English grammar is far simpler than German grammar. Eliminating noun genders, declensions, and cases (as English does) is a great simplification over German. I've never understood the need for noun genders and I scratch my head at a society that makes its members memorize such useless information.
That said, German pronunciation is more regular than English pronunciation. Every letter combination is in most cases pronounced exactly the same in every word.
Take, for example, the vowel combination "ie." No matter where you see it in a German word, it will be pronounced "ee".
Likewise, the combination "ei" will always be pronounced "eye."
Contrast this with the scattershot pronunciations English has for the same combinations:
> I scratch my head at a society that makes its members memorize such useless information.
Such a weird perspective on language and on the agency of societies. There are tons of "useless" things in any language. For instance, why not get rid of all the tenses in English? Do we really need the past progressive?
To make English spelling more "logical" (so people need to remember less useless information!), we should again look to Mark Twain:
I recently started learning Khmer (Cambodian). It's an awesome language. No tenses (all assumed from context... if something happened in the past, you say it happened "already", and there's a single modifier to all verbs to indicate they will happen). No genders, at all (there's no "he/she/they" problem). The numbering system is simple adn consistent, and it's applied to months and hours ("one month" is a measure of duration, "month one" is January). I reminds me of reading good code; simple, elegant, with no unnecessary cruft.
It's given me a new perspective on (as you say) all the useless crap we have in English.
Oh, and I started learning German, too. TFA made me laugh.
I learned Thai, which shares Khmer's refreshing simplicity, like not having tenses.
However, it has "classifiers", which are used when counting things. In English, you might say "Three children", in Thai you would say "Children three persons", where "person" happens to be the correct classifier for children. Makes sense in that case, but in general it's weird (and somewhat comedic): for instance airplanes and bamboo share the same classifier ("long hollow things").
There are about 80 classifiers, and part of learning the language is learning the correct classifier to go with each noun, much like learning genders in German. Same as with genders, if you get the classifier wrong, you'll still be understood, but considered uneducated (or badly in command of the language).
BTW, and programmers will love this: this situation means that when counting things of disparate types, you need to typecast!
Funny (to me, anyway) story: my wife was simultaneously telling off one of our sons, nicknamed "O", and one of our dogs, also nicknamed "O". Since they don't share the same classifier, she cast their classifier to the made-up-on-the-spot classifier "O" so it would both be factually and grammatically correct.
Yeah, it's weird, Thai and Khmer are very similar, and share some words, but also very different. Khmer isn't tonal, and has really simplified grammar.
They used to share an alphabet, too, but the Thai opted to simplify it (westernise it) while the Khmer opted to keep their original alphabet. Written Khmer is hard for us westerners to deal with because of this. They have lots of vowels and consonants that we don't have (I always struggle with the consonant between 'b' and 'p', because it doesn't seem like there should be any room for another consonant in there).
But English has a consonant between 'b' and 'p' ('pʰ' in IPA) as well. Just consider the difference between 'ban', 'span' and 'pan'. The 'p' in 'span' is not as forceful as the 'p' in 'pan', and they're actually different consonants.
To continue with my coding analogy... German is like Java (huge, sprawling, full of conceptsextendedwaypastthepointofsanity), English is like C++ (mashed together out of two different languages and made to work, mostly), Khmer is like Go (favouring simplicity over expressiveness).
It does rely a lot on context. If you don't share a context with your listener, it's easy to get confused. Given the cultural gap with the West, it can mean that you're fluent in Khmer, but still miss a lot of the meaning because you don't share the same cultural context. Essentially culture-wide in-jokes.
But then, I had to explain British rhyming slang to my German gf the other day, and she thought it was crazy. I guess there's nothing that unusual about culture-wide in-jokes.
It's the “agency of societies” that helped English lose its gendered nouns. One theory is that Old English society found them useless because there was overlap between endings, causing noun ending inflection to “collapse” into a single neutral form, which started in the North of England and progressed to the South.[1]
Societal changes are already influencing gendered nouns in Germany[2]. Some dialects of German (Niederdeutsch) also use de instead of der/die.
I'm a British national living in Austria. I've spoken with Austrian natives about the difficulty of learning German noun genders who admit that it feels increasingly old fashioned to them. The local dialect here slurs some noun endings so it's almost ambiguous, just as Old English once did.
