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  1. orungano orungano

    My legacy will be that I taught all you uncultured bints one French noun

    Monday, 11-May-15 00:13:54 UTC from web
    1. awlxaĺan awlxaĺan

      @tiffany A few linguistic terms in English too.

      Monday, 11-May-15 00:14:27 UTC from web
      1. orungano orungano

        @awolditzy Oh yeah that's fun

        Monday, 11-May-15 00:14:41 UTC from web
    2. Narwhal Narwhal

      @tiffany Actually I knew it before your jokes, since, you know, I kinda speak French and all that jazz :p

      Monday, 11-May-15 00:15:06 UTC from web
      1. orungano orungano

        @northernnarwhal Shut your le mouth

        Monday, 11-May-15 00:15:30 UTC from web
        1. Narwhal Narwhal

          @tiffany Actually the French word for mouth, bouche, is a feminine noun, so you wouldn't put "le" in front of it, you'd use "la".

          Monday, 11-May-15 00:16:26 UTC from web
          1. orungano orungano

            @northernnarwhal Reminds me of this http://pny.lv/fr0v

            Monday, 11-May-15 00:17:42 UTC from web
            1. orungano orungano

              @tiffany #

              Monday, 11-May-15 00:17:48 UTC from web
            2. Narwhal Narwhal

              @tiffany I guess it's because in French articles are very often attached to the nouns themselves, and also because it's sort of how a lot of subject-verb relationships work grammatically in the language.

              Monday, 11-May-15 00:23:30 UTC from web
              1. orungano orungano

                @northernnarwhal I would poke fun but as an English speaker I don't think I have the right

                Monday, 11-May-15 00:25:19 UTC from web
                1. Narwhal Narwhal

                  @tiffany What's funny is grammatical gender actually existed in Old English, it just fell out around the 13th century when Middle English became more prominent and generally only used natural gender as opposed to grammatical gender. You could also say it's simply from the paradigm shift towards a more gender neutral language.

                  I guess the best way to explain gender in nouns to someone who speaks English exclusively is how in English you're more often than not call a ship or vessel "she" or "her". Grammatical gender is generally reflective of ostensible attributes of a noun.

                  Monday, 11-May-15 00:30:24 UTC from web
                  1. orungano orungano

                    @northernnarwhal Oh hey, that's neat actually.

                    Monday, 11-May-15 00:31:18 UTC from web
                    1. Narwhal Narwhal

                      @tiffany Yeah, I mean you'll still get your point across without gender consistency when speaking something like French, you'll just sound kind of silly. Kind of like someone saying "me speak English".

                      Monday, 11-May-15 00:35:55 UTC from web
                      1. orungano orungano

                        @northernnarwhal But would it be considered as big a mess-up as that? Or would it be just like saying "a apple" or something?

                        Monday, 11-May-15 00:37:47 UTC from web
                        1. Narwhal Narwhal

                          @tiffany I guess it depends on the size and complexity of the sentence, but yeah it would be really obvious to a native French speaker.

                          Monday, 11-May-15 00:39:00 UTC from web
                          1. orungano orungano

                            @northernnarwhal Well oh my

                            Monday, 11-May-15 00:39:42 UTC from web
                      2. Scribus Scribus

                        @northernnarwhal I had a high school Spanish teacher who had a friend that refused to bother conjugating verbs.

                        Monday, 11-May-15 00:38:20 UTC from web
                        1. Narwhal Narwhal

                          @scriba I hate conjugate verbs!

                          Monday, 11-May-15 00:39:44 UTC from web
                          1. Scribus Scribus

                            @northernnarwhal Yeah, people kept calling her "Tarzan," because everything was "I to go to the mall, you to want to come with me?"

                            Monday, 11-May-15 00:41:07 UTC from web
                            1. Narwhal Narwhal

                              @scriba I remember learning songs specifically about verb conjugation when I was in elementary school. It's crucial.

                              Monday, 11-May-15 00:42:05 UTC from web
                  2. awlxaĺan awlxaĺan

                    @northernnarwhal I keep mixing grammatical gender and natural gender up to be honest, or grouping them as one in the same.

                    Monday, 11-May-15 00:31:57 UTC from web
                    1. Narwhal Narwhal

                      @awolditzy Yeah, grammatical gender is essentially an assigned set of subject-verb agreement rules for a word and its related modifiers whereas natural gender is just an association of a word with a gender based on its traits.

                      Monday, 11-May-15 00:33:51 UTC from web
                      1. awlxaĺan awlxaĺan

                        @northernnarwhal Abkhaz in this case has grammatical gender for verbs with the pronoun agreement, but not for nouns. An example is, ya means he and la means she. One would say yidirrou to say he knows, and l'dirrou to say she knows.

                        Monday, 11-May-15 00:37:45 UTC from web
                        1. Narwhal Narwhal

                          @awolditzy Oh, that's a bit easier than French, where every genders of every noun need to be taken into account.

                          Monday, 11-May-15 00:44:23 UTC from web