What's so bad about gendered nouns? They are quite useful, especially when the language allows you to omit the noun and leave only a pronoun, or maybe the entire subject altogether.
How are gendered nouns useful? (I'm referring specifically to assigning genders to nouns that refer to objects that aren't intrinsically gendered.)
My native language is English, and I never have to remember whether a "keyboard" or a "rock" is masculine or feminine. I've studied a few other languages (French, German, Spanish) that do expect me to remember such things.
To be clear, I'm not trying to refute your statement that they're useful, just asking how. I'm interested in learning about a different perspective.
I'd imagine the use is that it sometimes makes pronouns more useful.
Substituting "he" and "she" for gendered articles:
"I have he keyboard and she rock. He is large and she is grey"
Without that, I'd have to repeat the "keyboard" and "rock".
The question of course is whether this is worth all that rote memorization (since no language I know is fully logical here - german's "Das Mädchen" - girls are apparently of neutral gender - being a particularly egregious example).
The case of «das Mädchen» is a mere historical curiosity and doesn't require the memorisation as long as long the person in question is acquainted with basics of the German noun formation, i.e. the "-chen" suffix in German, when added to a noun of masculine or feminine gender, unequivocally results in the "neutralisation" of the noun gender, as well as the "umlautisation" of the stressed vowel of the noun being gender bent, eg. der Hund + "-chen" -> das Hündchen. It's a very simple rule, really.
The thing about this, though, is that it only works if you get lucky and none of your nouns share a gender. I feel like that undermines the argument at least a bit.
I feel like I could come up with some examples if I had kept up with German after high school. I remember it being difficult for a year or two, then it seemed more helpful as we got into more complex language mechanics. In any case, German felt more consistent than English, and most of the words just felt right with one gender or another (and in speech you could usually get away with something between "the" and "duh" if you weren't sure about der/die/das).
They are generally going to sound good together because the word and the pronoun co-evolved. If they didn't sound good together, either the pronoun or the word would have changed. That isn't about the gender being right so much as just the sound, though.
There are other possibilities, but trying to apply logical rules seems pointless; the whole point of language -- what actually makes something a language -- is a completely arbitrary set of rules.
If you do that in German (i.e., "Ich habe eine Tastatur und einen Stein. Sie ist groß und er ist grau."), everyone would start slapping you with a style manual. It's just so unnecessarily contrived.
The major argument for keeping gendered nouns as they are in existing languages is that speakers would be uncomfortable with having their language changed by some standards body.
German isn't my mother tongue, but I think it's a form of diminutive, which often becomes neuter in Germanic languages, as for instance in Dutch.
I agree it feels silly to learn the gender of "sexless" words; but this case and the rule behind it are quite clear in the respective languages this occurs in. I guess it's not unlike English using neuter for animal pronouns, which feels strange to speakers of most Germanic languages.
I translate Italian 16th century dance manuals into English. There are many pronouns in dance descriptions, and having gender as an extra clue is very helpful when I'm trying to figure out what pronouns refer to.
Now, in English, the author might have used fewer pronouns if they were ambiguous... but I've seen a lot of ambiguous pronouns in English writing.
I don't think anyone is objecting to gendered pronouns (he, she, him, her) but rather gendered nouns in general. For example in french "night" and "baguette" are female whereas "book" and "chair" are male. It seems arbitrary and makes learning the language more difficult.
The nouns for heel, foot, and toe have gender. When I get to the end of a dance step mentioning all 3, and it says "and in the final beat you lift <pronoun>", I use the clue that the pronoun gender should match the noun gender to try to finger out what the antecedent is.
I speak two languages with gendered nouns, and I didn't find much specific usefulness for it. It's just something that is part of the package, so you go with it, and you can claim that provides more rich texture or such (though I'm not sure why knowing "table" is "male" and "government" is "female" really has any meaning, but maybe poets have one more tool to play with), but I'm not really sure it's that useful outside of using it for objects for which gender does make sense. But even then saying different word for "walked" depending on whether it was male or female walking doesn't really seem to me much of an advantage. It's just what it is.
Just out of curiosity, which language are your examples from? I'm asking because my native language is Serbian and it also features "male" tables and "female" government.
What you find hard is mostly a function of what other language or languages you speak. People who speak languages without articles find articles extremely confusing in English and honestly I have a hard time articulating rules for when "the" or "a" would be appropriate.
Having a simple way to put it doesn't mean it's easy to do right.
My native language don't have anything like articles. I frequently misuse a/the in borderline cases. Or just omit the article completely..
