Just memorize them by rote. There’s nothing actually connecting them via spelling; they’re completely different words with completely different backgrounds and that’s a thing you have to get used to in English.
Remember English is a creole of a bunch of different languages and that’s why it is the way it is. It doesn’t really have rules like that aside from some basic grammar.
I am so glad to be a native English speaker… although I would have been a lot happier to have been Canadian. Everyone blames us Americans for the way English is without giving a thought to Britain. Or Australia.
Creoles/Pidgins of English often solve some issues, which I find funny. The Vanuatu creole (Bislama) changes all words that connect nouns to “blong” (belong)
<span style="color:#323232;"> Pikini blong mi: This child belongs to me, Kanu blong pikinini: That outrigger belongs to the child, Laet blong trak: The light on the truck, Finga blong tri: The branches of a tree, Bras blong tut: Toothbrush
</span>
…or “long”
<span style="color:#323232;">Pikinini i go long skul: The child goes to school
</span><span style="color:#323232;">truk i kam long hotel: The vehicle came from a/the hotel
</span><span style="color:#323232;">tri i foldaon long trak: A tree fell down on a/the vehicle
</span>
There is only one second+ person pronoun: “hem” and one personal pronoun: “mi”
Not quite the same though – that poem is literally incomprehensible to any Mandarin speaker, unless we read it. In OP’s meme it’s the spelling that’s messin’ things up.
Edit: Also, all these syllables (morphemes, not words) are not quite the same – they are differentiated by the four tones of mandarin chinese. Here is a link to the poem being read – you might hear the almost musical intonation of each syllable.
Of course, this can be confusing, but wouldn’t every single language have some confusing parts? As a non native English speaker who tried to learn other languages (without much success for now) I find English to be actually rather easy.
What would you propose as an easier alternative for a “universal” language?
Out of the languages I know, non have the nonsensical letter-sound pairings that English has. French has some combinations you wouldn’t expect (like eaux= o) but they are consistent in every word they appear. Irish also has some wild letter combinations, but I know to little about that to know, if it’s as confusing as English.
To illustrate, I would say you could write the words above a lot easier and understandably:
Taut, thou, thaut, thru, thruout, thorou, tuff
Grammatically, English is pretty easy. But the pronunciation is so inconsistent, that it is necessary to hold spelling bees in school. My language doesn’t need spelling bees for example.
I mean, ə could be replaced wiþ y (which would be kind of similar to Welsh) if j spells ðe /j/ sound (y as a consonant), but þorn and eð have been part of ðe English alphabet before ðe Fr*nch came and are otherwise quite difficult to replace intuitively.
Lol taut is already a word, it’s homophone of taught and means stretched tightly. And thou is the spelling of the archaic/biblical you. Also thou sounds like cow and though is most often substituted as tho
And thru and tuff are sometimes used in American English, but mostly on signage and branding
Sure, in informal situations currently it’s fine. It may change in the future depending on how common its usage becomes. Nite is a good example of informal English becoming so normalized that is formally acceptable.
For what it’s worth though the examples I was thinking of are more like trademarks. Drive-thru and tuff-stuff (cleaner brand) were the first to come to my mind.
It’s easier to understand when you look at English history and realize that English is essentially three different languages (old Saxon, Norse, and Norman) badly put together (a great example of this being meats having different names than the animals they come from, since the people farming said animals spoke Saxon, but the people eating them spoke Norman), with plenty of Latin, Greek, French, and other languages sprinkled on top, all written with a limited alphabet that’s incapable of properly reflecting the pronunciation of those languages’ words.
It doesn’t help, though ,that at some point the English alphabet got simplified with things like ō becoming things like oo, without taking into account that things like oo were already being used to represent different sounds, or that at one point over a period of a few decades in the middle ages for some reason all English speakers seemed to decide to randomly switch around the pronunciation of all their vowels without changing how they wrote them (!?), or that, while all languages borrow words from others, unlike most others English for some reason doesn’t bother to adapt their orthography or grammar (a French or Catalan speaker will have no problem understanding why façade is written like that and pronounced fassade instead of fackade, for instance, but I’m sure most English speakers won’t be so lucky, especially if they write it facade… and then you’ve got things like fiancé, or the plural of radius being radii, and so on)… and you end up with the oos in book, blood, door, and boot all being pronounced differently… and, for some reason (probably the borrowing one), the one in brooch being pronounced a particular fifth different way… 🤷♂️
Book and blood have the same oo’s for me by the way. I’m from the north east. But I understand southerners will say book differently. So not only is everything you said is true we also have a crazy amount of local differences across the country with very short distances between them at times.
The Normans were northmen (aka Scandinavians) that were allowed to settle in the Normandy (north west France). (They were the ruling class, the inhabitants from before continued to live there).They then adopted the French language.
I explain to people here that - in modern terms - it’s mixture of french, dutch, and welsh - you forgot the celtic /gaelic root (whatever you want to call it).
Yeah, I sort of forgot the Angle part of Anglo-Saxon, didn’t I…?
(Plus, there was probably quite a bit of Latin already there before the Norse and the Norman, at least south of Hadrian’s wall, though far from enough to make Old English a Romance language… all in all English has a very complex history.)
Word classes become really obvious really quickly, despite being largely impossible to communicate as an understandable rule during teaching. I.e. the more you speak a gendered language, the easier it becomes to get the gender of a word right, even if you were never exposed to said word before.
And the people that try to force it by replacing the el/ella(ellos/ellas) with Elle(Elles), and for gendered words the a/o at the end of words with the letter E
Grammatical gender has nothing to do with social gender, it’s just a simple way to communicate that there are classes of words which belong together. Some languages have gender pairs (e.g. Masculine and Feminine words), and some languages have more genders (e.g. Latin’s Masculine, Feminine and Neutral). Some others yet have a mix of genders still in use and active, still in use exclusively for historical reasons, and completely unused (e.g. Portuguese has active use of Masculine/Feminine, but Neutral gender is only present as an inherited holdover.).
That’s why @leftzero did answer the question - insofar as to state the question was incomplete to begin with. What does it mean to “deal with non-binaries” when a language isn’t binary in its gender?
As a curiosity, the Portuguese word for “a person” is always feminine (“uma pessoa”), but for “a citizen” can be either masculine or feminine (“uma cidadã”/“um cidadão”). This is very common, and greatly illustrates how grammatical gender is largely disconnected from social gender. For an example on neutral gender, “president” takes a gendered article but is never masculine nor feminine (“um/uma presidente”).
I love how you had negative karma because people want to use linguistics as some jab against how inclusive you are rather than just understand gendered language. Surprisingly LatinX is still gaining popularity!
Even better is people asking the difference when you’re essentially asking for a doctorate thesis in etymological linguistics in a comment on Lemmy lol.
In polish i havent really heard of a specific way, while polish has a neutral gender, it doesn’t feel like it makes sense with people, same way you don’t call NB people “it” in english, “ona była miła” (she was kind) feels better than “ono biło miłe” (it was kind)
As an American trying to learn Italian, the pronouns and possessives confuse the heck out of me. They’re gendered and dependent on groups and formality? Ugh…
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