There's no place for reinforcement of gender stereotypes via language (it is hard to find gender-neutral phrases in German - you are either a male programmer or a female one). Two languages that gender the same noun differently also have societies that use a different class of adjective (feminine vs masculine) for the word.[1]
To me it seems entirely reasonable to call gendered nouns “useless”, and to see them as a burden on a language and a society.
> "I've spoken with Austrian natives [...] who admit that it feels increasingly old fashioned to them. "
I can guarantee you, that your sample of Austrian natives is not representative of the majority of native speakers. Not even remotely. As a native speaker you will barely notice it, unless foreigners remind you of it.
> "To me it seems entirely reasonable to call gendered nouns “useless”, and to see them as a burden on a language and a society."
I can hardly imagine a force strong enough to change the way people speak to such a fundamental degree, as would be the removal of noun genders in German.
Advocating such force comes with a stench: It may have more todo with projecting power over the people you interact with and less with interacting itself. Which is why proponents of gender-neutral language in German often fail to not come across as snobbish. Which is why the only people in German speaking countries that speak gender-neutral are politicians or ideologues in academia.
Thanks for sharing - it's good to hear other opinions on this, and it's very likely the group of five or so people I was speaking to are not representative.
Thanks for taking my response the way you did and not as an insult (honestly, you're a rare exception these days on HN for not just downvote and leave as soon as the topic touches politics)!
>I can guarantee you, that your sample of Austrian natives is not representative of the majority of native speakers. Not even remotely.
Agreed. I find it hard to imagine how something can possibly sound old fashioned when there is no more modern alternative.
My German may not be perfect, but I have never heard anyone fudge definite articles in a way that makes them indistinguishable from each other (or drop them altogether).
> I find it hard to imagine how something can possibly sound old fashioned when there is no more modern alternative.
Exactly. Who'd be insulted by the moon being male in German and the sun being female? The sun, men or the moon?
Languages represent a form of continuous application of voluntary cooperation. Which is why almost no native speaker will think of his words he uses as an insult (either to a gender or that gendered word) but as a means to deliver information.
Using gender-neutral German in every day interactions will automatically make you come across affected. It is a linguistic Clinton-Thumb.
"Whenever the subject comes up, someone is sure to bring up […] Shaw's ghoti-- a word which illustrates only Shaw's wiseacre ignorance. English spelling may be a nightmare, but it does have rules, and by those rules, ghoti can only be pronounced like goatee."
In English, the writing has become detached from the writing to the point where it is not possible to write a word upon hearing it the first time or to pronounce it upon reading it.
Fixed how? By revising the orthography to accurately reflect pronunciation? (If so, whose?) Some English words have major variations in pronunciation in different regions (of the world, or indeed just of England). Should the revised spellings differ between regions?
> English grammar is far simpler than German grammar.
How do you negate in English? How does one eloquently and idiomatically combine English modal verbs? What are the rules governing when and how English deviates from SVO? Whom is still a word in English; how do its corner cases work? I could go on.
In other words, maybe English's grammar is simpler than German's and maybe it isn't, but it definitely isn't as clear-cut as you make it out to be.
I'm a native speaker of Norwegian, a language which also has three grammatical genders. I don't experience it as having to memorise genders. I only notice them when they are wrong.
The verb "regne" is ambiguous and the gender helps disambiguate ut.
Sometimes, the grammatical gender conveys information about the noun. Is it abstract or inanimate? Probably neuter. Is it alive? Can it move? Probably masculine or feminine.
Sometimes, when a follow-on sentence discusses previously introduced objects, gendered articles can clue you onto which objects are being discussed.
There are homonyms in languages with genderless nouns too, such as English, but context usually makes it clear.
It's hard to imagine a real-world situation where “it's raining” would be confused with “it's calculating” when stripped of the gender, for example.
> Sometimes, when a follow-on sentence discusses previously introduced objects, gendered articles can clue you onto which objects are being discussed.
That's the best argument I've heard so far, but it's so rare to require gender for comprehension. It seems a push to burden a whole language with gendered nouns for this purpose.
Regardless of the potential use for disambiguation, every noun having a gender affecting the articles and pronouns to be used adds a significant burden when learning the language. In some languages, like Spanish, the spelling of the noun nearly always indicates its gender, but this is not the case in German.
Acquiring a language as a native speaker in childhood is a significantly different experience from trying to learn one as an adult.