Yet gender is super easy in my language! Each noun has gendered suffix. Once you know the word, you know it's gender. Or once you know the gender, you know the suffix... :)
It's a significant bit just like the ones that form the letters: la tour, le tour, entirely different words that have their most famous examples within visual range once a year.
It's really easy, because "keyboard" is "teclado" which ends with o (so it's masculine) while "rock" is "roca" which ends with a (so it's feminine). :)
And there are, of course, counter-examples: el águila, el ala. I believe the rule should just be "it sounds right", as to say "la águila" is well, a third 'a' in there, two or them consecutive, and is just harder to even pronounce.
Yes, yes, but this example is so well trod that it immediately popped into your mind, and, what's more, try to think of a sentence where you might honestly be confused about whether "pound" or "book" was meant.
I can certainly imagine a French learner being confused about which gender goes with which noun. Before you say that this is ingrained in French speakers, so are unphonetic English orthography, Chinese tones and ideographs, and other linguistic sticking points ingrained in the native speakers of those languages.
French has quite a few words that break the apparent gender rules: un musée, un lycée, un mille (meaning "mile"; the homograph meaning "thousand" is feminine but usually doesn't take an article), le mort (dead person) vs. la mort (death), etc. All adding to the shit you gotta memorize. If you don't, your meaning will still come across but you'll sound "off".
(I don't even think I remember all my Vandertramp verbs...)
That only happens with a handful of words: those that 1) are feminine and 2) their first syllable begins with an "a" and 3) their first syllable is stressed.
It's similar to English which uses "an" instead of "a", but it happens very very very rarely.
(Needless to say, "águila" and "ala" ARE feminine nouns, what's changing here is the determiner so the two a's don't clash, not the gender of the nouns)
English lets you omit the noun and only use a pronoun. Colloquial English lets you omit the subject sometimes, too. And it doesn't have official gendered pronouns.
This sentence is short. It is short.
"What did you do today?"
"Rode bike"
Sometimes we even use genders for nouns even though it's not official:
The ship sank. She sank.
Compared to German:
The dog jumped on the table and bit the man.
Aww shit there are three "the"s in there... if I'm speaking, I can just slur through it and say "d'Hund" or "d'Tisch" but that doesn't work when I'm writing... okay let's try to get through this.
Der Hund sprang auf... Hmm, well "the table" is Der Tisch, but hang on, I have to figure out what case this is... ah, accusative! den Tisch und biss Ah fuck, "the man" is "der Mann" but what case is this... I don't even care anymore... d'Mann. Nailed it.
It's not like anyone is going to say "he jumped on him and bit him", so the genders serve absolutely no purpose.
Mmmh, but in German you can say "Der Hund sprang auf den Tisch und biss ihn". This kind of ambiguity can be a lot of fun. (It can also be confusing, I admit. But it can be fun, too.)
EDIT: Well, in English you can say "The dog jumped on the table and bit him", but it is not ambiguous. ;-/ The ambiguity in German is not due to gendered pronouns, but due to the gender of table/Tisch. :-|
the benefit of languages with cases is that you can switch the order of the sentence without changing the meaning. In those languages I can say "the dog bit the person" and "the (accusative) person bit the (nominative) dog" and it would not change the meaning of the sentence but it would allow me to emphasize one object more.
They make a language harder to learn and increase it's cognitive profile, especially for newer speakers.
I'll also make the contentious claim that they are clearly visible as being kinda sexist to progressively-oriented native speakers of languages that don't have them. Of course, if you honestly follow that train of thought, it doesn't stop at having gendered pronouns for inanimate objects. See https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.htm...
If they appear to be sexist to progressively oriented speakers of languages without gender, the problem isn’t the language, but the ignorance of the progressively oriented speakers of languages without gender.
The masculinity or femininity of a table ought not be controversional except among those who are eager for things about which to be offended. It would seem there are certain groups of people that seem to derive pleasure from being offended. It might also seem, to speakers of languages with gender, that these so-called progressives are being regressive by imposing their linguistic ideology upon others.
Of course I support sex equality for humans, but really sometimes so-called progressives venture into Newspeak territory or at the very least, absurdity. “Womyn” is another example of similar nonsense.
My native language is English, and I never have to remember whether a "keyboard" or a "rock" is masculine or feminine. I've studied a few other languages (French, German, Spanish) that do expect me to remember such things.
To be clear, I'm not trying to refute your statement that they're useful, just asking how. I'm interested in learning about a different perspective.