I think, therefore I am
Jun. 12th, 2008 02:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kitewithfishI've finished one of my finals, in the form of a paper that I handed in yesterday. That's one down and four to go.
Homework and general preparation.
Core Course: Read selections given, read extra four pages that will get sent to you, write a little essay about Heldenplatz..
Textanalyse: Just. Know everything. All of it forever. (For those in the know, this is the class that yielded one of my new favorite German words 'fünfhebig', or pentametrical.)
Tibetology: Read some, be able to talk about it in class with the professor.
Hand-scripts: ask professor if I can take the test early, as I will be flying out on the day that it's currently assigned.
Another reason that French bewilders me: I recently discovered that in French possessive pronouns, the pronoun takes the grammatical gender of the object, not the gender of the owner. I offer a list of comparisons from other languages to clarify my point.
Note: the object 'boyfriend' here was chosen because it's one of those few nouns in English that's understood to have a non-neutral grammatical gender; to whit, a 'boyfriend' is not an 'it.' Since I am working in four languages here, I wanted something that would have the same grammatical gender in all examples.
Compare:
English. That is her boyfriend.
The possessive pronoun, though applied here to noun with a masculine grammatical and physical gender, reflects the gender of the person doing the owning.
German Das ist ihr Freund.
The possessive pronoun ihr reflects the female gender of the owner. The adjective ending (which is here actually indicated via omission, because 'der Freund' is in the nominative case and adjectives modifying grammatically male nouns don't take an ending in the nominative) reflects the grammatically male gender of 'Freund' (a male friend, boyfriend).
Spanish Ese es su novio.
Related construction: Es el novio suyo.
The possessive pronoun su is itself gender neutral, but varies with the grammatical number of the noun it modifies (this function is not really shown here). This sentence could read either 'That is her boyfriend' or 'That is his boyfriend.' The related construction 'Es el novio suyo', translated 'He is the boyfriend of hers/his' displays the related possessive construction varies based on the grammatical gender (and number, though this is not here displayed) of the object of ownership.
French C'est son petit ami.
The possessive pronoun here son can be translated as 'his' or 'her', and corresponds to the grammatical gender of the object it modifies, masculine 'ami.'
In conclusion: Romance languages are incredibly fucking weird. They care more about the grammatical gender of the object than of the person doing the owning. Spanish being gender-neutral with su was easy enough to learn, but there is no way I would be able to wrap my mind around using a possessive pronoun that did not specify the gender of the owner but made a big deal of specifying the object's gender.
In spite of this, I find I actually kind of want to learn French.
Homework and general preparation.
Core Course: Read selections given, read extra four pages that will get sent to you, write a little essay about Heldenplatz..
Textanalyse: Just. Know everything. All of it forever. (For those in the know, this is the class that yielded one of my new favorite German words 'fünfhebig', or pentametrical.)
Tibetology: Read some, be able to talk about it in class with the professor.
Hand-scripts: ask professor if I can take the test early, as I will be flying out on the day that it's currently assigned.
Another reason that French bewilders me: I recently discovered that in French possessive pronouns, the pronoun takes the grammatical gender of the object, not the gender of the owner. I offer a list of comparisons from other languages to clarify my point.
Note: the object 'boyfriend' here was chosen because it's one of those few nouns in English that's understood to have a non-neutral grammatical gender; to whit, a 'boyfriend' is not an 'it.' Since I am working in four languages here, I wanted something that would have the same grammatical gender in all examples.
Compare:
English. That is her boyfriend.
The possessive pronoun, though applied here to noun with a masculine grammatical and physical gender, reflects the gender of the person doing the owning.
German Das ist ihr Freund.
The possessive pronoun ihr reflects the female gender of the owner. The adjective ending (which is here actually indicated via omission, because 'der Freund' is in the nominative case and adjectives modifying grammatically male nouns don't take an ending in the nominative) reflects the grammatically male gender of 'Freund' (a male friend, boyfriend).
Spanish Ese es su novio.
Related construction: Es el novio suyo.
The possessive pronoun su is itself gender neutral, but varies with the grammatical number of the noun it modifies (this function is not really shown here). This sentence could read either 'That is her boyfriend' or 'That is his boyfriend.' The related construction 'Es el novio suyo', translated 'He is the boyfriend of hers/his' displays the related possessive construction varies based on the grammatical gender (and number, though this is not here displayed) of the object of ownership.
French C'est son petit ami.
The possessive pronoun here son can be translated as 'his' or 'her', and corresponds to the grammatical gender of the object it modifies, masculine 'ami.'
In conclusion: Romance languages are incredibly fucking weird. They care more about the grammatical gender of the object than of the person doing the owning. Spanish being gender-neutral with su was easy enough to learn, but there is no way I would be able to wrap my mind around using a possessive pronoun that did not specify the gender of the owner but made a big deal of specifying the object's gender.
In spite of this, I find I actually kind of want to learn French.
