The last scene of the Captain Marvel movie trailer made me laugh a lot. Samuel Jackson is always such a safe value.

That a certain guy who ran over people at a protest, killing one, has been found guilty of first-degree murder. (note: You might be able to find videos of the incident online; treat said videos as having a major trigger warning.)

I got past my most difficult translation homework yet (an abstract of a scientific-level article on a linguistic question of femine and masculine noun forms - I love my translation courses, but that was one tough cookie). :D

I could see this being a rather interesting challenge, especially if you're translating between languages that handle gender differently. Do languages that don't have grammatical gender even have terms to refer to such concepts?

and here I thought algebra was tough!

The article deals with English and Slovene.

In general, English more or less follows biological sex with gender in grammar (feminine forms go with "she", masculine with "he" and neuter (usually inanimate objects and animals where sex is difficult to determine, e.g. spiders and insects) with "it", while Slovene is a prime example of how arbitrary grammatical gender is.

Examples: a "boulder" can be refered to as "skala" in Slovene and it's gramatical gender is femine, while a "stone" is "kamen" in Slovene and has masculine gramatical gender, "girl" can be "dekle" with neuter gender or "punca" with a femine gender, but the letter is a slightly informal word.

Now if that wasn't enough, as far as I know there's no special word to refer to gender as such, even in grammar "slovnični spol" is used and while it corresponds to "grammatical gender" in English, the Slovene word "spol" refers to biological sex and has to be premodified by "grammatical" in "slovnični spol" to convey the concept of grammatical gender.

So, Slovene has no concept of the English "they" as a gender-neutral pronoun, when referring to a person one must use "he" or "she" and because of grammatical agreement, the rest of the sentence must adapt to the chosen pronoun.

Comparative example:
- English: "Ines attended a seminar in New York."
- Slovene: "Ines je obiskovala seminar v New Yorku." - "je obiskovala" is the verb form that tells you this is the past tense with "je" and "obiskovala" carries some of the past tense + it's marked as a feminine form of the verb.

Granted "Ines" is a feminine name, but I wanted to use one that isn't specifically Slovene and the focus is on the behavior of the verb.

Notice how "in New York" becomes "v New Yorku"?
That's because the complications of Slovene don't stop here.
Every word has to have the correct case.

I found a good example in my notes.

Slovene vs. English

- knjiga - the book
- knjige - the book’s /of the book
- knjigi - to the book
- knjigo - the book
- v knjigi - in the book
- s knjigo - with the book

And another thing, there a virtually no gender-neutral expressions for people in Slovene.

Examples of a few job expressions
(English (neutral) + Slovene (masculine and femaine pairs):

- "writer" - "pisatelj" - "pisateljica"
- "farmer" - "kmet" - "kmetica"
- "author" - "avtor" - "avtorica"

I could go with some others, but I'm trying to avoid using č, š, ž as they won't be displayed correctly without having your computer set to Slovene.
They're letters used to represent sounds - think of the initial sounds in the English words "chips" and "share" and "gigolo" (not originally an English word, but a good example for the sound).

The thing is, 99% of feminine forms are derived from the masculine ones, making it grammatically dominant.
The masculine form is also used in the generic sense to refer to both sexes, usually with a footnote to make it clear.

In short notifications, one can use both forms, but in longer and more complex texts (such a legal documents) that is nearly impossible because the rest of every sentence would need to sustain the grammatical agreement between the form of the noun and the rest of the structure.

Example:
- English: "Every driver must be responsible while driving."
- Slovene - trying to fit in both forms: "Vsak voznik/voznica mora biti odgovoren/odgovorna, ko vozi."
- Slovene - normal usage with the masculine form to refer to male and female drivers:
"Vsak voznik mora biti odgovoren, ko vozi."

A single sentence works, but a longer document would be very difficult to read with such slashes and both forms all over it.

Oh, and the rules of how things should be written are very strict in Slovene.
E.g. Imagine having to put a comma after every clause, correctly every time no exceptions.

There are also several different declensions for feminine and masculine nouns and, because more information about the gender and case in conveyed in inflections, Slovene has not fixed word order, unlike English that must follow the sequence of "subject + predicator + object", but that's too in depth.

