Man. I don’t watch much movies but I’d watch this 10 times in row. If it’s a comedy or better…a serious comedy. The acting is serious but everything else isn’t.
There are parts of English that are simple and there are parts that are complex. Same as any language! The cool thing about linguistics is learning about the neat features of some languages. For example, Chinese doesn’t use articles!
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
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”.
“Die See” is only an exception. It’s origins are in the Platt languages bordering belgium and the netherlands iirc.
Don’t we talk about the usefulness of gender articles? There are some outliers. Adding gender articles increases the vocabularies by a factor of two but at what cost and what’s the real advantage? You can simply invent a new word for one of the “Bands” to reduce ambiguity in order to decrease the complexity of the language. I think you can compare it to irregular verbs. Those are just there for historic reasons, they don’t really serve a real purpose. Du/Sie is another example. It may be useful in some cases to maintain distance. Moreover we should get rid of the corner case “royal we” asap! Etc. The sooner we start the better.
Simplicity isn’t the goal of languages, but communication. England historically had a lot of different languages and dialects that tried communicating with each other, so the language got simpler to speak and understand.
German, Russian, Italian, etc. all existed in relatively homogenous so information density was far more important. Some languages use gendered articles, which also increases understandibility (if someone is mumbling a word you can still guess it).
Sie is actually a really interesting case, because it shifted meaning over time, from being a sign of respect, to being an indicator of closeness, but it still carries information.
"Lassen Sie mich in ruhe“
and
"Lass mich in Ruhe“
both translate to “leave me alone”, but the first one carries the information that these people don’t know each other and it might make sense to interfere.
And most importantly: your comparison to irregular verbs and idea to just change the word doesn’t make any sense. Gender is part of the word, so creating a new word would just be a waste of time, so it’s the same thing as just learning a new verb. Irregular verbs are a completely different thing since they don’t follow the rules of the language, so you have to learn two extra words, instead of just learning one and following the rules.
And reusing the same word to mean a plethora of completely unrelated things lol.
EG:
Jam = a fruit preserve, to play music, stopped traffic, a door that’s held open, to cram something into something else
Set = a collection of something, to change an option on a device, when something gelatinous becomes more solid, when the sun goes down, a stage or movie background, a list of songs at a concert, to put something down, and about 50 other things
Run = to move quickly, to enter a contest (ie run for President), to have something turned on (is that computer running, running a tap), to be a certain length (this films run time is 90 minutes), to be behind (this bus is running late), to be in charge of something (I’m running this place), a hand in poker, to be liquid (this egg is runny), a tear in a pair of tights
Umziehen - to change clothes, to move to a new home
aufziehen - to tease or ridicule someone, to wind up a clockwork, to raise kids
abziehen - to leave, to scam someone, to pull something off something else
herziehen - to gossip about someone
Anziehen - to attract something, to put on clothes
Yeah there are some of these for ziehen. You might be on to something. But for many generic verbs there are many variants with vastly different meanings. Like Machen - to make, or tun - to do, gehen - to go.
The real kicker is phrasal verbs. You can have alright conversational English without needing most of these “advanced” grammatical features, which is a big part of why English has a reputation of being easier to learn in school than other European languages like German or Dutch.
It’s when you’re faced with a vocabulary list like “get up”, “get on”/“get off”, “get in”/“get out”, “get through”, “get on”/“get along”, “get by”, “get across”, “get away with”, “get back”, and a myriad of other which in your native language each get a dedicated verb that you realize that English is not simpler, the complexity is just further up the road.
Also fun fact, if your native language is French, you can cheat and never use most of those, while accidentally using a much more formal/elevated register, because English has a habit of stealing French words when it wants to sound fancy.
“Get in” = enter (entrer), “Get through” = traverse (traverser), “Get by” = survive (survivre), “get across” ~ communicate (communiquer), “get back” = return (retourner).
It’s all of the above and then some. A good read on the subject is John McWhorter’s “Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue.” It’s intended for a non-technical/popular audience and doesn’t get too deep into the weeds so you don’t need a degree in linguistics to follow it.
A lot of the problem is that we use Middle English spellings for a lot of words, but the pronunciation continued to change after the spellings were standardized.
Can relate. I guess every guy had that issue at a young age when you got blue balls and just looking forward that date when you’ll get to release it, just to be touched once and have to step out to clean yourself. You’ll NEVER make the same mistake again.
The drivers who will stop and talk to each other on a two lane road are even worse. They see they are blocking traffic in both directions but keep talking.
This literally happened to me a couple of weeks ago. I even honked the horn and they just ignored it and kept talking like they were the only ones on the road. Some people are just so oblivious.
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