this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2023
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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".
That's very reasonable. We need gender articles for humans. why for things?
Because sometimes the same word can mean different things.
German has „Der See“ and „die See“ (the lake and the sea) Or even more extreme: „Band“ can describe a music group, a book or a tape.
You just reduce the need for context
"Die See" is only an exception. It's origins are in the Platt languages bordering belgium and the netherlands iirc.
Don't we talk about the usefulness of gender articles? There are some outliers. Adding gender articles increases the vocabularies by a factor of two but at what cost and what's the real advantage? You can simply invent a new word for one of the "Bands" to reduce ambiguity in order to decrease the complexity of the language. I think you can compare it to irregular verbs. Those are just there for historic reasons, they don't really serve a real purpose. Du/Sie is another example. It may be useful in some cases to maintain distance. Moreover we should get rid of the corner case "royal we" asap! Etc. The sooner we start the better.
Simplicity isn’t the goal of languages, but communication. England historically had a lot of different languages and dialects that tried communicating with each other, so the language got simpler to speak and understand.
German, Russian, Italian, etc. all existed in relatively homogenous so information density was far more important. Some languages use gendered articles, which also increases understandibility (if someone is mumbling a word you can still guess it).
Sie is actually a really interesting case, because it shifted meaning over time, from being a sign of respect, to being an indicator of closeness, but it still carries information.
"Lassen Sie mich in ruhe“
and
"Lass mich in Ruhe“
both translate to "leave me alone", but the first one carries the information that these people don’t know each other and it might make sense to interfere.
And most importantly: your comparison to irregular verbs and idea to just change the word doesn’t make any sense. Gender is part of the word, so creating a new word would just be a waste of time, so it’s the same thing as just learning a new verb. Irregular verbs are a completely different thing since they don’t follow the rules of the language, so you have to learn two extra words, instead of just learning one and following the rules.
I remember a study that gendered articles slightly increase understandibility among native speakers.