολογιkό χαραkτηριστιkό

Its neutral you shitforbrain, "feature" is intuitively neutral

Progressive mental basketcases need not apply

>>1692900
>>1692919
>a language is more complex i.e. better because it's more useful for these specific subjects that I think are more valid than other subjects that have an equivalent complexity in other languages

>>1693032
Are you really trying to argue that statistical and scientific concepts such as "standard error" are not more complicated than "potato?"

>>1692900
>one single chinese character can express a paragraph's worth of information in english. THIS is what I'm really getting at.
Ok, so that makes things more COMPLEX now.
But over here
>declensions increase the complexity of the language. period. that makes it more complex.
So if I just took Mandarin, and shoved some declensions all willy nilly, I've made the langauge more complex, but I've also made it take twice as long to say the same concept. Fucking weird, huh?

>explain entropy in an african language
>"okay, see, mutumbo, things that are hot tend to get cold." he'll say "of course, are you stupid? did you really need a separate word for that?"
Which African Language is this supposed to be? Be specific, let's break down the sentence structure here.

>>1693014
>Its neutral you shitforbrain, "feature" is intuitively neutral
Lel
>>1690359

>>1693041
you're ignoring the fact that the complexity of a concept and complexity in declension occurs on a completely separate bit channel. the latter occurs on what might as well be a wavelength level, the former occurs on a level that requires secondary functions such as hashes to be performed. hashes allow more complicated information to be encoded into simpler channels, because the complexity is embedded into the hash. this is what having a backend enables.

maybe you don't understand any of this. if you don't, it's because you're stupid.

if you aren't going to actually respond to what I wrote though, I'm not going to engage with your shitposting

>>1693049
Oh wow what a great citation, surely that shitpost invalidates a native speaker

Seriously though who cares this thread is shit, the gendering of nouns depends on whatever the fuck your language decided to declare them, and then kept, or changed, or did away with their gendering completely. Their effect on your perspective (haha le sun is a male guys) is part of your personal heritage, and you should defend it to the death simply because of that fact.

>>1693058
>you're ignoring the fact that the complexity of a concept and complexity in declension occurs on a completely separate bit channel.
OK, so the fact that you can't even discuss the theory in linguistic terminology, but need to resort to a forced metaphor to excuse yourself shows you have no idea what you're talking about. In fact, this is a wonderful bit of irony, because you literally have no words to directly say what you mean. OK, fine, the 'complexity' in one 'channel,' doesn't effect the complexity of another 'channel.' But you also hold that languages are one to one comparable. Mandarin is "the most complex language". So you must have some way of totaling these up, together in a singular value, otherwise you're unable to compare Mandarin and English. So, what's the formula for the total combined output?

>if you aren't going to actually respond to what I wrote though, I'm not going to engage with your shitposting
The funny thing is I actually DO respond what you write, and you seem very annoyed and evasive about this. As soon as I do, you seem eager to discuss something else for example:

>Which African Language is this supposed to be? Be specific, let's break down the sentence structure here.

What happened to this? I'm eager to engage your breakdown. Let's start with what language you're talking about.

>>1693075
>Their effect on your perspective (haha le sun is a male guys) is part of your personal heritage, and you should defend it to the death simply because of that fact.
Well, my perspective that natives in foreign lands are backwards, and they should learn to speak English is part of my personal heritage.

>>1693089
>not linguistics
it literally is

>totaling up complexity in a singular value
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(information_theory)#Limitations_of_entropy_as_information_content

here you go. we can very easily do so. the fact you don't understand this shows that you're an idiot.

with that, I'm gone. I sincerely hope you either educate yourself, or at least stop trying to drag everyone else down to your level.

the world is a beautiful place, and you can learn a lot, if you try.

>>1693097
Woop, and we're back to 'using less characters is measure of language's utility'.

Which of course puts Mandarin up as a great language, and of course makes German very bad. Especially if you want to discuss anything technical. That must be why Germans are so bad at engineering and such.

