One of my languages has three genders for living creatures, and two genders for items. Those genders are all different from each other: humans and other living beings are male/female/living neutral, things are item neutral/item neutral. An item neutral plural is also used for groups of living beings, but not for all groups of items.
One item neutral singular can in some instances be used for a living being regardless of their gender. The other item neutral would be insulting if used about living beings, and especially dehumanising to humans (wish someone had told me this sooner).
I have no idea when to use which item neutral. Locals keep correcting me or almost imperceptibly wincing when I get it wrong, so when I want to sound more fluent I just use the item plural for singulars as well - it seems less annoying for some reason.
Oh, and for one of the item neutrals, if you accidentally use the other item neutral it means the plural of the first one. Kill me now, lol.
Which godforsaken language is that?
Abyssal I assume.
In French, it’s ‘le pénis,’ but nobody says that. ‘Dick,’ is feminine (la bite.)
Also, ‘vagina’ is masculine, but ‘pussy’ is feminine, because if you were to say ‘le chat’ it would mean a cat, but by feminising the word, it becomes ‘la chatte,’ meaning pussy.
As someone who grew up Anglophone, I actually find gendered languages much more precise. On the other hand, in order to make yourself understood one must have a rich vocabulary, because the definitions of words are often more narrow than in English.
And don’t even get me started on phrasal verbs… English is messy.
You’d better back down before this blows up or i break down
Pure poetry.
I would love to see that discuss
Sorry, I don’t understand what I am seeing here. Is that someone xeeting a screenshot of someone reporting to Duolingo that penis should be feminine, not masculine in Spanish?
Both! Un lave-linge. Or, une machine à laver.
¿Por qué no los dos?
Hahaha France dumb because democracy!
English is such a poor language that they only have the article The and nouns without genders.
Seethe and cope.
bullpies!
i don’t like English, but those are things it does right!
who the hell needs TWELVE definite articles?!
Speakers of enlightened languages?
And they still have trouble learning it.
My native language doesn’t have any articles and there is no distinction between he and she.
May I ask what language that may be?
How progressive.
I’ve found that most of the time, just pick the most sexist answer you can think of, and you’ll typically be right!
I really don’t like gendered languages.
You’ll be right 50% of the times. Or 33% in german. And it doesn’t match between languages. Like, “cat” is a she in german and a he in french. Often synonyms have different genders : une lettre/un courrier (both mean a mail).
I think the issue is that you are searching your mind for correlations between gender and sexism-related, which is often easier than searching for non-correlation. If I ask you “quick, think of a singer that wears leather”, you’ll find one instantly. But if I ask “quick, find a singer that doesn’t wear leather” it takes a while, even though there more of them.
If you want a better impression of the phenomenon, open a dictionary, go over words one by one and count the points.
And also “organ” (the instrument) in french is male when singular and female when plural. “C’est un bel orgue” and “Ce sont de belles orgues”.
- Dick (bite) = Feminine
- Cunt (con) = Masculine
My favorite example for people who think grammatical gender has more than a passing correlation to social gender.
That being said there is actual built-in sexism to grammatical gender in some areas, e.g. job titles (un chauffeur = a driver, une chauffeuse = a prostitute).
You’d love German – there is absolutely zero system or logic behind what word has which of the three genders.
three?!
Yeah, a lot of european languages have a three gender system: masculine, feminine and neuter
Proto-Indo-European, the language which most European (and some South Asian languages) originate from, had a three gender system
Even English used to have a three gender system before it disappeared in the Middle English period
Despite the name, the neuter gender tends to not be used for people, although in some languages (such as Polish) the use of the neuter gender to refer to non-binary people is gaining traction
German is woke
It totally isn’t unfortunately, the gender neutral pronoun (if that’s what it’s called?) doesn’t work for humans.
The neuter pronoun (“it”) doesn’t work for humans in English either.
Why not though? Just because it sounds rude or something?
oh, it does work…
…if you’re bigoted enough.
Yep. Masculine, feminine, and neuter. It’s annoyingly hard to learn. Plus all the other adjectives and such change to match. It’s wild.
When I studied German a bit for fun I gave up on trying to memorize the genders and just used “das” for everything. Yeah it’s wildly incorrect but still mostly understandable which is fine for me.
Polish also has three. She, he, it/this.
I think most slavic languages in general, not just polish.
There are some general guidelines, which hold true more often than not: https://germanwithlaura.com/noun-gender/
For example, planets that don’t end with an e and which aren’t Venus tend to be male
Still mostly only good as a guessing guideline because there’s no real system, just etymological patterns, but yea you can guess more than 33% for sure.
