DLAB Cross-Linguistic Comparison 2 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: Spanish 'perro' (dog) is masculine and 'mesa' (table) is feminine. German 'Mädchen' (girl) is neuter. What does this show about grammatical gender?
- Gender always matches biological sex
- Grammatical gender is often arbitrary and unrelated to natural sex (Correct answer)
- Only animate nouns have gender
- Gender is universal across all languages
Correct answer: Grammatical gender is often arbitrary and unrelated to natural sex
Grammatical gender is often arbitrary: a table has no natural sex but is 'feminine' in Spanish. Even more strikingly, 'Mädchen' (girl) is grammatically neuter in German because the diminutive suffix '-chen' always assigns neuter gender. Grammatical gender is a classification system, not a sex-based system.
Question 2: English uses word order to show meaning: 'the dog bit the man' vs. 'the man bit the dog.' Latin uses case endings: 'canis mordit virum' = 'canine bit man-ACC.' What advantage do case systems provide?
- They make languages harder to learn
- They allow freer word order since grammatical roles are marked on nouns (Correct answer)
- They eliminate the need for verbs
- They make pronunciation easier
Correct answer: They allow freer word order since grammatical roles are marked on nouns
Case markings on nouns indicate their grammatical role (subject, object, etc.) regardless of position. This frees word order for other purposes like emphasis or topic-focus structure. Latin 'virum mordit canis' and 'canis mordit virum' both mean 'the dog bit the man' because '-um' marks the object.
Question 3: Vietnamese 'tôi đã ăn cơm' (I PAST eat rice) uses a separate word 'đã' for past tense. English uses a suffix: 'I eat' → 'I ate.' What morphological type does Vietnamese represent?
- Agglutinative
- Polysynthetic
- Fusional
- Isolating (analytic) (Correct answer)
Correct answer: Isolating (analytic)
Vietnamese is an isolating (analytic) language where grammatical relationships are expressed through separate words rather than affixes. Tense, aspect, and mood are all conveyed by independent particles. Words generally don't change form. Mandarin Chinese is another example.
Question 4: Finnish has 15 grammatical cases (nominative, genitive, partitive, inessive, elative, illative, etc.). English has virtually no case marking on nouns. What does Finnish's rich case system replace?
- Adjectives
- Prepositions and word order (Finnish uses case endings instead) (Correct answer)
- Verbs
- Pronouns
Correct answer: Prepositions and word order (Finnish uses case endings instead)
Finnish's rich case system encodes spatial, temporal, and grammatical relationships that English expresses with prepositions: 'talossa' (house-INESSIVE) = 'in the house,' 'talosta' (house-ELATIVE) = 'from inside the house.' Cases eliminate the need for many prepositions.
Question 5: In Navajo, a single verb can express what English needs an entire sentence for: 'yishtééh' = 'I am starting to carry a round object away.' What morphological type is Navajo?
- Isolating
- Agglutinative
- Fusional
- Polysynthetic (Correct answer)
Correct answer: Polysynthetic
Navajo is polysynthetic — a single word contains multiple morphemes encoding subject, object, direction, aspect, and verb root, expressing what would be a full sentence in English. The verb incorporates nominal and adverbial information into one complex word.
Question 6: Korean and Japanese both use SOV word order, postpositions, and agglutinative morphology, but they are genetically unrelated. What explains their similarities?
- They must be related
- Areal features — geographic proximity can cause unrelated languages to converge (Correct answer)
- Random coincidence
- All Asian languages are the same
Correct answer: Areal features — geographic proximity can cause unrelated languages to converge
Despite being genetically unrelated (Japanese is a Japonic language, Korean is a language isolate or Koreanic), geographic proximity and cultural contact caused convergence in typological features. This is called areal influence or the Sprachbund effect, where neighboring languages develop similar structural properties.
DLAB Cross-Linguistic Comparison 2
Spanish 'perro' (dog) is masculine and 'mesa' (table) is feminine.
German 'Mädchen' (girl) is neuter.
What does this show about grammatical gender?