this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2023
991 points (95.9% liked)

Memes

49359 readers
1870 users here now

Rules:

  1. Be civil and nice.
  2. Try not to excessively repost, as a rule of thumb, wait at least 2 months to do it if you have to.

founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 years ago (5 children)

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!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

My favourite is some words having different pronouns in different regions. Like der/die/das Nutella, der Butter, das Joghurt 😳

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Who the fuck says "der Butter" or "das Joghurt"? Nutella is difficult, because it's a name.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Einige Regionen in Bayern. In Teilen Österreichs auch gerne feminin die Joghurt

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

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 :)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

Computer means Rechner, which is obviously male, because women can't math. It's easy if you just think about it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

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.