this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2023
1061 points (97.1% liked)
Memes
45730 readers
818 users here now
Rules:
- Be civil and nice.
- Try not to excessively repost, as a rule of thumb, wait at least 2 months to do it if you have to.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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?
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
I remember a study that gendered articles slightly increase understandibility among native speakers.