• beta_tester@lemmy.ml
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    11 months ago

    Are articels useful at all?

    What’s the advantage of having a female /male table?

    • bricklove@midwest.social
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      11 months ago

      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

      • azertyfun@sh.itjust.works
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        11 months ago

        Gendered articles, like all things relating to grammatical gender, can be useful to reduce ambiguity and therefore increase information density/redundancy. They’re basically the Roman languages’ way of retaining the usefulness of Latin cases without actual grammatical cases.

        “Ami” and “amie” are homophones in French (with some accents you might see /ami/ vs /ami:/, but in casual speech you’d likely miss it anyway). However “un ami” is different from “une amie”.

        So in French you’d say “hier je suis sorti avec une amie” which, to convey the same level of detail in English, requires a translation like “yesterday I went out with a female friend”.

          • piekay@feddit.de
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            11 months ago

            Because sometimes the same word can mean different things.

            German has „Der See“ and „die See“ (the lake and the sea) Or even more extreme: „Band“ can describe a music group, a book or a tape.

            You just reduce the need for context

      • piekay@feddit.de
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        11 months ago

        I remember a study that gendered articles slightly increase understandibility among native speakers.