On Thursday, 28 April 2016 at 06:51:04 UTC, Ali Çehreli wrote:
>
> The other language that helps in Berlin is Turkish. :)
>
> Ali

Probably because Germans and Turks have been allies for over a century, learning from each other and perfecting their crafts, such as committing genocide, stealing land and subjugating their victims.

On Sunday, 1 May 2016 at 06:24:53 UTC, Bill Hicks wrote:
> On Thursday, 28 April 2016 at 06:51:04 UTC, Ali Çehreli wrote:
>>
>> The other language that helps in Berlin is Turkish. :)
>>
>> Ali
>
> Probably because Germans and Turks have been allies for over a century, learning from each other and perfecting their crafts, such as committing genocide, stealing land and subjugating their victims.

you keep forgetting about the english who were with the netherlands the largest slave traders of the world up to the first world war. additionally the english plundered most of the world f. ex. india etc.
the americans who butchered the native people and sterilized them until 1956. they bring us democracy and forced trade with wars to everyone and create along the way the islamic states.
as for the turks and arabs - nobody wants them in europe. as the english found out (guardian), they are a continual problem because of their incest marriages and therefore rapidly sinking iq`s.
most people would love it, if the american war mongers would leave europe with the turks and arabs together.

On Sunday, 1 May 2016 at 08:30:16 UTC, jack wrote:
>
> you keep forgetting about the english who were with the netherlands the largest slave traders of the world up to the first world war. additionally the english plundered most of the world f. ex. india etc.
> the americans who butchered the native people and sterilized them until 1956. they bring us democracy and forced trade with wars to everyone and create along the way the islamic states.
> as for the turks and arabs - nobody wants them in europe. as the english found out (guardian), they are a continual problem because of their incest marriages and therefore rapidly sinking iq`s.
> most people would love it, if the american war mongers would leave europe with the turks and arabs together.

Please consider that you won't defeat evil writing such posts on this forum. The point is there bad and good people in all countries. And as I can see you indirectly insulted Ali who seems to be a good person.

I know what you are talking about, and believe me, I can agree with you in some points. But this forum is not a good place to start a fight on this matter, especially by accusing all members of a country for its history.

There are more proper ways of making this world a better place. For example you can give a positive example of being a good person. I don't mean you should be naive, but I guess you know that already.

Piotrek

On Thu, 28 Apr 2016 08:43:52 +0200
> Ha!  There is no logical at all behind whether a word is masculine, feminine or neutral in German.

The same goes with French. e.g. body parts which one would think would be obviously masculine are feminine (and vice versa). The insight that one of my college professors gave on that is that it's the _word_ that has a gender, not what the word represents. Now, that's not particularly helpful in determining what gender a word is (you pretty much just have to memorize it, though in French, at least, the ending of the word can give it away), but if you think about it that way, it does help you to stop trying to figure out the gender based on what object or concept you're referring to.

- Jonathan M Davis

On Mon, May 02, 2016 at 02:15:46AM +0200, Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Thu, 28 Apr 2016 08:43:52 +0200
> > Ha!  There is no logical at all behind whether a word is masculine, feminine or neutral in German.
> 
> The same goes with French.
[...]

Actually, in just about every language that makes gender distinctions
the choice of gender for any given noun is basically arbitrary. Even
languages with a common ancestor may assign different genders to the
same ancestral noun (IIRC in Portuguese vs. Spanish, though I can't
recall the specific example off the top of my head).  And while one may
imagine that words of "obvious" gender like "man" or "woman" ought to
have the obvious gender, this is not always true (e.g., Russian мужчина
"man" is masculine in agreement with adjectives, but has the feminine -а
ending and declines like a feminine noun).

One linguistic theory about gender systems is that they arose as ancient rhyming schemes, where, e.g., words ending in a particular vowel would agree with adjectives ending in a similar vowel. Over time, of course, due to sound change and language change these ancient rhymes are forgotten, leaving behind a system of gender distinctions that apparently are based on biological genders, but are actually relics of long-forgotten, essentially arbitrary rhyming schemes. Arguably, noun class systems such as in Swahili also arose from such ancient rhyming schemes, but in Swahili noun class assignments don't even remotely resemble biological gender in any way.

