Click on the HN discussion > Click on the article > Notice the weird CMS error > Copy the sentense > Click back > Click back again by mistake(?) > Click on the discussion of the wrong article (?) > Paste the sentence > Notice that HN eat the emoji > Add the version in brackets.
Er, that sounds backwards to me. I thought you put the a on the word because it is feminine. You're saying the word is feminine because there's an a on it?
Strictly speaking there's no causality in either direction. A word's gender determines what it takes for other words to agree with it, while the form of the word itself can be anything. A word can always be irregular.
But not every word can be irregular. Mostly the words that belong to a gender will match a set of patterns, and the words belonging to another gender will match a different set of patterns. If you're lucky, you can learn a word from some usage that makes its gender explicit (and for irregular words, this is the only way you can learn about their irregularity). But often all you have to go on is the word, and in that case, when you want to use it, you have to make a choice. You'll do that based on the form of the word.
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If you want some examples of how gender irregularity in nouns works, here are a few different phenomena in Latin:
- An adjective in the first/second declensions has masculine (singular) endings -us, -ī, -ō, -um, -ō, -e and feminine endings -a, -ae, -ae, -am, -ā, -a. If you see one of these endings, and you know the adjective is first/second declension¹, then you've fully specified the gender of the adjective. There are no exceptions.
- First and second declension nouns mostly follow this pattern. Lana means wool and, as the -a suffix would lead you to expect, it's feminine. Campus means field as, as the -us suffix would lead you to expect, it's masculine. What this means is that "white wool" is lana alba and "a white field" is campus albus.
- Trees are weird. They are second declension (or sometimes fourth; pretend that's not true), appearing to be masculine, but instead they're feminine. So you'd have pinus alba, a white pine tree, or quercus alba, a white oak tree.
- There's a short list of profession terms that are first declension, appearing to be feminine, but that are nevertheless masculine. So it'd be agricola albus, a white farmer, or nauta albus, a white sailor.
- What about corpus? Well, it's neuter. Corpus album, a white body. Corpus is a third declension noun, and the third declension works completely differently. The apparent -us ending is misleading; the root of this noun is actually corpor- and the suffixes, of course, belong to the third declension.
- What do you do if you run into a word you don't know how to deal with? Pretend it's normal. Manus is a Latin word that means "hand"; it appears to be masculine, but it's feminine. It turns out that referring to hands is common enough that Spanish speakers today still remember that this masculine-looking word, now mano, is actually feminine. But we may compare Biblia, which is feminine in Spanish today despite the fact that in Latin it was neuter. It's feminine now because of that -a ending.
¹ That isn't actually true; the neuter suffixes are mostly just masculine suffixes except for one that is feminine. There are no distinctive second-declension neuter suffixes. But the suffixes by themselves are sufficient to distinguish masculine gender from feminine.
The meat of the book is the references, not the extreme interpretation that catches most peoples' attention. No hallucinations please unless something like substances were involved.
The plasticity of the brain whether damaged or not is emphasized, and uneven recovery of language skills gives some clues.
Monkey see, monkey do was certainly a thing before humans arrived and it's not been left behind very completely at all.
In a world where almost everybody starts out in early childhood learning to read & write at the same time, and it is structurally taught largely to right-handed kids from right-handed examples, and this has been going on since like "written history"[0], this can not help but provide an overwhelming mainstream norm about what side of the brain is for what. Especially when it comes to language. You could almost think of it as a force acting to confine language, or more so the writing part of literacy to one side of the brain more so than the other. The bulk of the highest-educated and most respected vocabularies have been largely built through literacy rather than orally for quite some time, it wasn't always like that even with equivalent vocabularies, and that part lasted longer than the part since literacy got popular.
For those where it doesn't perfectly apply, like left-handed people, those who don't read and/or write, those who learned from left-handed people, those that taught themselves, etc, that all adds up to a small minority and of course there is great pressure to conform. But that doesn't mean the same language ends up in the same parts of the brain as the "normal" specimen in the jar.
The most recent development is the way more early writing is accomplished using both hands on a keyboard like never before when it was traditionally penmanship for generations back.
Now some people actually "think" in language more so than others, some not at all, plus often bilingual works too.
I'll go ahead and say it, if you were up there in the highlands where Dolly Parton was born back in the 19th century before they really got to building schools, you could find an "illiterate" culture often having a wider vocabulary than those in places like Boston where they had schools continuously since arriving on the continent. Unlike PNG the hillbillies of the Smokies descended directly from a literate culture, they just didn't bring many books that far up the mountains, and odds are they would be lost to mildew by the mid 1700s.
Sometimes you also get the idea that when they were feuding, they just didn't understand each other and everything was fine among the disagreeable factions as long as everyone stayed on their own mountain. People had lost the ability to read, and when they only had one book that was probably the Bible but they couldn't literally decipher it any more. It was still holy though for the faithful who would pretend to read from it while more or less "lip-syncing" the scriptural quotes that had been passed down orally ever since.
Maybe that's where the saying comes from; "If I had half a brain I'd <obviously do what the mainstream would do>." From those who have no history of using less than both halves even for language, so they naturally don't do what the mainstream does? While simultaneously recognizing that they don't even have the same first half that the formally educated (whom they often respect so highly) do possess.
With PNG you've got to figure all the highlanders have language and stuff well-imprinted in their brains like anybody else, "just" not with the pattern recognized as most common to outsiders.
That doesn't mean their superstitions were based on hallucinations of any kind, among different cultures you can expect different parts of different halves of the brain to be doing some of the same things differently. Especially when they have always been isolated from each other.
There might even be a tendency going far back into "modern" literate culture, where the "literate" half of the brain is generally respected most when it is brilliant enough to get by on its own, and that ends up predominating.
Anyone who comes along and has always used all their brain may still have an orthogonal advantage. That could be why professor Diamond attributed the PNG highlanders as perhaps more intelligent than most in general. Or with a cool million of them there's got to be an Einstein or two. What would an Einstein casually having twice as much brainpower than previously imagined be like?
[0] Recent written history, the kind that means the most to a literate culture. Note the way with some traditionally illiterate groups how oral history can easily go back many generations further.
I think there’s a difference between knowing you’re doing something wrong and not caring, and not even knowing you’re doing anything wrong. What you’re describing is usually the latter.
They definitely get glares and annoyed looks from fellow passengers. And they must be oblivious if they’ve never noticed other people distractingly listening to music next to them or whatever.
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