"Je voudrais un baguette" I once asked in a parisian boulangerie. I don't think anyone has looked at me with the same level of disgust before as the older lady selling the breads.
"Voilà, une baguette.", the "une" flying through me like an icicle.
"Stupid fucking foreigner thinking my bread has a dick..."
I remember standing in line for crepes in Le Havre, I just had my first year of French in school and I was practicing how to order in my head, nervously repeating "un crepe avec sucre", and killed myself over not remembering the gender of crepe. So it's finally my turn in line and I order nervously (I am 13 years old) and they reply with "pancake with sugar, no problem" and I'm just like 😭
Somehow people not even giving you a chance to practice your language skills is awful
Damn French, une crêpe and a pancake are not the same thing!
Baguettes are distinctly penis shaped, so the French are just wrong about that.
Tfw the washing machine is gender fluid
I believe women sometimes use them to aid in the release of gender fluid.
Enter German and Gendering: You can not say Programmer to address all Programmers in the room. You have to call them Programmerin und Programmer or Programmer:in or Programmende. And yes, most of these words aren't even German but if you don't use them you are a Grammar Nazi.
And btw, the fact that we address females with "die" does not mean we want them dead, thank you and have a good day.
It's a little bit worse than that in fact. "Programmiererinnen und Programmierer" or "Programmierer:innen" or "Programmierende". And if you get it wrong you are not a grammar nazi but more of a regular nazi.
/s just in case
Due to the increased acceptance of non-conforming identities, it's become more prevalent to either ask for pronouns, tell them to a person you meet, or have them somewhere visible in things like gameshows.
That's quite as silly to me as this whole "what gender is this washing machine" nonsense is to English-speaking people.
Here in Finland, we don't have gendered language. Even with third person pronouns, we usually default to "it" instead of "him/her/they". Except for pets. They always get the proper pronoun "hän". It's just respectful.
So yeah, just like the English wonder why they have to learn different words for something needlessly gendered in France, I too, as a Finn, wonder why I have to learn different words for something needlessly gendered in English.
Right or wrong, calling a person "it" in English is incredibly disrespectful
Polish speaker here. We not only have gendered nouns but also verbs and adjectives.
Spanish speaker here. For as chaotic and wild as English is, I've always appreciated that it has no gendered nouns. Why are chairs female? Makes no sense
Maybe you are interested in Finnish. We do not have gendered pronouns either. Everyone is just "hän".
A washing machine is obviously female because doing laundry is a thing for women.
And now I will sit back and watch how many people get mad at me because they don't understand sarcasm.
And now I will sit back and watch how many people get mad at me because they don't understand sarcasm.
Really getting worked up over that imaginary person you created huh? Lol
No. It's feminine because you put dirty things in it.
EDIT: I'm going to get lynched by the hyper vigilant with you. We're in this together now.
While gendered nouns are stupid, I at least appreciate Italian because you can just learn the word and get its gender from the end part of the word. In German, however, it's completely random and you have to learn the gender with the word.
I don't know what you're on about. It's "die Waschmaschine" (washing machine, female), "das Waschmittel" (laundry detergent, neutral) and "der Trockner" (dryer, male).
Pretty self explanatory /s
crying in German
intentionally misreading as wholesome - the idea is to subvert the concept of gender.
"You'll never be a real woman!"
"Neither will the chair I'm sitting in but you keep calling it 'her' so maybe stfu."
What exactly does gender achieve in a language? Is English missing out on any nuance? Is it literally thinking about nouns as male or female, or is it just a weird name for the concept? Who decides gender when a new noun is made? What about borrowed words from other languages? Do you sound stupid if you speak French without using it, or are you just a language hipster?
Language, dude...
I'm not an expert. But I believe it is something to do with information redundancy.
If you mishear a word but surrounding words must match gender and number, you may reconstruct the misheard word.
As a native spanish speaker, I don't think of the actual sexuality of objects, it's just a characteristic of the word that should match other words in the sentence. For example the word screen (pantalla) is femenine, and the word monitor (monitor) is masculine. So when I see my monitor I don't think of an actual female or male object. But the nouns should match adjectives gender, so if someone says "broken monitor" (monitor roto) or "broken screen" (pantalla rota) I have this kind of redundancy if I misheard a word.
But I'm not an expert of linguistics. Don't quote me.
This sounds right. I think it’s just a hint for listeners for what the noun might be, and it happens to align to the male/female genders.
Speaking as a gendered language user (Italian) it is sometimes weird.
For example, car is feminine but our name for an off-road vehicle is masculine, as is the word for truck. Since you have to apply the gender of the noun to verbs, articles and adjectives, which one do you use when talking about your SUV? Feminine because it's a car or masculine because it's an offroader?
For borrowed words there's usually a consensus on gender that forms over time. Sometimes a borrowed word inherits its gender from the translation of that word that fell out of use. One example of this could be the word computer. An equivalent term exists in Italian (calcolatore) which fell out of use but gave it a definite gender, masculine.
Germany has three genders lmao
Of course! Hitler proved all right wing Germans are pussies with dicks.
Non-neutral nouns have always struck me as odd. They provide no info gain whatsoever outside of actually providing a gender if you're referring to a person or animal (for example, in Spanish, gato -> male cat, gata -> female cat). And in those situations, a short sentence can provide instant clarification if needed in a non-gendered language like English.
It's a language feature built to be helpful in one use case, whilst simultaneously being worse in about a bazillion others. It's a very odd choice.
There's an argument to be made that it might help clarifying when speaking to someone. Consider these two German sentences:
"Der rote Apfel" – the red apple
"Die rote Ampel" – the red traffic light
Imagine a noisy environment, a quiet speaker or some other problem and you only understand
"Die rote A***el" – the red x***xx
In a language like English, you don't have enough information to understand the meaning. The German gender system helps to direct your possible matching words (Ampel or Apfel) to the correct one, as "Die rote Apfel" is grammatically incorrect.
Another point I want to make is that it isn't "being worse in about a bazillion other" use cases. Native speakers don't really have an issue with noun class systems. It's just very unintuitive and tedious for non-native language learners to memorize all the genders of nouns.
is that like how you have to memorize every single articels (der, die, das) for every word in german?
Uh? I'm Portuguese and it works in the same in my language. I don't know what the big deal is. You get the gender by the arti...
Oh...
This shit again...
Why are you so hung up on "gender"? Just replace it with "group" and you'll find the exact same situation in almost all languages.
In Swedish words are not gendered. But to specify the singular we use one of two groups. En or ett. It can be a word before what you want to specify. Or a suffix.
En banan, (a banana) Banan-en, (the banana)
Or perhaps.
Ett körsbär, (a cherry) Körsbär-et, (the cherry)
It's just one if two groups. Has nothing to do with gender. But if you really want to, we can pretend it's gendered because it doesn't matter. It's gonna be one or the other regardless.
Now tell me. How is this different from "gendered" languages? And as a bonus. There is NO rule regarding which to use when. You just have to know.
Spanish enters the room: words have gender, but there are special cases where the definite article switches gender.
"El hacha roja/Las hachas rojas", "El agua fría/Las aguas frías"
Also, some words may have both genders:
"El computador/La computadora"
It's a she, because that's a woman job. Same goes for dish washer !
Also, there are a few words that even french (most of them) would have the gender wrong...
Sorry to disappoint, a dish washer is "un lave-vaisselle", which is masculine. A car however is "une voiture", maybe there's a joke in there about how manly men love their car more than their gf.
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