As a native speaker of a language without articles, I find the English article system by far the most intuitive and easiest to learn of all the languages I have studied. Most other Indo-European languages have articles that you simply need to memorize, as there is no way to derive them from the word itself. Which I never manage to do.
Genders in language is seemingly such a needlessly pointless concept I am really confused as to how it ever developed.
I still feel Armenian is such a great Indo European language. No articles, no genders, completely phonetic, consistent verb endings, no particular word ordering
In languages with genders you need fewer unique words for gender-related concepts. For example English (genderless) has "boy" and "girl", while Spanish (male and female) has "niño" and "niña".
Not sure about spanish, but in portuguese, as a general rule, you decide the gender of an object by the last caracther. For instance “cadeira” (chair) is feminine while “livro” (book) is masculine.
Basically, most feminine words end with an “a” while masculine words end with an “o”, although there are some words that end with other letters whose genders is not that easy to identify. For instance “árvore” (tree) ends with an “e” and is feminine (“a árvore”), while “peixe” (fish) also ends with an “e” but is masculine (“o peixe“).
Except words ending in "ma" that came from Greek (o problema, o estigma) which are masculine, while those from Latin (a alma) are feminine as expected. In Spanish it's basically the same. A Spanish teacher gave me a nice mnemonic: "-ma is masculine, like your mother." I've never forgotten that.
deliciousturkey · · focus · HN ↗
nlitened · · focus · HN ↗
andoando · · focus · HN ↗
I still feel Armenian is such a great Indo European language. No articles, no genders, completely phonetic, consistent verb endings, no particular word ordering
igsomething · · focus · HN ↗
SamBam · · focus · HN ↗
jventura · · focus · HN ↗
Basically, most feminine words end with an “a” while masculine words end with an “o”, although there are some words that end with other letters whose genders is not that easy to identify. For instance “árvore” (tree) ends with an “e” and is feminine (“a árvore”), while “peixe” (fish) also ends with an “e” but is masculine (“o peixe“).
projektfu · · focus · HN ↗