As a native speaker of Slavic language, I've never understood the need for differentiating between "THE table" and "A table". It's useless and clear from the context what is meant (note that both are different from "THIS/THAT table", which I do NOT deem useless.)
For English and Norwegian, I've learned grammatical rules that cover ca 80% of use-cases, the rest is guessing and I still get it wrong sometimes.
> As a native speaker of Slavic language, I've never understood the need for differentiating between "THE table" and "A table"
This was a common sentiment I heard from Russian students when teaching them English. The concept of articles is absolutely maddening, I think, when your native language does not have it.
I recall trying to teach it with a simple explanation. “I heard a dog walking outside. The dog pushed the door open and entered.” By switching from “a dog” to “the dog”, I expressed that the dog I heard was the same dog that entered. We translated the same sentences into Russian and they expressed that it was natural to assume, without the articles it was the same dog. I then asked them “but what if was a different dog that entered?” and they indicated the speaker would likely add a clarifying clause to the statement to ensure that there are two different dogs in scope.
It caused me to ponder and I came to the realization that some of these elements of language while seemingly “useless” (meaning, you could clearly make a language work without them) are what add subtle richness to a language. Just as I can do without a ternary in JavaScript, I enjoy its succinctness even if it might be a bit confusing for a new learner.
I recall comparing some of my own difficulties learning Russian as a native English speaker. My head literally exploded when I realized for every verb I had to learn a perfective and imperfective aspects. Something simple like “I did it.” What on earth is the difference between the two aspects, I often asked. To Russians it was clear - it addeded subtle richness.
I guess what I learned is that in language “not needed” does not mean “useless”. I learned to love the richness of the Russian language and began to better appreciate some of richness of my own language that I previously took for granted.
> “I heard a dog walking outside. The dog pushed the door open and entered.”
"THE door"? Which door? Why is "the" there? Seems as yet another case of "tautological article", as the answer is "that exact door that was opened by the dog", so why not just write "[The] dog pushed door open and entered."? No extra information is conveyed by "the".
Of course it's maddening since no explanation makes full sense.
> I then asked them “but what if was a different dog that entered?”
Indeed, what would you say in English if it were a different dog? "I heard a dog walking outside. [Another] dog pushed the door open end entered."
Writing the second sentence as "A dog pushed the door.." if there were another makes absolutely no sense to me (because: which dog? -- another one or the same one?), so when writing "Dog pushed door.." it's very natural to assume that it's the same dog.
> What on earth is the difference between the two aspects, I often asked. To Russians it was clear - it addeded subtle richness.
Ah, but aspect is more than just subtle richness: it's a tool that it makes it possible to succinctly express complex temporal relationships.
I’m curious your native language so I can better understand your perspective. Articles convey meaning to me - relatively, perhaps, or specificity. How to use “a” vs. “the” is not taught in schools to native speakers of English. It’s not something that is prescribed by rules. A speaker selects “a” or “the” by what they are trying to convey and a native speaker does not ever question when he should use one or their other based on grammar or rules. Instead, he chooses based on what he is trying to express.
I wonder how the native language you learn as a child impacts the way your brain not only expresses concepts but how it even perceives them.
If I walked up to a my friend, a native speaker of English and said “I like dogs” he’d probably respond with “that’s nice”. If I walked up and said “I like the dogs” he’d probably ask “which dogs?” because the use of “the” conveys that it is a specific group of dogs. In a language without articles you might use “I like those dogs” or “I like these dogs” to call out specificity among dogs in general. That’s great. There’s lots of different ways to express the same concept in virtually all languages. Redundancy in expression doesn’t remove meaning from any method.
My whole point was there is no requirement for articles, many languages work without articles, but just because they don’t convey meaning to you doesn’t mean they don’t convey meaning to someone else. They add specificity and relatively that is subtle yet important within the language, even if it could be accomplished by other means.
I heard another example last night when watching sport news and am curious your thoughts. The announcer said:
“This is not the story of the night but it definitely is a story.” If I drop the articles, it seems I have to re-word that sentence to convey what is being expressed.
I'm not disputing that articles are sometimes useful, indeed sometimes you need "the" or "that" for disambiguation. But in most cases it's [a?] noise that I can't make sense of as in your previous example.
[I seriously cannot decide whether "it's noise" or "it's a noise" is correct in the previous sentence because it makes sense to put "some" in front but putting "a" "feels" wrong.]
> "The dog opened the door and entered."
