Nouns: Roles & Gender

Nouns are the basic building blocks of every language, together with verbs. The subject of a sentence will always be a noun, just like the object. I start with these, instead of verbs, as they are way simpler to learn and understand.

Nouns: names for people, things or concepts

Role

In many languages, nouns receive different suffixes depending on their role within the sentence.

English does not do this. Nouns always stay the same. It doesn’t care about the role in the sentence.

This makes them easy to learn!

Gender

Another common rule in languages is to give words a gender.

This is, most likely, also a remnant of how humans started communicating a long time ago.

In a primitive world where procreation is everything, it’s not strange to think everything in the world has a gender. Or to construct a language that has two versions of each word—one for each gender.

Gender was simply one of the most important and consistent things in the natural world. Something that divided everything 50/50.

English, again, mostly ignores this. A dog doesn’t have a specified gender, nor does a house or chair. It’s always “the dog” and “the chair”. You don’t know anything else about that dog.

Therefore, you usually don’t have to worry about gender. You might only find that in older writings. If you want to specify gender, for whatever reason, you can put male or female in front. (A male friend, a female student.)

But some remnants of the past remain, usually where it makes the most sense. In that case, there are usually three completely different nouns to use. Some of the most common ones …

You’ll learn about referring to a noun later, gendered or not.

A remark on language

Somehow, language has become quite opinionated lately. People choosing their own pronouns. Words not being allowed anymore. Gender apparently not existing. I try to make this a course on how English works currently and nothing else.

So I will give my take only once. Then we can continue in peace.

All words are allowed and communication improves through specificity.

What does this mean? Words aren’t owned by anyone. The meaning given to them comes through mutual agreement. Most people believe a word means X, so we assume it means X.

But you can say anything you like. And if others don’t like it, they can say anything back. Language is organic and very susceptible to human emotion and assumptions.

But never hold back. Never censor, yourself or others. If somebody else thinks a word is foul and you are wrong to use it, that is their problem, as it is their perception of the word.

Freedom of speech is something we should hold in high regard. Don’t burn the books.

Additionally, I am quite sad that English does away with those common rules I explained above. Having two versions of a word for two common cases is always better than having a single word.

Why? It allows you to communicate more specifically and more clearly.

Remember, in Dutch if I say “lerares”, the person listening already knows “a female teacher”. I communicated more meaning in a single word.

Similarly, in Latin, if a female word ends in “am” you already know it will be the object of the sentence. (Well, Latin is strange, there are always exceptions.)

That’s why this course only explains the basic rules. I merely give some intuition about how language works in general. For example, why they often use gendered words. I don’t force my style or preference on you, nor make predictions about where language is headed.

I won’t mention anything about this again. Let’s continue!