Japanese: wtf are you talking about?
Finnish: No, seriously, what are they talking about?
Chinese too
Where this really sucks is in programming when you write things like “The {{objectType}}” in your translations file.
Your program will replace objectType with the actual thing, so “The Ball”. All good, right? But then every other language has the weird conjugation, so “El Bola” doesn’t make sense anymore…
Oh god, I’ve never thought about that.
Russian doesn’t have articles at all, but it sure isn’t simple.
But it’s also simpler in many ways. For example, it doesn’t use the verb “to be”. So, for example, instead of saying “I’m a boy”, you would say “I boy”.
Yes, that one aspect of the language is simpler, but the six grammatical cases, three genders, two aspects, and unpredictable stress make up for it.
“The” but sometimes it’s pronounced “thee” just for fun ir vowels or whatever.
French had a golden oportunity for changing this during french revolution. A unecessary complex language is not reasonable
Latin: Quæ?
Portuguese: append “s”. O, os; a, as;
Slavic languages: whats an article?
All languages are hard if you don’t practice them
Are we forgetting he, she they, they’re, their… ?
These are only definite articles, not pronouns.
i mean technically we have the and thə
Excuse me friend, but one of your e’s appears to be drunk.
The ol mnemonic my German professor taught me about remembering the German articles:
Rese
Nese
Merman
Sister SisterI took several years of German in highschool and in college and this doesn’t make any sense to me. Explain please?
Not op but I have a hunch,
The mnemonic is to remember the differences,
DeR - Rese
deN - Nese
DeM deM - MerMan
deS deS - Sister Sister.
Alright, are you calling English sane?
There are parts of English that are simple and there are parts that are complex. Same as any language! The cool thing about linguistics is learning about the neat features of some languages. For example, Chinese doesn’t use articles!
Are articels useful at all?
What’s the advantage of having a female /male table?
they can create tablets
I’m still smiling at this.
Gendered articles probably not but having “a” vs “the” removes the need for additional cases (eg. I/me/my). Latin and Russian don’t have articles but they have more cases which have different suffixes that have to be applied to all nouns. Usually simplifying one part of language makes another part more complex. English has a very simple case structure but the word order is much more strict
Gendered articles, like all things relating to grammatical gender, can be useful to reduce ambiguity and therefore increase information density/redundancy. They’re basically the Roman languages’ way of retaining the usefulness of Latin cases without actual grammatical cases.
“Ami” and “amie” are homophones in French (with some accents you might see /ami/ vs /ami:/, but in casual speech you’d likely miss it anyway). However “un ami” is different from “une amie”.
So in French you’d say “hier je suis sorti avec une amie” which, to convey the same level of detail in English, requires a translation like “yesterday I went out with a female friend”.
god I hate german grammar so much
