this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2023
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There are parts of English that are simple and there are parts that are complex. Same as any language! The cool thing about linguistics is learning about the neat features of some languages. For example, Chinese doesn't use articles!
they can create tablets
I'm still smiling at this.
Gendered articles probably not but having "a" vs "the" removes the need for additional cases (eg. I/me/my). Latin and Russian don't have articles but they have more cases which have different suffixes that have to be applied to all nouns. Usually simplifying one part of language makes another part more complex. English has a very simple case structure but the word order is much more strict
Gendered articles, like all things relating to grammatical gender, can be useful to reduce ambiguity and therefore increase information density/redundancy. They're basically the Roman languages' way of retaining the usefulness of Latin cases without actual grammatical cases.
"Ami" and "amie" are homophones in French (with some accents you might see /ami/ vs /ami:/, but in casual speech you'd likely miss it anyway). However "un ami" is different from "une amie".
So in French you'd say "hier je suis sorti avec une amie" which, to convey the same level of detail in English, requires a translation like "yesterday I went out with a female friend".