Lvxferre

Another important detail is that Digg v4 pissed off most of the userbase, so the impact was pretty much immediate. Reddit APIcalypse pissed off only power users instead; the impact will only come off later (sadly likely past IPO).

Yeah, he isn’t multiplying booze like the OG Jesus was.

He’s the modern Jesus.

This post assumes that a meaningful amount of defed instances are caused by simple lack of agreement. Often, it’s an orthogonal matter - it boils down to instance A actually understanding something about the userbase of instance B and saying “I’m not dealing with this shit, it’ll make the instance worse for its own users”. For example: the typical user of B might be disingenuous, or preach immoral prescriptions, behave like a chimp, or be a bloody stupid piece of trash that should’ve stayed in Reddit to avoid smearing its stupidity everywhere here.

Are instance admins too eager to pull the trigger for defed? Perhaps, in some cases; specially because it handles groups of users instead of individuals. But those cases are better addressed through actual examples, not through a meme talking on generic grounds.

Wait. What?

Sometimes reality is even funnier than our shitty jokes! (Except for the kids. I feel genuinely sorry for them.)

Yup. I’m not sure if the same tea +→ cold yerba mate tea implication applies elsewhere in Brazil though; in some places I’d expect a “this is a restaurant, if you want tea go back home” or similar, dunno.

whatever the hell Ellon named his spawn

ChildX, most likely.

In this chunk of the Southern Cone they’ll probably assume that you want this:

Cold and sweetened yerba mate tea, often flavoured with lemon or peach. It’s actually quite good, preferable over soda.

*chomp* oh look, it’s one of those maps without Australia!

I’m not sure in your specific case; no context, no conclusion. But in most contexts I’d probably do the same as that mod, or at the very least scold the user. Because most of the time, “rent free” is: two types of stupid (ad hominem, assumption), aggravating (it’s often a taunt), and noisy (it doesn’t lead to meaningful discussion). It’s that kind of crap that makes the community less engaging for other members.

@abbotsbury mentioned 4chan; well, that’s one of the things that I’ve seen jannies there removing all the fucking time. (For free.)

At the end of the day, “we’re smarter” is just an excuse. The reason why we do it is Realpolitik - that wouldn’t change if another species popped up, even if it was smarter than us.

I usually tell myself “Let the dead bury the dead. Who’s alive?” in loud voice, when the mistake pops up in my head. Then I look for why I’m thinking about this - am I about to do it again?

It works for me because it forces me to focus on the present.

you suggesting that gender in these languages was an intentional decision to solve the problems you raise?

No, I’m not suggesting intention or decision. Most of the time, language works a lot like a biological species: there’s no critter or speaker deciding “we shall have this feature!”, but instead the feature spreads or goes extinct depending on the role that it performs in the language, alongside other features.

My explanation is all about that role. That is the point of grammatical gender, and it explains:

• why it appeared independently across different languages? Clearly the gender systems in Dyirbal, in most Indo-European languages, in [most?] Afro-Asiatic languages are unrelated to each other, but why did they develop that same feature?
• why it survives for so long in a language? For example, the gender system in Russian, Hindi and Spanish backtracks all the way back into Late Proto-Indo-European (6000? years ago).

A pointless feature wouldn’t do it.

I do not remotely know Portuguese, but how does this derivation quality help with the word for an apple seed?

The fruit vs. plant example is from Italian, not Portuguese (see note*).

It doesn’t need to help with the word for an apple seed (IT: seme di mela, lit. “seed of apple”). It’s just an extension, a “bonus” of the system; the core is like bambino/bambina, words referring to human beings, we humans tend to speak a lot about each other.

That said, your question reminds me the noun classes of Bantu languages. Gender is just a specific type of noun class; it’s possible that some language out there would actually use a noun class derivation of their word for apple to refer to apple seeds.

does this depend on the nouns in question coincidentally having different gender

Yup - the example wouldn’t work if both nouns had the same gender. And gender is intrinsic to the noun, you can’t change it (you can change the noun though).

That’s why, usually, languages with a productive gender system keep a comparable amount of nouns in each gender, since this maximises the odds that multiple nouns in the same sentence got different genders.

And can a sentence in those languages refer to 3 or more nouns?

Yup, they can.

In both cases (same gender nouns, or 3+ nouns), the solution is typically the same as in a non-gendered language: you use the noun instead of a pronoun, or rely on context to disambiguate it.

Thanks!

Did you just type that out?

Yup. That’s why I’m leveraging examples from PT/IT/Lat.

That’s one of the reasons why I love English so much, English is nice.

