Gender problems when learning a language (male or female?)
• An Arabic speaker has to translate the sentence "You are fast", and he is wondering how to do this. How can you tell whether this "you" is ???? (anta) or ???? (anti)???? (see note below) Surely they need to add something to differentiate between genders, right? What about "You male are fast" or "You female are fast"?
• An English speaker has to translate the sentence "Tiene sueño", and he is wondering how to do this. How can you tell whether this "tiene" is for "he" or for "she"? Surely they need to add something to differentiate between genders, right? What about "Él tiene sueño" or "Ella tiene sueño"?
The trick is simple: An English speaker is not forced to conjure up a mental image of the sex of the person upon hearing "you", which is something you have to do in Arabic, and a Spanish speaker is not forced to conjure up a mental image of the sex of the person upon hearing "tiene", which is something you have to do in English. You have to learn to suppress the temptation to impose your language constrains into other languages, as well as learning how to impose new ones that your language doesn't have.
If you hear "you" and there is no context, you continue listening until the information is provided, but in most cases, you know this because the context has provided this information before, so if John was talking to Jane when he said "you are fast", you know this "you" is ???? (anti), the feminine "you". If you hear "tiene" and there is no context, you continue listening until the information is provided, but if John was talking about Hellen, and you hear "tiene sueño", that "tiene" clearly refers "she". You only use these pronouns if the John is talking about Mark and Hellen, and without clues of any kind, he says "Tiene sueño", because this would confuse even a native speaker. In this case, the presence of "ella" in "Ella tiene sueño" is a warning: Pay attention, because it is not Mark, but Hellen. The rest of the time, it is like saying "you male" or "you female" systematically to ensure that there is "no ambiguities" (between "anta" and "anti").
Note: ???? (anta) is "you" used for males and ???? (anti) is "you" used for females.
4 Answers
In a similar vein:
Vietnamese has two words for "we". One refers to the speaker and one/more others but not the listener and the other includes the listener. Ever since I came across this, I have been uncomfortable with the ambiguity of "we" in English.
In my formative years, I spent a fair amount of time with people from the south and south-west and (despite being a New Yorker) adopted the use of "y'all" for the plural. Studying Romance languages only reinforced the desire to make the distinction.
Japanese has about half a dozen ways to say "you" and another half-dozen to say "I" (to distinguish levels of social standing or familiarity). How does English manage with only one?
The first rule of learning a second language: It's different!
Laz, in Arabic, as in Spanish, the subject pronouns, in most cases, are omitted because the verb conjugation tells you whom is being talked about. It's even less confusing than Spanish.
When you say 'me dio un regalo'. Who gave you the gift, he or she?
But in Arabic; he gave me a gift ??? ?? ???? . No subject pronoun is needed because ??? can only be used for masculine third person past.
Where as 'she gave me a gift ???? ?? ???? The verb conjugation ???? can only be used for feminine third person past. By the way, there's only one past in Arabic.
Thank you for this explanation.
As I learned Spanish I simply believed the native speakers when they say "Do not use subject pronouns unless you have to clear up an ambiguity or want to emphasis the person doing the action." That was good enough for me.
I usually just mimic what I hear around me instead of wonder why it's different from English. Only when I have doubts about sentence construction or the use of a word in a particular context do I begin to say, "Hey, what's that all about?"
Thanks again for taking the time to explain how learning a language works.
In most languages you can't use pronouns unless the noun is clear from context. I really don't see why people have a problem with this in any language: you have to come up with really contrived examples in order to find a situation where it makes a difference.