It’s not perfect, no, but I feel like you can identify feminine words based on their endings alone in 90% of cases, and if you can use a few general rules to make masculine/neuter better than a 50-50 guess, you’re already right more often than you’re wrong. Maybe even 75% with no rote menorization whatsoever
Edit: I actually just read masculine is about 2x as common as other genders, so always guessing masculine should take you to 50% alone
Yeah, no, it doesn’t make sense:
Der Mann (the man - male article)
Die Frau (the woman - female article)
Der Junge (the boy - male article)
Das Mädchen (the girl - neutral article)
Like, come on gendered articles, you had one job.
Anything with -chen/-klein (a diminutive) is neuter.
E.g. in addition to Mädchen there is Jungchen (~“youngster”) that is also neuter rather than masculine.
But there’s no Mäd.
Maid. Man kann sich auch lernresistenter geben als man ist.
Alles voll logisch, stimmt. Ich geh’ dann mal das Waschmaschine befüllen 👌
doesn’t work at all, completely breaks down for the planetoids and moons…
which makes sense, since those names are not german, which is why german grammar doesn’t apply to them.
latin loanwords work the same way in german as they do in latin: completely at random and just have to be memorized…but at least they do follow the gender of the deity, so if you know your greco-roman pantheon it’s pretty easy!
edit: also a very weird example, with a weird rule about ending in “e”; venus and earth (erde) are the only female planets…
There was a whole battle about whether covid was masculine or feminine. I think feminine won, probably because it sucked.
Feminine is what the Académie settled on, months after everyone settled on Masculine.
That institution holds some normative power with other institutions (e.g. some media outlets) but has utterly failed to impose its outdated and reactionary outlook to anyone but other reactionaries. They’re constantly coming out with revisions for words that reached common parlance years earlier.
So common usage is Le covid. If someone used the feminine I’d have to assume they unironically use the word “Wokisme”, because only these kinds of people actually think that the Académie is worth listening to.
I think it was masculine, I heard a lot of people saying, “I got Covid Man.”
And a lot of people still say le covid because that’s how language works
I only studied french for a short time, but I feel like that really doesn’t work for french:
- chemisier, blouse, is masculine
- ceinture, belt, is feminine
Those were the two onces I could remember like this half a year after ending my french studies, but could be that those are only two uncommon counterexamples.
Also, both of these are what you would “expect” in German (die Bluse, der Gürtel)
Interesting how those words are reversed as far as genders go in Spanish:
- Chemisier = Blusa, feminine
- Ceinture = Cinturón, masculine
Despite both languages having common Latin roots.
Well it works for this example, because lave-vaisselle is feminine. The root vasselle (dishes) is feminine.
Une lave-vaisselle totally does not work.
Vaisselle is feminine, but lave-vaisselle is masculine.
vaiselle is actually inhereting its gender in an unrelated manner.
It comes from Latin vāscellum which is a Neuter noun.
But the specific form that gave rise to vaiselle was the collective plural of that noun vāscella. source
And it’s a common pattern that in vulgar latin, (what gave rise to french), collective plural nouns were interpreted as feminine. I think this is a general tendency and unrelated to the noun’s meaning. The reason often given is that neuter plural endings and feminine singular endings were the same in Latin.
BTW; this is also the latin root of the english word vessel.
(PS: I agree with you that gender in language is problematic and I prefer non gendered as well).
That’s what I love about my native Hungarian, even pronouns are ungendered.
Everything else is stupid complicated though. We have tonal harmony to worry about instead.
I also found that if you really want to be understood in French, you have to force yourself into an over the top, bordering on ridiculous French accent.
So the key to speaking good French is to default to the most sexist position possible and intentionally speak like an asshole.
It sounds ridiculous to us, but that’s just how they talk. It also works in reverse for them; I sometimes have to remind my spouse when we’re among English speakers that she sounds like she doesn’t have enough mash potatoes in her mouth.
Female. Obviously. 😏
Yes, but what if you’re a man married to a man? Which one is the washing machine? 🤌
One of the few genders German and French agree on is that a machine is female.
So, if a man is considered to be a machine he is female in that field.
“Europeans solve trans bathroom problem, whoever does the laundry, pees in the ladies room”
The one that is sent from the future that consists of living tissue over a metal endoskeleton.
My body is a MACHINE that turns DIRTY things into CLEAN things. /skeleton-deadlift-meme
I am.
(j/k; I’m pretty poor at cleaning things.)
I asked my Francophone buddy that grew up in backwoods Quebec how the hell he kept it all in his head. He said that he never bothered.
If it had an “e” on the end, he just assumed it was feminine.
If he was drunk, he didn’t give a single flying tabernak.