Why "THE" door? It's not been previously introduced and it refers to the very door being opened by the dog. SUCH use of articles is confusing and nonsensical when set against all of the examples where "the" _does_ make a difference.
Similar examples: "I'm on the phone", "I'm in the shower", "The food is in the fridge", etc. By the same "rule" that requires "the" in these examples, you should be supposed to say "I'm at the home", which is for some reason wrong.
Next, should one use "the" / "a" or nothing here: "I'm at the post office." [Which one? There are tens if not hundreds in a large city.]
I've learned those and many others as expressions by heart, but use of "the" is a mystery to me.
As for "a", I have two simple rules: nouns (usually) cannot stand naked, and "a" is appropriate if "some" would be appropriate as well.
Or, if I imagine a teacher saying: "Today, we're going to learn about the animals that ruled the Earth 100 million years ago."
Why "the" animals? Why did I put it there in the first place? Because if I read the sentence silently, it feels "wrong" without an article before "animals", yet I cannot put "a" since it's in plural.
Or, even more amusingly: why "THE Earth"? We only have one.
Or, contrast with: "that ruled planet Earth 100 million years ago". No "THE planet Earth". Why? Or is it correct to say "THE planet Earth"? I seriously have no idea.
> “This is not the story of the night but it definitely is a story.” If I drop the articles, it seems I have to re-word that sentence to convey what is being expressed.
If you drop articles, it'd be ambiguous in English because it could be interpreted as "This is not (story of night) [i.e., story _about_ night] but it definitely is story."
The ambiguity in Croatian is resolved by declension; "night" would be in genitive case which seems to be the role of "the" in that sentence.
"A" in "a story" doesn't seem to have any purpose (to me).
EDIT: So, that's my perspective. I can't describe it in a better way than listing examples where "THE"/"A" is somehow required (or, worse, it must NOT be there), yet the use doesn't have anything to do with "specificity".
As an amusing anecdote: A couple of years ago I attended a course on scientific writing in English and we had to write an essay. The teacher returned the essay to me, it was full of red ink, and the vast majority of the errors (like >80%) were wrong use of articles (missing or wrong).
EDIT2: As for my native language (Croatian), definiteness is mostly implied. When you feel that specificity is needed because there are multiple potential subjects/objects, you use "THAT/THIS". For example, say you were at an animal shelter and you wanted to take some animal home. If there only were one dog among the animals, and you liked that dog of all animals, you'd say "I like dog, I'll take it home." If there were multiple dogs, you'd point and say "I like THAT dog, I'll take it home."
I would add that so many tenses in other languages also feel excessive (there are only three in Russian). And so does using the verb "to be" for the present tense: in Russian it's enough to say "I developer". This and the wide range of diminutives are the best parts of the Russian grammar, everything else is overly complex.
> I came to the realization that some of these elements of language while seemingly “useless” (meaning, you could clearly make a language work without them) are what add subtle richness to a language.
For me, "the" and "a" are critical for understanding whether you are introducing something new or assuming that I know what you are talking about from context. If I use "the" then it's something clear from context, if I use "a" it's something new. The languages I know make a big fuss about this so I'm curious how you can figure out from context whether you can figure out something from context.
> I'm curious how you can figure out from context whether you can figure out something from context.
Erm, memory? You remember whether something has been introduced or not.
Take a hypothetical phone conversation, an example that nobody has managed to explain to me satisfactorily: A: "Where are you?" B: "I'm in [the/a/(nothing)] shower."
People tell me that "the" is the correct thing to use. But A is none the wiser; B could be at home, in a gym, at work... A is none the wiser about _which_ shower B is in and the shower has not been introduced previously in the conversation. It's tautological "the", B is in that shower that he's currently using, so he could just as well say "I'm in shower".
Or, similarly: A: "Where's my food?" B: "I've put it in fridge." If A is at work, he'd go looking into fridge at office. If at home, he'd go look into fridge in kitchen. If there are two fridges nearby, he'd ask "Which one?"
Even though I deliberately omitted "the/a" in the previous paragraph, I don't think you got confused about _which_ office or _which_ kitchen fridge A would go looking in. And personally I cannot imagine that A, upon hearing "it's in fridge" while being in the office, would go home and look into the fridge at home. Or that he'd even have to ask "which fridge?" if there only were one at office.
So there's an attempted answer.
EDIT: one of my rules of thumb is: if I can put "some" in front of a noun without changing the meaning, then it's most probably appropriate to use "a".
