this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2023
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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.
This always confused me, even as a native speaker so I looked it up some. Ultimately it's because modern German is the confluence of multiple older, historic languages one of which came from a tree with a strict male/female rule for nouns while the other one's grammar defaulted to a neutral case.
As languages merge or adopt from others they often becomes a conjoined mess of multiple rules coexisting at the same time. A contemporary example is that in English the plural of a word is usually formed by attaching the suffix "s" to the singular form, aka house becomes houses. However there's plenty of exceptions (mouse, mice) in particular if the words stem from a different language (octopus, octopi but nowadays octotuses is also acceptable). In that sense to people not privy to the etymology of words and who only study/learn the language per se there would be no perfectly accurate mechanism to predict the plural of a word.
It was to make the male seem more important. Even in English the word "woman" comes from "wife man". Everything was about the pecking order in history. Gender bias was a major part of that.
That's a misrepresentation of old English. Man used to be neutral, and was modified by were and wif respectively for man and woman. Wife comes from woman, not the other way around.