Why do some languages use gendered nouns? It seems to just add more complexity for no benefit.

  • Skua
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    5 months ago

    Your cat example works because it shows an example that is ambiguous in English but not in German. Zezhin’s example was showing something that wasn’t ambiguous in English, a language with no noun class distinctions outside of referring to things by their actual gender, so there’s no benefit to having more general noun classes in that example

    • @Wasgaytsiedasan@feddit.de
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      55 months ago

      He was showing how gendered words can resolve ambiguity in an example were this also applies in english, so that you can extrapolate to situations like the one I (or the other replies) showed.