Thursday, January 19, 2012

Gendered Nouns are the devil

You know you can still send me your mailing address to kcshaw123 at gmail dot com and get a free Goldie bookmark. Just sayin.

I've made it to lesson four in my Irish language CDs today. I'm going slowly because I have to repeat each lesson two or three times until I start to get it. It wasn't until today's lesson that Pimsleur let it slip that Irish has gendered nouns. I hate gendered nouns! They don't make any sense and it just means you have to memorize everything! I was always fed up with them in German, and had hoped Irish didn't have them. Today I learned that the Irish word for 'road,' which I can't remember, is male.

English has its problems, sure. But while our verbs are weirdly irregular, our pronunciations and spellings are all over the place (The Tough Coughs as He Ploughs the Dough, anybody?), and we've borrowed so much from other languages that ours really doesn't resemble any other Germanic language anymore, at least we don't have gendered nouns. Also, the word 'the' never changes.

Now I'm going to make hot chocolate and run a hot bubble bath so I can read and warm up. Because it's cold. And gendered nouns get me down.

8 comments:

Michael McClung said...

Us being speculative writer types, imagine a world with gendered verbs...

See? Now you don't feel so bad about the nouns, right?

Ok, I tried.

K.C. Shaw said...

There probably are languages with gendered verbs. I hope it doesn't turn out to be Irish.

Free Range Anglican said...

Just one word of advice then... stay far, far away from Greek. Nouns can be masculine, feminine or neuter, all pronouns, articles, and verbs have to agree in case (part of speech, because nouns change by where they are in the sentence too), number, and gender. So every noun has about eight basic forms.... and verbs even more.

K.C. Shaw said...

Thanks for the advice. *shudders at the thought of all those agreements* Not that I was going to study Greek anyway, but you know.

Kelly Robinson said...

I'm for transgendered nouns. Nouns should be whatever they feel like they are.

K.C. Shaw said...

I just bit my tongue laughing. You win Best Comment Ever.

Free Range Anglican said...

I'm also shuddering at the thought of all those noun agreements. Ann warned me that seminary Koine would not mean much to learning modern Greek, but she wasn't kidding. Using Rosetta Stone for the October trip.... grammar is floating right by me like a dead fish on a windy day.

K.C. Shaw said...

The language-learning book I finished reading today says that Greek is somewhere between French and Russian in difficulty. In other words, really hard. :) Still, it's pretty darn cool that you're working on it!