> Erm, memory? You remember whether something has been introduced or not.
This doesn't work in English, because both speakers are not assumed to have the same knowledge of context. The "the"/"a" distinguishes between something that describes and something that also determines.
Alice: Did you see any of those movies?
Bob: I saw the good one.
In this sentence, Bob is saying that "good one" can be figured out from context. In other words, Bob is saying that there is only one good movie in "those movies". Alice may or may not be aware of this from context, but she has learned that Bob thinks that there is only one good movie in "those movies".
Bob: I saw a good one.
In this sentence, Bob is saying that "good one" describes the movie he saw, but he is not saying that this determines which one he saw. He is not making claims about context.
This is an example where it plays a role. In Slavic languages, you would say something like “I saw that good one” (inserting a definitive article substitute) or “the one I saw was good”; in English, you don’t need the latter phrasing with “a”; indeed, it is somewhat artificial example.
What the parent post was saying was well described by his examples of where the article is obviously superfluous and doesn’t provide contextual information - which is the majority of their uses. There are situations where articles carry information (nobody disputes that I think), but they are used far more frequently as grammatical filler.
“I saw that good one” -- translated to Croatian, this wording strongly implies that both knew upfront which movie was good and he watched only that one. But according to the parent's explanation it may not be the case, Alice has only learned that one of the movies was good.
and
"The one I saw was good" (he picked a random movie from the collection and it happened to be good -- which would be "a good one" from the parent's example).
Ah, finally an example where "the" does convey some extra information. However,
> Bob: I saw the good one.
Weird. Before I read your explanation I interpreted this as Alice and Bob having a prior mutual understanding about which of the movies was good and Alice immediately knows the particular movie he saw. Also, she knows that he decided upfront to watch (only) that movie.
EDIT: last point, if they don't have a prior understanding about which movie is "good", Bob would have to have watched _all_ of them to be able to say "THE good one". (Because, if he only watched a subset, an unwatched movie could be better than those he watched and would make him change his mind about which one is "good").
> she has learned that Bob thinks that there is only one good movie in "those movies".
According to your explanation, she still doesn't know _which_ movie he saw. She knows that only one was good and that it was the movie he saw. But then you could just say "I watched good one".
> "I saw a good one"
.. here, he picked a movie at random and it happened to be good. Yay, "a" does make a difference! :)
It's the (sorry) obligatory "the", because "the shower" has been lexicalized. This is very intimate, because the situation in which one talks about the shower, especially when still learning the language, will virtually always be at home with family. But enough talk. I will go to bed ... to bed myself. First I will go to the shower, an' shower, though. It's overall very unlikely I will have an in-shower phone call.
The given explanation is not satisfying. There's a difference between rhetorics and grammar. The common denominator is syntax (phonology, too, to a degree) but it differs between vocal and written speech. The semantics are the same, but you can take a look at the wiktionary page of [a] to get an idea of how diverse that is.
then, confused by seemingly nonsensical request of bringing some table along [why "some" -- because he doesn't remember the earlier conversation]: "Huh? Why, what table?"
As rytis pointed out, if the "sender" wants to emphasize the context, he'd say "And bring THAT table."
On the other hand, if the sender and receiver are thinking of a particular, but _different_ table, neither "table", nor "THE table", nor "THAT table" helps. (E.g., the receiver has one table that needs painting and one that needs to have its leg replaced, where "the" for the sender is the first and for the receiver the second table.)
A rule I heard was about abstract nouns requiring the article. It is not a strict rule, it seems, and what is abstract or not could be a matter of debate. In line with the OP notion something abstract would be exactly something that was not known. So here, the whole scenario is "the table". It's not any old table. In the speakers mind it is the sole reason of the listeners existence.
"hello, table?"
"Yes, this is table speaking"
"Is it still there?"
"Yes, it is here?"
"good good. bring it, table!"
