I’m just happy that washing machine has the same gender in French as my language and not a different one
I do not respect gendered languages. I will not apologize for misgendering a pencil. The right form of “the” for an apple is “the apple.”
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.
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
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.
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.
So Luxembourgish?
You can’t just make stuff up.
All good examples in comments, but in this case it’s Swedish. And if not by god then I’ll forsake it.
Which language is that?
Hahaha France dumb because democracy!
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?
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 actually find gendered languages much more precise.
Just never ask a group of Germans what the singular article of Nutella is.
Put some yogurt on that!
I don’t get the weirdness of phrasal verbs? It’s a basic staple of every Indoeuropean language to generate verbs by tacking on prepositions. Ok, it’s a bit weird to use prepositions after the word, but that’s just standard Germanic separable verbs that are a bit regulized. So what?
They’re just so ubiquitous in English. In my experience, people coming from the Romance languages have a very hard time with them, because most of the actions they describe are a single verb in their mother tongues. Imagine having to remember what two words mean, but then also having to remember that when you use the two words together, they form a distinct, sometimes even unrelated, meaning.
And there’s thousands.
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 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.
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.
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
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
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.
Both! Un lave-linge. Or, une machine à laver.
¿Por qué no los dos?
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.
Japanese?
Nope. It’s Persian (also known as Farsi, or Parsi).
Persian’s roots are actually closer to English than Arabic: Persian is an Indo-European language, same as English, while Arabic is a Semitic language.
May I ask what language that may be?
How progressive.
My two main fluent languages are not gendered. It was such a weird concept when I started to learn French.
Same as italian
Gender is a social construct powered by language.
female of course
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 actually older than French itself - a relic from Gaulish.
TIL, thanks
