this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2023
991 points (95.9% liked)
Memes
45550 readers
1864 users here now
Rules:
- Be civil and nice.
- Try not to excessively repost, as a rule of thumb, wait at least 2 months to do it if you have to.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
In German:
Man = male (der Mann)
Woman = female (die Frau)
Boy = male (der Junge)
Girl = neutral (das Mädchen)
No idea why lol.
Also I'm learning French and everything has a gender but I don't see any pattern to it at all. Pizza is female, books are male, a suitcase is female, hats are male and so on.
Also in French, the names of numbers go absolutely mental once you go above about 50. That's got nothing to do with gender but I want to complain it whenever I can.
Mädchen is a diminutive, and all diminutives are grammatically neutral.
It's the same in Dutch btw, and my girlfriend who is learning Dutch is frequently abusing this as a cheat code: whenever she doesn't know the gender of a word, she'll just use the diminutive and it will automatically be neutral.
I just might have just learned smth about my native language.