It seems almost as if "it" and "the", highly underspecific terms are way more complicated in nature and thus have to repeated often to remind us ... just as much as egoists tend to speak a lot of "I", which I tend to avoid when I write my own texts because I do know who I am talking to. That is, "come" is usually preceded by "you", to address the recipient. "you come" is a full sentence. It's regularly binding "here", but if "here" needs to be specified, the verb is "come by". The object is a new phrase, and to set that off with the appropriate contrast, we simply use an article. Otherwise, "come to shop" would appear like a compound verb. Indeed, "come to town" is idiomatic, and that's lexicalized as a compound word (collocation) as seen in "homecoming". While "bring" is usually bound to "me" (or here, eventually, as the difference is minimal). It wouldn't be "table bringing". You don't address the table itself to bring itself. The table doesn't belong to the noun, the subject of the verb - not anymore. The status of the table is kind of unclear and that's the whole point. It already changed ownership as it seems, but didn't change hands yet. The "the" then is a placeholder for a qualifier. It is the most simple place holder next "a" or nothing. It should change to "my", and since we also have "(to) me" in scope, that would actually be very apt. "Bring my table". Is that one also objectionable? Diplomatically, you'd say "your table". The article is used to show that' you want to be specific, but not too specific yet. In essence, it changes only changes the scope. If it didn't and if it was clear that you have (are) the table, then it would be enough to say "you bring!" And people really do or did talk like that. "I'm hungry, cook!" "Answer! I wanna have an answer. You answer" "guard, guard!". etc. etc.
Linguistically, articles are the exception rather than the rule. Grammatical words are always derived from concrete words and 'the' is just a degeneration of 'that'.
I am fascinated by how little syntax is required to actually communicate with each other. You can remove gender from language entirely and still understand what people mean. We can even get rid of time-based tenses and instead say something like "I go to the store yesterday". This is incorrect English, but the point is still communicated. As you say "the" and "a" could be condensed. You could go even further and combine these words with "one". Having traveled to a lot of places where I had to speak languages that I don't speak or understand, the amount of language built on top of the tiny "required" subset is marvelous and interesting.
Other questions that make language fun. Any ideas where eenie meanie miney moe comes from? Why does flat (low) German exist, and how far is it from Dutch (or English)? How many dialects of various languages are spoken in the Alps? Why do we call different Chinese dialects "dialects" and not "languages"? Which language has the most diverse set of conjugation rules? But I digress.
> Why does flat (low) German exist, and how far is it from Dutch (or English)?
I'm not a linguist by any means but as I understand it's a separate language with its' own dialects. Lower saxon nowadays might have a gradual dialect continuum in the West into the Netherlands but in a days of Hanse it was a widespread language around the Baltic sea and had a huge influence on other languages and cultures. Even today part of it's dialects are closer to Swedish than high German (specially Pommern which was part of Sweden for quite some time).
>As a native speaker of Slavic language, I've never understood the need for differentiating between "THE table" and "A table". It's useless and clear from the context what is meant (note that both are different from "THIS/THAT table", which I do NOT deem useless.)
One differentiating example could be:
One person says to another:
1) Put it on the table.
vs. saying:
2) Put it on a table.
(Where, in both cases, by "it", they mean some object, say a book or any other thing).
1) would imply there is only one table in the room, so "the" was used.
2) would imply there is more than one table in the room, so "a" was used, meaning put it on any table you wish, it doesn't matter which one.
I'm a German learning czech and have the opposite problem: the czech (and probably other slavic languages) still have those articles but mostly leave them away. I'm never really sure, when you still need to use them:
* ten/ta/to = that, not “the”; I.e. literally or figuratively pointing (including e.g. referencing previously mentioned object and not wanting to repeat it)
* nějaký etc. - some, not “a”, i.e. explicitly strongly expressing vagueness. “A” in English is automatic grammar construct, “some” is explicitly expressing uncertainess. That sentence would correctly be translated as “SOME woman asks for directions” - I.e. a woman you don’t know, some rando that walked in the shop for example. A more real sentence: “some woman is asking for you” (you don’t know her, never seen her, she just walked in and asked for your colleguae), “nějaká paní se po tobě ptá”. You would use “a” in English here, it warrants clarifying the situation with “some” - and in Czech, that’s the only situation when you need these, when you are pointing to/referencing something or expressing vagueness.
Ah, thanks, I think I got it now. One problem for me was, that German der/die/das can actually translate to both, “the“ and “that“ depending on the emphasis.
are you sure it's not "that" (dies(e,es,er)) instead of "the"?
> Not sure what is different if the nějaká is left out.
I'd interpret it as "The woman asks for the way.", i.e., a particular person is contextually implied. Otherwise it doesn't make sense.
EDIT: alternately, it describes an abstract event of woman asking for directions. Putting it as "paní se ptá na cestu" would make perfect sense in, say, a movie script.