At the end of the day, such gender systems are essentially arbitrary and you just have to memorize which words belong to which class.


T

-- 
Prosperity breeds contempt, and poverty breeds consent. -- Suck.com

> The same goes with French. e.g. body parts which one would think would be obviously masculine are feminine (and vice versa).

Funny, it's actually true. I've never figured that out... :)

In french, there are 2 specials cases about gender. "orgue" (organ) and "amour" (love) are masculine on singular, and feminine on plural.

On Mon, 2016-05-02 at 12:18 +0000, Claude via Digitalmars-d wrote: […]
> 
> In french, there are 2 specials cases about gender. "orgue"
> (organ) and "amour" (love) are masculine on singular, and
> feminine on plural.

Oh FFS. And they say English is a difficult language.

-- 
Russel. ============================================================================= Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder@ekiga.net 41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel@winder.org.uk London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder

On Mon, 02 May 2016 13:55:35 +0100
Russel Winder via Digitalmars-d <digitalmars-d@puremagic.com> wrote:

> On Mon, 2016-05-02 at 12:18 +0000, Claude via Digitalmars-d wrote: […]
> >
> > In french, there are 2 specials cases about gender. "orgue"
> > (organ) and "amour" (love) are masculine on singular, and
> > feminine on plural.
>
> Oh FFS. And they say English is a difficult language.

LOL. Well, every language has its quirks - especially with the commonly used words (they probably get munged the most over time, because they get used the most), but I've found that French is far more consistent than English - especially when get a grammar book that actually explains things rather than just telling you what to do. English suffers from having a lot of different sources for its various words. It's consistent in a lot of ways, but it's a huge mess in others - though I for one think that the fact that English has no gender like languages such as French and German is a huge win.

In any case, learning any new language is hard - especially the farther it is from your own (e.g. Asian languages are going to generally be pretty brutal to learn for someone speaking a European languages).

- Jonathan M Davis

On 2 May 2016 at 14:55, Russel Winder via Digitalmars-d <digitalmars-d@puremagic.com> wrote:
> On Mon, 2016-05-02 at 12:18 +0000, Claude via Digitalmars-d wrote: […]
>>
>> In french, there are 2 specials cases about gender. "orgue"
>> (organ) and "amour" (love) are masculine on singular, and
>> feminine on plural.
>
> Oh FFS. And they say English is a difficult language.
>

For every rule, there are 101 exceptions. :-)

http://shirah-goes-again.blogspot.de/2011/01/entire-english-language-is-big.html

On Monday, 2 May 2016 at 16:22:49 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> On Mon, 02 May 2016 13:55:35 +0100
> Russel Winder via Digitalmars-d <digitalmars-d@puremagic.com> wrote:
>
>> On Mon, 2016-05-02 at 12:18 +0000, Claude via Digitalmars-d wrote: […]
>> > [...]
>>
>> Oh FFS. And they say English is a difficult language.
>
> LOL. Well, every language has its quirks - especially with the commonly used words (they probably get munged the most over time, because they get used the most), but I've found that French is far more consistent than English - especially when get a grammar book that actually explains things rather than just telling you what to do. English suffers from having a lot of different sources for its various words. It's consistent in a lot of ways, but it's a huge mess in others - though I for one think that the fact that English has no gender like languages such as French and German is a huge win.
>
> In any case, learning any new language is hard - especially the farther it is from your own (e.g. Asian languages are going to generally be pretty brutal to learn for someone speaking a European languages).
>
> - Jonathan M Davis

Many Asian languages are much more straightforward then any of the romance languages. In Chinese verbs aren't even inflected for tense, voice, etc., much less this silly gendered noun stuff. It's extremely refreshing and quite simple grammatically.