There’s a pattern to it. I don’t know what it is, and I’m not sure anyone knows consciously. But for example, when creating new words (eg. fantasy/sci-fi context) there usually isn’t any confusion as to what that word’s gender will be, it just sounds bad with the wrong pronoun. There are a few exceptions of course, same as “autobus” and “avion” which technically have a gender assigned but people toss a coin every time.
It is not a problem for native speakers though. These kinds of things are only something you think about if you are learning it as a second language later in life. If you grew up with them you just aborb the information and use it without thinking about it.
It’s likely the same as English spelling. Just years and years of repeated exposure, and you eventually pick up most of it through osmosis
How does anyone manage to keep allll the words pronunciation and spelling they know is already amazing, craming pronouns on top of that isn’t much worse
female of course
Mark Twain also struggled with language
To continue with the German genders: a tree is male, its buds are female, its leaves are neuter; horses are sexless, dogs are male, cats are female—tomcats included, of course; a person’s mouth, neck, bosom, elbows, fingers, nails, feet, and body are of the male sex, and his head is male or neuter according to the word selected to signify it, and NOT according to the sex of the individual who wears it—for in Germany all the women wear either male heads or sexless ones; a person’s nose, lips, shoulders, breast, hands, and toes are of the female sex; and his hair, ears, eyes, chin, legs, knees, heart, and conscience haven’t any sex at all. The inventor of the language probably got what he knew about a conscience from hearsay.
Dogs are male? In my language dogs are female. So I guess there is no standard for gendered language.
There’s absolutely no standard. A common trope among language learners of gendered languages whose mother tongue is also gendered is that they always pick the wrong gender for everything.
It is said that when English went from old English (which was gendered) to modern English, part of the problem was that the genders of the Germanic roots didn’t match the genders of the French influences so the people chose to just skip it all together.
Basically the last good decision in the creation of English
Dunno about German but in french dogs are male or female depending on their actual gender (obviously the female word has been adopted as a slur towards women, to be fair sometimes the masculine also is used that way for men).
In German, dogs are male by default (der Hund can be used as a generic term for both male and female dogs), but bitches are female (die Hündin). Cats are female by default (die Katze), but tomcats are male (der Kater).
We do not use Hündin as a slur for women, but Hund can be used as a slur for men.
The male word is also used as slur for men in Québec. It’s usually accompanied by copious religious profanity and a few tasteful adjectives.
- C’est un ostie de câlisse de chien sale à marde, Tabarnak!
German has both genders for dogs, but since the variants look (and sound) slightly different, it’s not instantly obvious:
Der Hund - a male dog
Die Hündin - a female dog
I like when the gender changes what the noun is. Here are a couple Spanish examples: la cometa = the kite (feminine) or el cometa = the comet (masculine) la papa = the potato (feminine) or el papa = the Pope (masculine).
Swahili has 18 genders, though only 16 are in active use.
Oh hey, someone that used gender in regards to Spanish correctly.
I say that in regards to one of my Spanish teachers from high school who would always grade us wrong when we say male/female instead of masculine/feminine. One day he explained that by saying “Objects have gender! People have sex!”
I didn’t know Swahili was that progressive.
How do you call a herd of washing machines?
On the phone?
remember to raise those washing machines and feed them the best laundry detergent you can! i recommend arm and hammer (partly because of the logo - the logo was used a lot in de leonism, and armand hammer supports socialism)
Is it possible to bash your way though this, as a foreigner, by getting the gender wrong half the time? Are mis-genedered nouns sometimes homophones for completely different things, or can you be understood with bad grammar, regardless?
I say this since sometimes “bad/wrong” is less about understanding and more about “that sounds funny” or “nobody talks like that.”
You will be understood, it will just give people a small pause.
Sometimes it may cause confusion, like “the phone (he) went through the washing machine (she) and now <she/he> is broken” changes meaning if you get the pronoun wrong. But then if you are used to disambiguate thIs kind of situation - and you have to in english - it shouldn’t happen too often
Good to know! I’ll just not let any phones into any washing machines while traveling, to avoid grammatical confusion. I’ll wash my phone when I get home instead.
no rules, no sens, only disdain
L’Académie Française existed since the 18th century to make the language too complex “for the common and the women”
Is that when they decided to make counting past 70 complicated?
no, I’m afraid I could not shift the blame on this one. Particularly when french speakers in Switzerland and Belgium show alternatives for a long time
That’s four goddamn numbers in a row!
Pierre-Frédérique-Antoine and Mike having llunch after french class. Mike : Oh wregaarde un mouche! PFA : non, on dit UNE mouche. Mike: wow t’as de bons zyeux!