English is morphologically nice but syntactically painful:

• Adjectives must follow a very specific order unless you don’t mind sounding like a maniac.
• Questions require word order inversion, from SVO to VSO. That would be fine… except that most verbs don’t allow such inversion, so you need to spawn a “do”, let it steal the conjugation from the other verb, and then invert the “do” instead.
• Articles are a convoluted mess in every language using them, full of arbitrary cases. Including English.
• Prepositions are even worse. And English spams them since the only surviving noun case is the genitive/possessive. Oh wait there’s a genitive preposition too! (“of”)

And IMO the interesting part is that the syntactical painfulness - let’s call it complexity - is partially caused by the morphological lack of complexity. Human language requires a certain amount of complexity; if you remove it from the words themselves it’ll end in how the words interact with each other.

English’s is extremely worn-down; we only use gender on pronouns, whereas many other European languages use it on articles and adjectives with all nouns.

It’s also worth noting that even those gendered pronouns in English work differently. Since they don’t have a grammatical gender system to rely on, they “hot-wire” to things outside language, such as social gender and sex.

[Shameless comm advertisement: make sure to check !linguistics@lemmy.ml, this sort of question fits nicely there!]

There are two main points: agreement and derivation.

Agreement: grammatical gender gives you an easy way to keep track of which word refers to which. Consider for example the following sentence:

• The clock fell over the glass table, and it broke.

What does “it” refer to? It’s ambiguous, it could be either “the clock” or “the glass table” (both things are breakable). In Portuguese however the sentence is completely unambiguous due to the gender system, as the translations show:

1. O relógio caiu sobre a mesa de vidro, e ele quebrou. // “ele” he/it = the clock
2. O relógio caiu sobre a mesa de vidro, e ela quebrou. // “ela” she/it = the table

It’s only one word of difference; however “ele” he/it must refer to “relógio” clock due to the gender agreement. Same deal with “ela” she/it and “mesa” table.

Latin also shows something similar, due to the syntactically free word order. Like this:

• puer bellam puellam amat. (boy.M.NOM pretty.F.ACC girl.F.ACC loves) = the boy loves the beautiful girl
• puer bellus puellam amat. (boy.M.NOM pretty.M.NOM girl.F.ACC loves) = the handsome boy loves the girl

Note how the adjective between “puer” boy and “puella” girl could theoretically refer to any of those nouns; Latin is not picky with adjective placement, as long as it’s near the noun it’s fine. However, because “puer” is a masculine word and “puella” is feminine, we know that the adjective refers to one if masculine, another if feminine. (Note: the case marks reinforce this, but they aren’t fully reliable.)

The second aspect that I mentioned is derivation: gender gives you a quick way to create more words, without needing new roots for that. Italian examples:

• “bambino” boy vs. “bambina” girl
• “gatto” cat, tomcat vs. “gatta” female cat
• “banana” banana (fruit) vs. “banano” banana plant
• “mela” apple (fruit) vs. “melo” apple tree

Focus on the last two lines - note how the gender system is reused to things that (from human PoV) have no sex or social gender, like trees and their fruits. This kind of extension of the derivation system is fairly common across gendered languages.

Addressing some comments here: English does not have a grammatical gender system. It has a few words that refer to social gender and sex, but both concepts (grammatical gender and social gender) are completely distinct.

That’s specially evident when triggering agreement in a gendered language, as English doesn’t do anything similar. Portuguese examples, again:

• [Sentence] O Ivan é uma pessoa muito alta.
• [Gloss, showing word gender] The.M Ivan.M is a.F person.F very tall.F
• [Translation] Ivan is a very tall person.

Check the adjective, “alta” tall. Even if “Ivan” refers to a man, you need to use the feminine adjective here, because it needs to agree with “pessoa” person - a feminine word. This kind of stuff happens all the time in gendered languages, but you don’t see it e.g. in English.

I half-agree with this. I think that this depends a lot on the topic and, while the smaller amount of comments does hurt discussion depth, the individual comments themselves partially offset this by being more thoughtful.

And, while anecdotal, I think that there’s a considerably lower ratio of comments with negative discussion value here in Lemmy than in Reddit. I’m not even talking about the out-of-place jokes (although they add noise), but shit like this:

• “waaah, TL;DR!!” discouraging in-depth explainations
• feigned lack of understanding as ad nauseam tactic
• context illiteracy
• unchecked assumptions towards other users, for the sake of ad hominem
• “trust me”

Don’t get me wrong; you do find this crap here, but IMO it’s way less than in Reddit. And they hurt discussion because they either waste the time of the more thoughtful and knowledgeable users, or outright disengage them.