Say a friend observed you from the other side of the street talking with her, approached you and asked what was that about.
You could say "[nějaká] paní se ptá na cestu" both with and without "nějaká". WITH "nějaká" you'd be emphasizing it was a random woman. WITHOUT "nějaká" it'd be that particular woman he saw you talking with. though, I'd use "she" for describing the event, i.e., "she asked for the way".
Articles usually appear in the languages which (are starting to) lose inflection. Say, there is a Slavic language which had lost its cases and does have the articles now - Bulgarian
It's all a kind of ouroboros of languages - if something gets simplified, something else appears there
Careful what you wish for. Many languages are much more specific than English, but you don't think that English has a problem there, do you?
For example, why not introduce gendered nouns - they often help to clarify references? "The door and the window are open." - "Well, close es (=das window)" vs "Well, close sie (=die door)".
Other languages indicate evidentiality (that is, how a speaker learned about something) by a verb suffix, eg Eastern Pomo:
Now, I might say, in English that is clear from context, or expressed in some other way, but according to you, "we should avoid it if we can". Thus, better learn Eastern Pomo?
Grammar articles ("a" and "the") often times function as a type of glue for your words so that sentences can keep a certain pace, they also provide a lot of meaningful information on how sure you are about the thing that you are talking about.
Indeed, I once read an article about the Iliad, in which it claimed that the combination of the rhythm and other poetic features made it harder to screw up when reciting from memory.
> a society that makes its members memorize such useless information
That is a really strange angle on the subject of native language. If there's any language my society has made me learn, it's the one I'm writing now, my second (and absolutely indispensable) one. The gendering of nouns (in my national case, two genders) and sundry other weird historical linguistic baggage is just the way things are and ever were.
>I've never understood the need for noun genders and I scratch my head at a society that makes its members memorize such useless information.
Society doesn't make anybody do anything. Languages are not built in labs, they grow evolutionary and organically (with some bureaucratic intervention here and there).
For that particular people, following the historical lineages they went through, those things evolved in their language.
Plus, instead of seeing them as "useless information" (where the main concern is crudely expressing the most basic concepts to another, e.g. utilitarian communication), one could see them as a richer way of describing the world than English, and with more expressive power (not just for raw communication, for expression of feelings, poetry, etc as well).
(In fact a common point to many European essays from the past 200 or so years is how English is a cruder language suited mainly for "commerce").
Just today I had a chat with a friend about a movie named "rogue one". Roug, Rook, Roug, Rook. If feel quite fit writing english but talking - as someone with very litte practice - drives me mad.
That specific example points to the root cause of most English pronunciation weirdness - an insistence on preserving original spelling for loanwords even if they come from languages with very different orthography. "Rogue" and "chef" are both French loanwords that English still spells as if they were French, not to mention all the Latin loanwords that still give middle-schoolers endless pain.
Interestingly, "chief" is the same word as "chef" just imported from the Normans. French had a consonant shift, while English did not, and then imported the word again with the new pronunciation and spelling.
That vowel shift is not from French, but rather part of the English Great Vowel Shift [1]. The original loanword from Medieval Norman French to Middle English was /tʃeːf/ (spelled "chef"), compared to the re-borrowed /ʃɛf/.
Like fashion and law, spelling and pronounciation are a sign of status. It's not supposed to be easy. From another point of view, what does the state of the orthografy say about the authorities, are they lenient, chaotic ... speaking a different language?
School children are very low in the social hierarchy, of course, because they cannot defend themselves. Of course they are going to be oppressed when they note that there's no system behind and when they say it's too complicated they will be called lazy. The parents had to wade to shit, so they don't even notice the smell anymore, and now the children have to, too.
On the other hand, conservative orthography can help to learn the related languages (ie. French, Latin), serve as interesting step into history, exercise memory, and what not.
There could be no regular spelling. That's an illusory proposition, given the breadth of dialects that exist. So next you will require all the poor children to learn a new dialect, basically. Is that any better? It would be a loss of diversity, each one preserving a little bit of historic language development - and status. It's really a shame that status varies. Learning a language properly might give some stability.
What's really killing me is that the genders don't matter when you have a plural form.
It's all the same (ie. using "die" and the plural cases)
In Spanish or French for eg. you still have gender marks (los/Las for eg.) with the plural form but in German, it's all the same.