And of course this means that the English language, and most latin based languages can be 'improved' by dropping spacing. Sends the same message, uses less spaces.

But the best of course, are illiterate languages. Those are the most complex at all. Any measure sent with them comes back with a value of zero.

Oh grand, what a lovely way of measuring languages you've come up with.

>the world is a beautiful place, and you can learn a lot, if you try.
Still waiting for you to come around to learning about African Languages. I almost get the feeling you didn't have a language in mind at all, and were just running on broad stereotypes that seem intuitive to you.

>>1693113
If the complexity of the language is not the complexity of the grammar, but it is also not the complexity of the thoughts beneath the grammar, then what is it, according to you? Because it's obvious that a more advanced language allows more complex thoughts. Are you saying the mathematical idea of complexity itself doesn't exist? Or are you saying science itself is normative? Because that's wrong.

>>1693166
>"If the complexity of the language is not the complexity of the grammar, but it is also not the complexity of the thoughts beneath the grammar, then what is it, according to you?"
A useless, poorly defined mess?

Also
>thoughts beneath the grammar
Read some fucking Wittgenstein.

>Because it's obvious that a more advanced language allows more complex thoughts
Lots of shit is 'obvious', that doesn't mean it's true. It's obvious that a heavier object will fall faster. It's obvious that the world is flat. That doesn't make it in any way true.

> Are you saying the mathematical idea of complexity itself doesn't exist? Or are you saying science itself is normative? Because that's wrong.
No, I'm saying you're applying your normative values with the thin dressing of information theory as a pseudo-scientific way to justify your own ignorant assertions about languages.

>this thread
Oh man, this is why you shouldn't get your linguistics education from racialist science blogs.

>>1693236
It seems that it is how every 4chan thread works. Everything starts well, you'd expect to share your views and learn more about the topic but then the thread is crowded by autism and it turns shit.

>>1693166
>Because it's obvious that a more advanced language allows more complex thoughts.
Prove it. Protip: you can't, that's just not how language works.

>>1693014
>>1693075
>feature
La caractéristique
A característica
La característica
La caratteristica
Caracteristica (-a)
Karakteristik-la
Etc...

File: Apparently this map indicates the two counting cultures still in existence, from John Barrow's Pi in the Sky.jpg (17KB, 461x259px) Image search: [Google]

17KB, 461x259px

>>1692506
>many african languages have 3 numbers
Which ones? I've encountered quite a lot of West and Central African languages and I can't think of a single one, they all have quite normal couting systems. Either way, how exactly is counting a factor of language complexity ?

>declensions increase the complexity of the language
>"I'm going to his house with the cousin of a friend on friday"
meh
>"I'm going his houseto a friend's cousinwith fridayon"
so complex

>>1694931
That's not really how declensions work desu.

>>1694938
At least that's how Latin felt like to me, with some extra words you usually wouldn't mention in English.

>>1692900
>you can't EXPLAIN to him, with simple language, why entropy is different, and why it's more important. his language simply doesn't have the ability to express these things. if it gained the ability to do so, it would essentially be a new language.

My dad speaks Tigrinya and Anharuc and I'm sure he can get the concept of Entropy.

>>1693850
Express the concept of 'banter' in any other language using only one word.

>>1695445
Be.

>>1690795

Polish (and other Slavic languages too I imagine) accomplishes the same thing through word order without any need for articles.

>Krzesło jest w domu

The chair is in the house

>W domu jest krzesło

In the house is a chair

>>1695171
I'm pretty sure there isn't a single ethiopian nuclear physicist, and I'm pretty sure being "pretty sure" someone understands a scientific concept isn't a very good threshold for being s cientific. Science needs to be capable of expressing near absolute certainty.

>>1695628
>and I'm pretty sure being "pretty sure" someone understands a scientific concept isn't a very good threshold for being s cientific. Science needs to be capable of expressing near absolute certainty.

You can easily come up with a term which is what many languages do. Either that or borrow words.

>>1695639
Okay, come back to me with a ju'hoan who can talk about set theory and I'll give up the point.

