Not quite correct: “he” in Mandarin is 他 while “she” in Mandarin is 她. However they are both pronounced the same – tā.
They also have distinct written forms for "you," depending on gender. But these are modernisms, added to the written language in relatively recent times. There is no basis for gender in Chinese grammar, going back to the ancient texts from 3,000 years ago.
If you want a language in which “he” and “she” are the same, try Finnish: the pronoun hän can mean “he” or “she” depending on context.
I wonder if this is a standard paradigm in all the Uralic languages. Hungarian? Estonian? Saami?
We've lost most genders in language, but we have kept some (i.e. "blond" vs. "blonde," "fiance" vs "fiancee", "him" vs "her.") These harken back to an earlier time when gendered nouns were common in English.
Hold on there, "he/she" and "him/her" are
pronouns, not nouns. Because pronouns are used more often than most other parts of speech, their characteristics are reinforced and don't change as quickly.
Not only are our pronouns declined for
gender, but also for
case.
- Nominative: I, thou, he, she, it, we, ye, they.
- Genitive: my, thy, his, her, its, our, your, their.
- Accusative: me, thee, him, her, it, us, you, them.
This is common in the Indo-European languages. None of the Romance languages (except Romanian) decline nouns for case, but they all decline their pronouns just like we do.
"Blond/blonde" and "fiancé/fiancée" are French borrowings. Besides, we have a few home-grown gender-identifiers, such as waiter/waitress and actor/actress.
We lost most of these around the 12th century, probably due to influences from other languages (Norse) on English.
The biggest influence on English after the Norman Invasion in 1066 was French. It became the official language of government, education and business, so English absorbed a vast vocabulary (everyday words like face, color, second, beef and use are French) as well as modifying our phonetics and simplifying our grammar (which was often merely a second-order effect of the phonetic shifts).
Agreed; as is a lot of language. Look at verb conjugations. How does that add any meaning?
It adds flexibility. In Latin, you can omit the subject of a verb because it's clear from the tense, person and number. You can put your subject and object in any order, for emphasis or poetic meter, because their case identifies them.
For a view of the exact opposite, consider Chinese, which has no inflections at all. All the words in a sentence must be in an exact, rigid sequence, or you'll change its meaning (or perhaps just turn it into gibberish).
I guess that in order to understand gender markers, declensions, conjugations and so on, one first needs to be fluent in one or more languages that have them. Then it's clear what such features accomplish. Someone who isn't fluent in such languages can pontificate about them and criticize them until he or she gets blue in the face --- and all to no avail ...
I can speak Spanish (although probably not well enough to get a job in Latin America) and I use the inflections correctly. They still seem unnecessarily complicated to me.
For one thing, they greatly increase the syllable count of a sentence. A sentence that can be expressed in seven syllables in Chinese and ten in English or French will use roughly 14 in Spanish, and more in Italian or Japanese. To compensate, Spanish is spoken faster than English (which is spoken faster than Chinese). This makes understanding more difficult, especially in a noisy environment.
