my actual unbiased linugistic opinion is that english is about this close to just conjugating everything in third person plural and it will probably happen in my lifetime tbh
@kibi Mine is that the a/an distinction will disappear, most likely in favour of using an all the time, but that will take a long time to happen.
@witchfynder_finder @lizardsquid I think "a whole nother" provides evidence that the a/an distinction will shift towards a, actually, and maybe we'll just see n's popping up at the beginning of other random words 🤷🏻♀️
@kibi @lizardsquid That could be it, too! My personal rationale is that it's easier to say, for example, "an night" than it is to say "a apple."
@witchfynder_finder @kibi you could also argue that the /n/ in "an" would assimilate in the phrase "an night", producing /æn'ɒɪ̞t/
@witchfynder_finder @lizardsquid @kibi yeeeeees, use "an" for everything, and then realise that you neeeeed to distinguish between arbitrary words being gendered or not-gendered (neutrum) and start using "at" for neutrum words!
E.g. an horse, at house,
And then you're finally approaching Danish ("en" / "et")!
@zatnosk @lizardsquid @kibi English already got rid of grammatical gender, I don't think we're gonna bring it back. =P
@witchfynder_finder @lizardsquid @kibi but.. we could have articles discerning between "common-gender" (an) "not-gendered" (neutrum; at) and "neutral-gendered" (like xe/xir; ax)
An horse, at house, ax orc!
Embrace the madness!
@zatnosk @lizardsquid @kibi Not-gendered and neutral-gendered is a really interesting distinction to me as an anglophone who can technically also speak German. Like. Those feel like the same thing to me. =P
@witchfynder_finder
yeah, I might be inventing the distinction between not-gendered and neutral-gendered.
I'm calling neutrum not-gendered because it's generally used for lifeless things. It's also called nothing-gender in Danish (intetkøn).
The really strange part is that I also want to distinguish between common-gender and neutral-gender, where common-gender is both masculine and feminine (grammatical) genders.
Neutral-gender would then match the rest.
Like bisexual vs pansexual.
@witchfynder_finder (had to untag people to fit this in a toot :P)
@witchfynder_finder But in actuality I'd prefer totally genderless languages, just for the simplicity.
Grammatical gender is just so arbitrary and meaningless in too many cases.
@witchfynder_finder @zatnosk @lizardsquid if we're adding gender back into english then i want space gender and plant gender at minimum
@kibi @witchfynder_finder @zatnosk ...can I add space and plant classes to the noun class system of one of my languages?
@lizardsquid @witchfynder_finder @zatnosk absolutely lol
@lizardsquid @zatnosk @witchfynder_finder realtalk tho if english was going to get gender it would just be the animate/inanimate distinction again, not very exciting
@kibi @witchfynder_finder @lizardsquid wait, so we could have
- animal(/animate) gender; an horse
- plant gender; ap tree
- space gender; az* moon
- thing gender; at rock
And we could have actual meaning to articles instead of just each word being locked to one grammatical gender.
"at rock" = regular, boring rock
"ap rock" = living, growing rock!
"an rock" = pet rock <3
It's glorious.
*) space is the final frontier, z is the final letter, it's logical!
(I should probably start conlanging)
@lizardsquid @witchfynder_finder @kibi (also, genderfluid words is kinda magical)
@lizardsquid @kibi Yeah, that's part of what makes it easier to say than the other. Like, personally I'd rather kinda slur two words together and keep the current paradigm for vowel-initial words than have to inject a glottal stop every time for vowel-initial words and keep the current system for consonant-initial ones.
But I'm just one speaker.