Huh, interesting that that's your experience. One of the things I've found myself disliking here is that the power users seem to drive even more of the conversation. I have never seen so much Star Trek content in my life because by chance two particularly active users happen to be big on Star Trek. I've got nothing against the Star Trek stuff but it catches my attention, you know?
I suppose it's possible that the reddit experience I'm comparing it to was quite different from the usual one. It's also possible there's just something else making me notice specific names more here than there. It's not the end of the world, and I'm much more likely to post comments than threads so I'm not doing a lot to help the situation anyway
My username is a bird that steals fish. I'm not sure how I'm going to get on the good side of one, but I guess I'd better get used to either seafood or hunger
I have a homebrew that I need to revisit and fix the formatting of for mixed heritage PCs, and the system I came up with meant that I had to give every race four traits. Some of these would be minor, like darkvision, but there had to be four. I went with a once-per-day refuse-to-die ability and a proficiency-per-day advantage on a roll of your choice, so that the one thing humans do best is push through the tough situations
Your cat example works because it shows an example that is ambiguous in English but not in German. Zezhin's example was showing something that wasn't ambiguous in English, a language with no noun class distinctions outside of referring to things by their actual gender, so there's no benefit to having more general noun classes in that example
Pretty sure that OP is referring to noun class systems. English doesn't use one, but most other European languages do and English used to. Like German's three equivalents to English's "the": der, die, and das, which German changes depending on the noun class ("grammatical gender") of the noun in question regardless of its actual gender or whether it even has one
These bits of grammar don't always actually communicate any extra information about anything other than the grammar of the language you're speaking, though. The "gender" of the thing in question can't reliably be distinguished from grammar since even in the Indo-European languages where the noun classes are typically thought of as masculine or feminine, the word's grammatical gender can contradict its actual gender. The Old English word for "woman", back when English had grammatical gender, was masculine.
While I don't actually know a goddamn thing about the history of this, that doesn't seem to work too well once you look at more languages. While a male/female or male/female/neuter system is common in Indo-European languages, other language groups use versions that have more distinctions and haven't traditionally been associated with gender. Most languages in the Atlantic-Congo group that a lot of the southern half of Africa speaks have between ten and twenty different categories of noun in that sense. That's why they're more formally called "noun classes" rather than "grammatical genders"
The "81 vs 91" thing makes for a snappier soundbite. It doesn't mean that the other things don't matter, just that there was a catchier way to mention the felony counts
The pressure on Russia's manpower is not the plain old number of humans in the country, it's the amount that they can commit to this war without having so much of a domestic impact that public opinion turns against the government too much. Ukraine has a quarter of the population but has the domestic support to be able to call up everyone that can fight. Russia doesn't want to do this, so it uses the likes of Wagner and prison conscripts that won't be missed by much of the general populace.
"As a translator of political discourse, you also have the duty to write readable texts: so what am I to do? Translate Trump as he speaks, and let French readers struggle with whatever content there is? (Not to mention the fact that I will be judged on the vocabulary I choose — sometimes the translator is blamed for the poor quality of a piece.) Or keep the content, but smooth out the style, so that it is a little bit more intelligible, leading non-English speakers to believe that Trump is an ordinary politician who speaks properly — when this is obviously not the case?"
Translator Bérengère Viennot in an interview with the Los Angeles Review of Books
Huh, interesting that that's your experience. One of the things I've found myself disliking here is that the power users seem to drive even more of the conversation. I have never seen so much Star Trek content in my life because by chance two particularly active users happen to be big on Star Trek. I've got nothing against the Star Trek stuff but it catches my attention, you know?
I suppose it's possible that the reddit experience I'm comparing it to was quite different from the usual one. It's also possible there's just something else making me notice specific names more here than there. It's not the end of the world, and I'm much more likely to post comments than threads so I'm not doing a lot to help the situation anyway