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
Great way to frame it. But it does rely on just chance that the nouns you’re talking about will slot into different categories. Would be much more useful if pronouns let us refer to ‘the previously mentioned subject’ or ‘the previously mentioned object’ rather than ‘the previously mentioned masculine person’.
Like in “John met David. He was delighted to meet him.” We have a conflict over the ‘masculine object’ register, so ‘he’ and ‘him’ are ambiguous.
But if we had a pronoun like ‘de/dim’ for ‘previous subject’ and ‘ne/nim’ for ‘previous object’ you could unabiguously say “John met David. De was delighted to make nis acquaintance, but ne wasn’t so keen”
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
eru · · focus · HN ↗
Genders, or word classes in general, often work like registers in a computer. So you can quickly refer to things mentioned earlier.
jameshart · · focus · HN ↗
Like in “John met David. He was delighted to meet him.” We have a conflict over the ‘masculine object’ register, so ‘he’ and ‘him’ are ambiguous.
But if we had a pronoun like ‘de/dim’ for ‘previous subject’ and ‘ne/nim’ for ‘previous object’ you could unabiguously say “John met David. De was delighted to make nis acquaintance, but ne wasn’t so keen”
eru · · focus · HN ↗
> “John met David. He was delighted to meet him.”
'The former was delighted to meet the latter.'
There's also other languages which have different ways to class nouns. Have a look at eg Chinese.