
English is not normal - BerislavLopac
https://aeon.co/amp/essays/why-is-english-so-weirdly-different-from-other-languages
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Silixon
As a native English speaker whose first written language was Spanish and who
has studied and spoken German, Italian, and Cantonese, it has always seemed to
me that English is one of the easier common languages for conveying simple
meaning in a small number of words. With a vocabulary of two or three hundred
words you can reasonably speak Pidgin English to accomplish basic tasks like
asking directions, ordering food, and buying daily items. With a romance
language (let alone a character-based language), you realistically need about
five to ten times more words to do the same thing. This is especially true for
languages with formulaic conjugation and gendered nouns. My point is not that
English is better or more flexible. My point is actually that English is often
ambiguous and that new speakers can use that ambiguity to convey a lot of
meaning compactly. However, that ambiguity also means that fluency is hard to
come by because you need to understand context and custom well enough to
choose the right meaning of words that could realistically have dozens of
separate and contradictory meanings. Basically, the barrier to entry is low
but the barrier to fluency is high and hard to overcome.

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thekaleb
> almost all European languages belong to one family – Indo-European – and of
> all of them, English is the only one that doesn’t assign genders that way.

Persian is Indo-European and does not assign genders that way either.

~~~
johnzb
Nor does Armenian or Bengali. But English does. Gender does not affect grammar
in English (cf French where conjugation depends on grammar), but it is
actually a gendered language with three genders. Almost all nouns are neuter
but many animate pronouns can be masculine, feminine, or neuter (people or
animals can be referred to as "he", "she", or "it"/"they"). Some inanimate
pronouns can also be gendered. For example, ships are often female; you might
say something like "she's a beauty" when talking about a boat. There are also
a handful of gendered nouns. For example, "actor" and "actress" are masculine
and feminine nouns.

~~~
BerislavLopac
Just because a word describe something that is gendered, it doesn't mean that
the word is gendered itself. And using gendered pronouns for inanimate things
in English is purely result of tradition and has nothing to do with grammar;
it is perfectly normal to use "it" for a ship.

> Gender does not affect grammar in English [...], but it is actually a
> gendered language with three genders.

A definition of a gendered language _is_ that the gender affects grammar, not
whether it has (pro)nouns to designate gendered objects.

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johnzb
> There is no other language, for example, that is close enough to English
> that we can get about half of what people are saying without training and
> the rest with only modest effort. German and Dutch are like that, as are
> Spanish and Portuguese, or Thai and Lao

Only because we've arbitrarily decided that all of the English dialects are a
single language. Texas Southern English and Newfoundland English are not
significantly more mutually intelligible than Spanish and Portuguese. Scots
and Singlish are considered English dialects but are barely intelligible to
many English speakers.