I hope I've managed to give a good overview of how complex gender is in grammar in Slovene and that it wasn't too long or off-topic. :)

P.S. Thank you, Grammarly, for all the corrections. XD
After transparecy of extra spaces was erased: Hm, why is the posting system so alergic to spaces? :(

It wouldn't be university without a challenge. ;)

Thanks for the enjoyable read, sounds a bit intricate to translate. I imagine subtitles on TV in Slovenia must be quite something.

This makes me really glad I took French and Japanese instead.

"famer" this was meant as farmer. Wolfy777 left the r out

Glad to know it was readable. :D

It was quite challenging as Slovene has has not way to specifically say "feminine" and "masculine" without resorting to borrowing words that sounds very foreign to a native speaker of Slovene.

E.g. even with declantions, you'd get "ženske in moške sklanjatve" - corresponding in meaning to "feminine and "masculine declantions", but in literal translation you'd "female and male declantions".

Well, most movies make it easier be showing the character on screen (so it can be seen if they are male or female) and the use of the masculine form for both sexes in universally used (also in legal documents that require absolute clarity).

I do rember the movie "Aga" was slightly special case, a character was not on screen until the very last few minutes, but was consantly talked about.
The person making the subtitles had to watch the whole thing before they could determine the person in question was female and then use feminine forms. XD

You'd only get both the feminine nad masculine forms in short pieces.

A TV anouncer will say: "Drage gledalke in gledalci" (Slovene for "female and male viewers") if they want to be inclusive, but "gledalci" (the masculine form) will be used otherwise.

Not the best example as "gledalke" sounds a bit strange and is rarely used in Slovene, but it conveys the point and I can avoid the special letters with it too. :)
Thanks, it escaped me and I'll correct it. :)
Wait, you actually considered studying Slovene?! Wow, few people outside of Slovenia do so.

May I ask how French and Japanese are less complicated, if that's the implication?

I was considering several European languages and Latin at the time, but I don't think Slovene was in my college's list. Neither was Latin unfortunately, so I took French as the easiest alternative to fit in my class schedule. Mostly, I wanted to learn Latin as a base and try to master most European languages stemming from it.

Ha, perhaps, my head kind of flailed reading over your text. French has some pretty predictable rules when it comes to gendered grammar, I suppose that may be in part due to the Académie française. French also shares a lot of its rules with English as well as particles; to me was almost like an extension of English at times. So I suppose I would find it easier based on those grounds.

Japanese has far fewer pronouns to deal with, and grammar is more gender neutral gramatically speaking; nouns and verbs aren't gendered, the differences seem to be modes of speech, so an old business man is going to use different expressions compared to a high school girl. Hm, like, my online tutor used to teach me how to say things soft and femininely by using a particle "wa" used mostly by women at the end of sentences.

Most interesting, thank you. :D

"Mostly, I wanted to learn Latin as a base and try to master most European languages stemming from it."

I have to admit I know next to nothing about Latin besides the fact that sceintific names of animal and plant species have Latin names and that Latin is a "dead language" that hasn't changed in a long time. XD

Still, I can see how a Latin base would work for languages with a close connection to it, such as English or Italian, but I severly doubt it would work out for a Slavic languge such as Slovene.

"[In Japanese,] the differences seem to be modes of speech".
Would you mind pointing me to a research source for this?

I take it's no as simple as lexical choices and I'd prefer not to pester you with too many questions. :)

Having a drink with my best bud after finishing chapter 4 of Celeste game while being jobless for 1.5 months hahaha

Yeah, I'd be trying to learn a different set for Slavic, Gaelic and Germanic languages. Latin has quite an influence thorough out Europe as far as I've seen so I thought it was a solid choice to start with, and my friend taught me some Russian pronouns I would have sworn had the same roots as French pronouns.

Sure, https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/japanese-gendered-language/ this hits right on the topic, (the site was started by some people a couple classes ahead of me so there's that too!)

Wow, that sure is ambitious. O.O

My humble self will stick to trying to perefect Slovene and English. ;)

Thanks a lot for the link. :D

One final question:
I take it "flailed" in "Ha, perhaps, my head kind of flailed reading over your text." means that all the red "stop" lights went off in your head?
I've rarely encoutered "flailed" in such a context.