>>1695628
Also there are many Ethiopian scientists no nuclear physicists of note though I am aware or though but there us a physists.

Yes grammatical gender is pointless and the concept of gendered nouns is stupid Idk what frogs and spaniards were thinking.


On the subject of language are gendered verbs pointless as well?

>>1695648
The point was about if Entropy can be explained adequately why it's different and important in an African language.

>>1695651
african phds perform at about the same level as a western bachelor's graduate. just fyi

according to signals theory that began to be developed in ww2 in order to computerize or mechanize speech, in accordance with decryption and performing hash functions, some shit is literally just more complex than others.

we have brain scans of people speaking languages now and some languages literally just provoke more fucking brain activity.

this is a stupid fucking discussion.

>>1695666
"the really really small hot rock eventually transfers its spirit energy to the really really small cold rock and both smalrocks end up cold with the same amount of spirit energy from the great anaconda."

consider me convinced lad

>>1695691
>we have brain scans of people speaking languages now and some languages literally just provoke more fucking brain activity.

Source?

>>1695707
Do you really think that all African languages don't have any abstract terms? I haven't learned any, but I doubt that they don't have terms like "smallest thing" or "object".

I really can't tell whether you actually mean this. With /pol/ even dumbest things are possible.

>>1695628
Why are you so adamant about requiring a physicist? Precise and technical language is a requirement outside of the natural sciences, too, like in legal sciences and theology.

>>1695741
>Do you really think that all African languages don't have any abstract terms?

Which is pretty funny for him to think of because religion and spirituality uses a lot of abstract terms in it unless that anon is going to make a case of "African religions don't count".

>>1695762
For some unexplainable reason there is no african word for:
empathy
morality
patience
future
gratitude
promise
consent(no Im not joking)
altruism
justice
law
evidence
detail
maintenance
knowledge

>>1695778

>"african" is a language

???

>>1695778
Cant tell if bait

>>1695793
African tribal languages anon.

>>1695800

Which, specifically?

>>1695778
>empathy
"same belly feel"
>morality
"I won't kill you know, but if you insult my blood-horor I will rape your wife"
>patience
uh....
>future
"tomorrow-tomorrow"
>promise
this one is famously documented, kek

this is getting exhausting, though. the fact that these idiot-posters don't think needing to explain a sentence's worth of embedded concepts with every other word ISNT less complex is stunning.

what ideal guides them? absolute equality? what makes them think all languages are equally stochastically complex? the mere thought is idiotic

hold on guys "all genomes are equally complex" "all molecules are equally complex" "all lifeforms have equal potential." what a fucking religion

>>1695778
> Being this fucking stupid

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>>1695628
>>1695691
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigerian_Americans#Education
>almost 40% of Nigerian Americans hold bachelor's degrees, 17% hold master's degrees, and 4% hold doctorates, more than any other ethnic group in the nation
>Nigerian immigrants have the highest education attainment level in the United States, surpassing every other ethnic group in the country, according to U.S Bureau Census data.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-Saharan_Africa#Education
>In some OECD countries, like the United States, Sub-Saharan Africans are the most educated immigrant group.
And if you still have doubts concerning the quality of African education in Africa (or at least the complexity of their science program), just type "annale bac"+[former French colony] and try to solve what up to 50% of French-speaking African high school students are able to solve. You'll feel like a retard.

>>1695778
Funny. Cos perhaps only two of those are actually English.

>>1695821

Latinate influence into English did bring new concepts into the language, but in many cases borrowings simply trampled and replaced their Germanic equivalents.

>>1695846
And so the same can be said of any 'lacking' supposed-'tribal' languages.

If the people of Oongo-Bongo don't have the word for entropy, they simply borrow it. It's not as if the concept itself is simply 'unknowable' by them.

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>>1695778

>>1695812
>>1695778
How about you stop making up caricatures of languages and start backing up your wild claims about the totality of languages spoken in Africa? You seem to be very sure, so I bet you must have done a lot of research and can easily offer us a whole grove of proper citations.

