Gendered nouns make no sense

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From what I understand even though it's called masculine or feminine doesn't mean people associate it with that gender in other languages. They don't really think about it that much, it's just another grammar rule. It just seems weird to English speaking people because there really is nothing like it in the English language to compare it to.

Precisely - there's no logic to it.

Maybe, but then what would the reason be? Why have that rule? I know we have 'a' and 'an' before words, but that goes by whether or not the next word begins with a vowel.

What about blond/blonde in english?

they just do.

I see how it can be confusing though. one of the reasons why I could never learn French was the discrepancies between the male/female words in French and in my native Polish.

at least we have a rule, all words ending with -a are feminine (there are only very few exceptions), whereas in French it's just hit and miss, no rule, no sense whatsoever. annoying as hell.

I hate French.

There are a few gender conventions in English, like referring to ships (and occasionally cars, machinery etc.) as "she" instead of "it". And there are verbs which change for no particular reason: I tell, you tell, but s/he tells, for instance. It gives a cue as to the context, but it isn't strictly necessary, and to continue the example: I told, you told, s/he told - in past tense they're all the same word.

English retains only vague remnants of the PIE gender and declension systems (primarily in personal pronouns). Nouns by default don't have gender so I don't think it really counts as a gender system.

Conjugation of some sort is quite common in languages I'm pretty sure. English conjugation is much simpler than other Indo-European languages (aside from the gross irregularity), reduced even from what it was 500 years ago (think back to, for example, the Shakespearean -est and -eth conjugations). In these situations at least we seem to be much less redundant than other related languages (though not as streamlined in terms of inflection as the example I gave above, Mandarin). Although as I recall more developed conjugation and declension systems allow for greater flexibility in word order, as opposed to English which is fairly rigid.

Since it has been asked in this thread *why* genders appear (specifically in Indo-European) in the first place, I have found some minor musings on the origin of gender in proto-Indo-European (for anyone still following this thread who doesn't know what that is, it is the parent language of most European languages as well as Farsi and many Indian languages such as Hindi).

This site speculates that the gender system originated as an animate/inanimate distinction (the same convention holds for Hittite the oldest [arguably] Indo-European language attested). This two gender system is found in several other languages; although why it might be necessary in the first place seems a mystery to me, but it seems to make more intuitive sense than assigning my calculator one of two irrelevant genders.

What about them? They're just as pointless.

That spelling distinction is inherited from French.

I think it is similar to how people make their own personal associations to things a bit like synethesia, except everyone else has to put up with it in these languages.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinal_li ... nification

Pretty much, yeah! I'm learning Chinese. I used to be studying German, love Chinese a LOT more. Much easier, actually. They do have a few confusing bits, like where to use the place holder "ze" after what noun, or when to use "ge" or "zhi" or something different.

When referring to a third party though, the pronoun used is "ta"
I wish I lived in China, would make things lots easier for me as someone who doesn't exactly fit the norm when it comes to society's outlook on sex and gender.

Most European (southern, anyway) languages are descended from Latin, which had genders in it. English started off Germanic, when some 'ba**ard' named Bill came and brought a mixture of Scandanavian and Old French to the island, and the two languages, Old English and Norman French fought it out until a 'Reese's peices' moment happened, and we got Middle English. We have a bad habit of borrowing from other languages, so that's why we're different.

I seem to remember that the French, in the early days of printing, were trying to 'copyright' spelling on words, so that's supposedly why French spelling is so 'different'... Maybe it's not true, but it ought to be...

I was told 'La Ley' is the word for 'the law'...at least in Mexico it is... Izquierdo (sp? it's been a while) is Left ' derecho is right'.

signing off...

That`s right. We have gendered nouns in Norwegian and that is as natural to us as a/an is to English speakers. It was very weird when I began learning English, especially in the definite article. Where you are used to putting "the" in front of the noun, Norwegian changes the ending of the noun. For example, a dog, the dog in Norwegian is "en hund, hunden" (m), a/the book is "ei bok, boka" (f) and finally a/the tree becomes "et tre, treet" (n). To make matters even better, quite a few nouns are optional m or f. Confused yet?
I have been told that Norwegian is kind of tricky to learn for foreigners.
To me the English "I write, you write, he/she writes" make no sense. We have no such distinction in verbs. We would say "jeg/du/han/hun skriver". The weirdest thing in English, though, is your use of so many "to be"s. Where you must distinguish between am, are and is, and was/were, we only have "er" and "var".

I know a little Hebrew and that is a language with some weird twists. It differs between whether the one it applies to is a female or a male. Thus to say "What is your name?" to a girl it would be "Ma shmech?" and to a boy it is "Ma shimcha?" Nouns change too. A female student is a "talmida"and a male student is a "talmid". If the noun or verb applies to a mixed sex group, the noun or verb take the male form.

Do your heads spin now, people?

In French, the female genitalia is considered to be masculine.

La ley would be "the law" when referring to a specific law. As in, un ley = a law; los leyes = the laws.