[irakli]

Fun read, but alas factually inaccurate. Article says: "almost all European languages belong to one family – Indo-European – and of all of them, English is the only one that doesn’t assign genders that way."

1. There're quite a few languages in Europe that do not belong to Indo-European: Basque, Estonian, Finnish, Georgian, Hungarian, Turkish...

2. It is not true that English is the only Indo-European language the nouns of which don't have gender. Armenian for instance, does not and there are probably others.

[robotresearcher]

You ignored the word 'almost'.

[thaumasiotes]

You didn't read the quote.

> almost all European languages belong to one family – Indo-European

This is where we see "almost". Basque, for example, is a European language, but famously does not belong to the Indo-European language family.

> and of all of them, English is the only one that doesn’t assign genders that way

No qualifier here. Armenian is an Indo-European language with no grammatical gender (making it even less gendered than English), which the quote states, boldly and without qualification, to be impossible.

You could make the argument that he ignored the word "European", because to you Armenian is an Asian language and not a European one -- but saying "English is the only language within an oddly-shaped geographic region to have some special feature" is a very strange way to assign significance. Saying "English is the only descendant of Proto-Indo-European to have mostly lost its grammatical gender" gets the idea of "what might be interesting" right -- it makes more sense to compare English to sister languages than to compare it to unrelated languages that happen to lie within the same weird gerrymander outline you drew on a map -- but it isn't true.

[Mithaldu]

"them" in that case is the group of languages belonging to the family "Indo-European". He was selecting a group of language from the european ones and then making a statement about that group.

[thaumasiotes]

You're agreeing with me. Where "them" is the family of Indo-European languages, the claim "of all of them, English is the only one that doesn't assign genders that way" is false, and is not qualified with the word "almost".

Where "them" is the special-pleading-based group of Indo-European languages currently spoken within "Europe", the claim is less false than otherwise (but still not great), and it's still not qualified with the word "almost".

[Mithaldu]

Yeah, i misunderstood you a little. Nevertheless your initial complaint is mistaken.

Honestly, this is a nice example of attribution of responsibility in message comprehension. As a professor he constructs elaborate structures to convey meaning and puts the responsibility to understand on the reader. As an internet commentor you put the responsibility to express himself clearly on him.

You considered it ridiculous that he may have meant "European" languages, but he clearly constructed the group out of those.

[noamyoungerm]

Also: Scots is a mutually intelligible language

On the other hand, just like trying to explain programming to someone who only knows how to use MS Word, trying to explain linguistics to someone without formal training is bound to end in misunderstandings and inaccuracy.

[Turing_Machine]

"Also: Scots is a mutually intelligible language"

That's very strongly dependent on your native dialect. I know people who have to put on the subtitles to understand the movie Trainspotting, and (I think) that's not even full-blown Scots.

[guard-of-terra]

Armenia is located in Asia. Of course it is a formal distinction but it is there.

[irakli]

Doesn't matter. Even if it were on Mars, the language is qualified as part of the Indo-European group in all classifications.

[guard-of-terra]

You're right, the article is kind of vague on the exact set of languages which all assign genders to nouns.

[blowski]

It seems that the article found some bits of the language which are genuinely unique ("in conjugation only third-person singular changes") but these are so specific as to be irrelevant. If English had no way of expressing the conditional, for example, that would be genuinely interesting.

As it is, it reads like a teenager talking about their uniqueness because only they like eating peanut butter and ice cream while listening to Leonard Cohen.