[vacri]

Every language has absurdities. Genders for non-gendered things is one example.

What's really absurd about English is the contempt for diacritical marks. Other languages give you a clue as to how the word is pronounced, whereas in English, if I write 'wind', you don't know if I'm talking about air blowing or charging a mechanical clock unless you have context - which may come later in the sentence.

[csense]

> absurdities: Genders for non-gendered things is one example.

This. I never understood how e.g. Spanish speakers think that a door is female or a clock is male. I mean, it's not like there are any body parts you can examine for a definitive answer, or clothing and mannerisms which let you make a pretty good guess...I never really got a satisfactory answer other than "it's usually -o or -a, but not always; really, you just have to memorize it." Seriously...WTF?

> diacritical marks

Other European languages love them. To me as an English speaker, they look like misplaced inkspots or dirt on my monitor. I never had any class in school or college that taught what they mean [1]. I blithely type "fiancee," "naive" and "Geiger-Muller," since I don't want to get out Character Map or whatever the Linux equivalent is [2], and I'm not really sure which marks to use or where to put them. I pretty much pretend they don't exist, unless they cause compiler errors [3], in which case I terminate them with extreme prejudice.

[1] I did once learn that an overline (a line above a character; I don't know if that's actually what it's called) means a long vowel sound, and an upside-down e means schwa. I haven't seen either of these used outside dictionary pronunciation keys.

[2] In my current operating system, Linux Mint, I don't even know how to get those characters other than copy-and-pasting the Unicode text somebody else has put on a webpage, or spending an hour or two sitting down with the RFC's that specify UTF-8 encoding and a hex editor. The only reason I know on Windows is that I eventually stumbled on Character Map by curiously exploring all the menus. This may give you a clue how often I deal with international text

[3] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5316875

[voyou]

"I never understood how e.g. Spanish speakers think that a door is female or a clock is male. I mean, it's not like there are any body parts you can examine for a definitive answer..."

But "gender," as a term in grammar, just means an arbitrary classification of words for grammatical purposes. It's only a few languages which, absurdly, map these grammatical tags to biological or cultural sex distinctions. English compounds the absurdity by retaining this grammatical distinction only in this one bizarre case.

(My favourite example of the arbitrary nature of grammatical gender is Dutch. Dutch has two genders, common and neuter, which, if you wanted to map them to sex, would mean "either male or female" and "neither male nor female", respectively.)

[philwelch]

English used to have diacritical marks, specifically the diaereses, as can be seen in names like Zoë or in the surname Brontë (as in the family of English authors.)

The New Yorker loves the diaereses to this day, and frequently uses it in words like "coöperate".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaeresis_(diacritic)

[vacri]

I made the realisation when I went to Vietnam, where basically you right a sentence then shake a bagful of diacritics over it. I thought "Heh, English doesn't require any of that nonsense... hey... wait a minute..."

[vorg]

> What's really absurd about English is the contempt for diacritical marks.

Not just English, but also Chinese. Pinyin was originally specified as having marks over the vowels:

  āáǎà ēéěè īíǐì ōóǒò ūúǔù üǖǘǚǜ

But although you see pinyin used a lot in mainland China alongside Chinese characters, you virtually never see those diacritics, just:

  a e i o u v

where v is used instead of ü.