>>1695819
Shit I missed the first anon's point, as education in former French colonies is mostly in French.

>>1695819
we already know college access in america is mostly mediated by income. we also know that the only nigerians who make it over here are millionaires, and they STILL have inferior educational outcomes to whites and asians.

>african bac
high school in africa is privately funded. these people are probably in the top 3% of african ability.

>>1695819
What is tougher is that many African countries don't teach in the native language in schools at all so often the kids are put into getting their heads figuratively dick-slapped with English/French on direct onset. Only a few places are really utilizing the native language at school but this is growing slowly.

Imagine having to learn the Japanese curriculum in Japanese with little assistance. These kids are trial-by-fired into French/English with the luxury of parent fluent in French not something to rely on (hell that french fluent parent could be too busy to help out with your homework and rural the chances are low).

>>1695919
So is every fucking kid in BAC.
Also many Nigerians aren't super rich or well off. Many are poor or middle class that come to the U.S where their education is not recognized so they often take meagre jobs (or study if they have the money to). Typical Taxi driver was a engineer/ university educated teacher back home stuff.

>>1695863
Those are recent additions the actual oral tongues before colonialism had no words of those terms.

>>1695977
How do you know that?

>>1695977
Proofs?

>>1695977
Wouldn't you notice the obvious ripped from another language words in that list?

>>1695977
>genuinely believing that there are languages that don't even have the concept of "law"
Not sure if serious or trolling.

>>1695977
Before colonialism most of them lived in hunter-gatherer tribal societies! There's a fuckthon of south american languages, like guarani, without abstract nouns like friendship or love.

Search for a PIE root of any of those words and you will get what I'm saying.

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>>1695919
>they STILL have inferior educational outcomes to whites and asians
>"more than any other ethnic group in the nation"
>inferior educational outcomes to whites and asians
>"highest education attainment level"
>inferior
I'm confused now, which one of us has poor reading comprehension?
>the only nigerians who make it over here are millionaires
Pic related
>high school in africa is privately funded
[citation needed]
I do feel like African students tend to choose private schools more easily than elsewhere though, for obvious reasons. But that doesn't make it an elitist system.
>in the top 3% of african ability
[citation needed]

>>1696001
They have love "aihu" but no distinguishing between love between friend's, lovers and love for god. Furthermore "To love" for them means to find oneself in another.
Then again you can uses "love" in the religious, romantic, familial and friendship sense in English too. For friendship it's hospitality.

>>1696003
>I do feel like African students tend to choose private schools more easily than elsewhere though, for obvious reasons. But that doesn't make it an elitist system.

But lacklustre public school system (more underfunded and resource strained) is something that smut be dealt with as well as free education to at least the end of secondary school.

>>1690310
>"pointless linguistic feature"
(fem., La) Característica lingüística inútil.

>>1696046
>ü

>>1695947
the average nigerian is literally a millionaire in america. the average chinese makes 30k per capita, and make 16k per capita in the 90's, and still had superior educational outcomes

>>1696003
>having MORE degrees means that the people are graduating at the TOP
how are epople, in twenty fucking sixteen, still confusing titles with quantitative measurements and accomplishments?

the average college graduate reads at an 11th grade reading level. having LOTS of 11th graders does not ensure better educational outcomes than having a sightly lower number of people with graduate level reading levels in physics

>>1695778
'African' isn't a language, even 'African tribal languages' is a garbage descriptor that means nothing.

English also doesn't have a word for plenty of shit. It's a red herring, and really doesn't matter if you can stuff a more complicated term into one word, or do it via phrases. The concept can be expressed either way.

>>1695628
There aren't any nuclear plants in Ethiopia. Ethiopia is also pretty corrupt and the quality of higher education is pretty meh. Doesn't mean an Ethiopian isn't able to discuss nuclear physics in one of the several main languages of the country.

>>1695445
Quatschen.

>>1695648
If you make an outlandish claim, it's your job to prove the point, not say "Until you prove otherwise I am right", you lazy fucking pleb.