That makes me wonder why it's so necessary to have genders in the first place since the German plural doesn't have marks of it and it doesn't hurt understanding.
It's not necessary and as a native german it is something i can totally live with if foreigners get it wrong in conversations. Even people with years of being fluent in germany still ocassionally screw them up. In a similar way i always struggle pronouncing words like "caffeine, beard, deteriorate" etc after years of speaking english at work.
In Swedish there are two ways to say "one" - "ett" and "en". Ex. one table = "ett bord" and one cat = "en katt". There is no rule for when to use either. And yes, this makes it extremely difficult for foreigners.
I can only speak for Norway, but here we use different articles for the different genders. In Bokmål, a masculine noun uses "en", a feminine noun uses "ei or en", and non-gendered nouns use "et". I think it's slightly different in New Norwegian, but I don't really know it so I can't comment on that. Bokmål is closer to Swedish anyway.
I do agree that it's difficult to learn though as there are no rules for determining a noun's gender or lack thereof. I certainly don't miss memorising the genders of nouns in primary school, not to mention all the exceptions.
"Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen."
For a Finnish speaker, the pronunciation of most languages seems illogical, because things are pronounced differently as they are written, depending on the word itself. One might think: why are they so illogical? Of course, this is not how native speakers of German, English, etc. see things; for them, the words are spoken exactly as they are written, as they are used to it being so.
When I was learning English at school, I thought it was odd to sprinkle all the small articles and words all over the speech. And this thing with British vs. US spelling. Later, when I studied German, I thought there were so many concrete rules, yet every rule was followed by a number of exceptions.
I don't think one can say grammar/pronunciation of language x is universally difficult or easy. It depends so much on the linguistic background of the learner. For example: those skilled only in Japanese will likely have an easier time learning Chinese than me. But I will likely be able to pick up Estonian or proper Danish/Norwegian easier than them because of my background.
PS. Speaking of illogical things: "pronunciation" and "pronounce". Why not "pronunce" or "pronounciation"?
I often wonder if all that extra grammatical baggage and more rigid pronouciation would make it easier for a computer to understand german over english.
For English, aside from do/does useless distinguishment, the lack of a gender neutral noun for a person usually make people write in a way "he/she". You could say, "the person" but it's long.
And months should be represented as numbers instead of names in spoken languages too which is easier to use and remember to have a globally common form.
Also, as a Japanese, I'm not sure if singular and plural forms make much sense as we mostly don't have it and I doubt it's any source of confusion.
> For English, aside from do/does useless distinguishment, the lack of a gender neutral noun for a person usually make people write in a way "he/she". You could say, "the person" but it's long.
You're mosly right about pronouciation but German pronouncation isn't as regular as e.g. Spanish or Italian. In German you have open and close vowels, i.e. the "e" can sound slightly different depending on its position in a word. There is some variation between local dialects though.
IMHO the need for genders, cases etc. becomes obvious in spoken language where these things serve to guide the listener's expecations. "Simpler" languages often use redundant wording, formulaic constructions to make up for them.
> I've never understood the need for noun genders and I scratch my head at a society that makes its members memorize such useless information.
I’ve never understood the need to pronounce completely differently from writing - and irregularly, too - as you guys do in English. Or throwing the the everywhere, or having a gazillion of bizarre tenses.
English is simpler in some ways, terribly overcomplicated in others.
In Ukraine, we sometimes have these discussions about moving to a Latin-based alphabet. Some even try to come up with their version of it.
It always winds up either as something ugly with a lot of diacritics (like Polish/Hungarian) or having a lot of double/triple-letter sounds (e.g. `sh` instead of 'ш', `ye` instead of `є`, `shch` instead of `щ' and so on).
Thanks, but no, I'll take our 33 funny Cyrillic letters over a Latin alphabet.
English grammar is too simple. I often can't tell if a word is a noun or a verb. In particular, headlines can be really hard for me to parse when they seem like nothing more than a handful of nouns.
That said, German pronunciation is more regular than English pronunciation. Every letter combination is in most cases pronounced exactly the same in every word.
Take, for example, the vowel combination "ie." No matter where you see it in a German word, it will be pronounced "ee".
Likewise, the combination "ei" will always be pronounced "eye."
Contrast this with the scattershot pronunciations English has for the same combinations:
"Neighbor" uses "ay".
"Albeit" and "Atheist" uses "ee-i".
"Caffeine" uses "ee".
And so on.