this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2023
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German is so weird. They came up with the concept of a neutral gender, but objects that obviously have no real gender (tables, boxes, sunglasses) don't use neuter.
Like, what's the process when they create a new word.
"Computer".... hmm, I think it's female.
Nah, it's neuter.
You guys are idiots, he's obviously male!
Oh yeah, Gunther is right! Look at him!
In gendered languages the "gender" of things other than people doesn't really relate to human gender at all. It's just a grammatical construct.
Mostly yes, but a few gendered languages (Wikipedia lists the Yeniseian and most Dravidian languages, Dizi and Zande) use strict semantic criteria, so that the grammatical gender does correlate strictly with the actual gender 99% of the time.
My favourite is some words having different pronouns in different regions. Like der/die/das Nutella, der Butter, das Joghurt 😳
Who the fuck says "der Butter" or "das Joghurt"? Nutella is difficult, because it's a name.
Einige Regionen in Bayern. In Teilen Österreichs auch gerne feminin die Joghurt
Because we already had a word for "computer" (literally: calculator) which had the male article so when we started using the English word "computer" we kept the article :)
I'm really curious what the process for it forming was like too but just gonna put it out there that gender in language generally has more to do with tracking what the word is than literally thinking stuff has gender. Originally there was a proposal to call it left and right to make it clear that it's just a split.
Computer means Rechner, which is obviously male, because women can't math. It's easy if you just think about it.