You are not hear to discuss language, you're hear to put your /pol/ cart before the horse.

>>1695778
You are a moron

t. Ghanaian

>>1695846
>MUH MOVING GOALPOSTS!

>>1696939
the fact that ethiopia can't do nuclear science, and that there is probably not a single book written in an ethiopian language, on nuclear science, is pretty good evidence that the language is incapable of handling it. because in fact, the languages never HAVE handled it.

>>1696001
Most of 'them' who? You know Ethiopia for example had one of the oldest imperial dynasties until the Italians fomented a coup? That's what got the Ras Tafarians so upset.

>>1696573
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-10-13/it-isn-t-just-asian-immigrants-who-excel-in-the-u-s-
http://factfinder.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?src=bkmk

>Nigerian-Americans, for instance, have a median household income well above the American average, and above the average of many white and Asian groups, such as those of Dutch or Korean descent.
>Nigerian immigrants are especially educated, with almost two-thirds holding college degrees -- a significantly higher percentage even than Chinese or South Korean immigrants.
>The average Nigerian-American household earns 61,000 in income annually

Just fuck off

We all know this discussion is headed for "f-fucking niggers! grr!"

>>1696001
>Before colonialism most of them lived in hunter-gatherer tribal societies!
Jesus Christ, this board is full of morons

By the middle ages only the pygmies, khoisan, and a few scattered bands of the upper congo basin lived by hunting and gathering

>>1696978
Discuss nuclear physics right now without using German, Greek, or Latin words

>>1696978
Wow, you really are stupid. Necessity is the mother of invention.

Saying Ethiopia 'can't do nuclear science', is like saying Luxembourg 'cant do ancient Shao-Lin kung-fu monasteries' and therefore blah blah blah. Your argument is predicated on deeply flawed logic.

I'm sure there are a handful of Ethiopian nuclear physicists, though probably not in Ethiopia which has no nuclear industry. They've probably been educated in foreign school systems, and so know all they need to know by having learnt English/French/Farsi/Chinese, etc.

IF there aren't books on nuclear science in an Ethiopian language (your job to prove it, not ours), it's simply because the demand isn't there, not because it's incapable.

>>1696995
to be fair, I think it's most just this one guy.

>>1696988
african american women (not nigerian, but born here) have more college degrees than any other demographic in america. google search "america's most educated demographic."

unfortunately, those same graduates also have the lowest literacy rates from post-graduate surveys.

a degree is not proof of an education

>>1697007
>asking someone to prove an absence
kek

>>1697014
>making ridiculous flagrant claims
Kek

>>1689907
Pretty much this

>tfw Israeli
>Tfw see gender, especially gendered numbers disintegrated before my eyes

Feels wierd fama

>>1696931
No it cant abstract nouns dont work like that, the fact that blacks couldnt naturally come up with these terms says alot about their psychology.
>>1696995
Majority of black africa was nothing but tribes, even their kingdoms were really simple jungle states that were hell on earth according to missionaries.

>>1697196
>Go to check this
>Google translate
>English to Swahili

Oh LOOK, they DO have words for it!
Who woulda thunk it

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>>1697196
>English gets more than half of its vocabulary from other languages
>superior language etc
>other languages borrow scientific terms from other languages
>obvious sign of psychological(???) inferiority

>>1697225
>claims that languages are all equal
>claims black women are the most educated demographic in america
>forgets that they're mostly unemployed ethnic studies majors
>double down: a piece of paper is what defines intelligence, not how they speak, or their actual language
>fuuuuuu

>>1697253
That wasn't me, I just found your post a bit peculiar.

>>1697253
>>claims that languages are all equal
They are. You have a bias towards particular languages and what they're able to express more efficiently doesn't change that.
>>claims black women are the most educated demographic in america
>forgets that they're mostly unemployed ethnic studies majors
>double down: a piece of paper is what defines intelligence, not how they speak, or their actual language
No one claimed anything about that. Also how you speak or what language you use has nothing to do with your intelligence. Even ebonics is a perfectly valid dialect of English, simply because you can communicate perfectly well with it, regardless of how you'd like to think otherwise because of "muh prestige dialect"

>>1697196
Are you seriously saying African languages, do not have abstract nouns when their people have very complex and varied mythologies and religions?

