just in case this hasn't been answered yet ... on Wed, 22 Oct 2003 10:54:24PM -0500, Ron Johnson insinuated: > On Wed, 2003-10-22 at 20:47, Erik Steffl wrote: > > Nori Heikkinen wrote: > > > on Sun, 19 Oct 2003 12:38:45PM -0700, Erik Steffl insinuated: > > ... > > >> of course, you can create various complex and ambiguous sentences in > > >>english, the point is that you can take few forms of sentences and > > >>have a working language (that's pretty much what BASIC (talking > > >>about programming language) is). > > > > > > you can do that in both languages. > > > > let's say you have a function called isRed(x) (returns true if x is > > red). Now how would you call this function in german? it would never be > > in agreement with all possible x (grammatically). not sure if this is > > the best example - perhaps in this case it would be acceptable to use > > istRot, regardless of gender of x. point is you would run into problems > > like this trying to use german, you would very rarely come up with > > problems of this nature in english... > > Being a native speaker of American, I've always wondered > - What is the purpose of "gender" in grammar/language?
purpose? none. it's just categories that certain words fall into.
> - Is it only the European/Latinate languages that have the gender
> concept?
nope -- swahili for one. the only languages that have just two
genders that *i* know about are the latinate languages, but that
doesn't mean there aren't more.
> - Why English doesn't have gender, since it's predecessor, German,
not to mention french,
> does have gender?
languages evolved, pure and simple. who's to say why this particular
feature got lost over the years?
</nori>
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