>>1696970
'Moron' is an English word. Ghanaians couldn't come up with their own words for that. Ergo, Africans are stupid 70 IQs subhumans. Absolutely cited by linguistics PhD. Certainly not African PhDs of course. :^)

>>1689186
MAD
A A
DAM

>>1697196
>were really simple jungle states that were hell on earth according to missionaries.
Totally not a biased source, do you also know that American drink snow cofee and that there isn't any birds in their cities because they eat them to not starve? Just look at this video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6qF5NU-ehU

>>1697714
>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6qF5NU-ehU
sounds about right 2bh

>>1697196
>the fact that blacks couldnt naturally come up with these terms says alot about their psychology.
At least you're not pretending you're not a racist anymore. Besides the fact you are plain wrong, it is also beyond obvious you know absolutely nothing about linguistics, or psychology.

I'm sure this kind of pseudo-science flies in your home board board though. Try taking it there: >>>/pol/

>>1697562
Moron is a Greek word, but I see what you were doing there so it's coo'.

>>1689368
Apparently Luganda sorta kinda has that system somewhat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luganda#Noun_classes

It has its own gender for long or cylindrical objects, one gender for big things and liquids and one gender for small things, among others.

>>1698751
Not just Luganda, isn't that a common feature in Niger Congo languages?

>>1689064
It's a reference to an esperanto shill on krautchan.

>>1698805
I just found it from the main article about gender systems, it's possible. I had heard about something similar based on shapes before, may have been a different language

>>1698823
Some counters/classifiers in Chinese and in Japanese are also shape-influenced, although it's not literally all about the geometrical form
>>1690428
>>1690432

>>1697562
> 'Moron' is an English word.
Greek for 'fucking stupid'.

>>1689186
You did fine and there are others here sharing your view on this. I won't engage in this discussion though.

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>>1697562
>'Moron' is an English word.
Greek, actually

>Ghanaians couldn't come up with their own words for that
Well since you mention it

>Ogyennyentwie
>Ogyimfoɔ
>Kwasea
>Kwaseampani

All describe you accurately, dummy

>Ergo, Africans are stupid 70 IQs subhumans
This meme again?

>Absolutely cited by linguistics PhD
Kek

Dude, just stop

You're making yourself look even spergier

Typical obruni throwing a typical series of obruni nonsense out

It's impractical that English doesn't have singular form of 'you'.

>>1699148
Or the dual form desu

>>1699148
>>1699163

Some dialects do.

>>1699208
I presume you mean "you" vs. "yall" for the singular form of "you" but what would be an example of dual?

>>1699223
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You#Informal_plural_forms

>>1699248
Indeed. I was asking for dual, though, since you seemed to imply it used it in some forms.

>>1699258
"you both", duh

>>1699148
Works just fine, actually. And 'plural you' does exist in many dialects, but is not attested in standard grammar because it's not considered formal. Old English had "thou" or "thee" (usage depended on the century and regional variations), but remain only as relics in a few dialects.

>>1699293
Oh, right. Still, "both" and "either" (another one I remembered just one) don't really constitute the dual system.

>>1699223
Doesn't exist in modern English, but Old English had "git", pronounced like "hyeet", where the y would have been a more throaty y. Something similar to the German/Scottish 'ch' sound.

It's 1st person cognate was 'weet', whereas 'we' was for any number more than 2.

>>1699148
Some English dialects still use 'thou' and 'thee'.

>>1699223
Singular: thou
Dual: you two (or >>1699357)
Plural: you

>>1699148
you is singular, if a distinction is necessary, people say "you all" or "you guys" rather than "you".

>>1699433
> people say "you all" or "you guys" rather than "you"
> people
Nope. Only Americans. And only some of those.

>English
>sex based
What?

No. It allows for more abstract communication and therefor lends itself to development.