• erogenouswarzone@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    This is giving me stress daymares about Spanish in high school.

    Still, it’s an interesting point you make.

    But then again, with definitive articles you have a bunch of things that are not supposed to convey gender conveying gender. Like a toaster… It would suck to have to remember the gender of a toaster, or, well toasters in general.

    • 𝘋𝘪𝘳𝘬@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      It’s “der Toaster” which makes it masculine. On the other hand, a girl (“das Mädchen”) is neuter. The grammatical gender is somewhat arbitrary and does not follow any “real” rules.

      As a German you somehow “feel” if the correct article is used, though.

      • erogenouswarzone@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        Yeah, fuck that. English is bs enough.

        Edit: yeah, that “feeling” is knowing it so well, you don’t totally understand it, and also means it’s hard to convey

      • Faresh@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        Embarrassingly for someone whose native language is german, I often use the masculine when the neuter should have been used, because they feel the same to me. I never was taught any formal grammar in german, though, so that might play a role.

      • barsoap@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        It’s less about magical feelings but rules that native speakers know but aren’t aware of. Toaster is clearly male because nouns constructed from verb+er are always male.

        Also “male gender” is kinda misleading, it’s basically a mistake early linguistics made because it was so centered around Indo-European languages. The modern term is noun class, and Indo-European languages share the trait that they have three noun classes, one containing the word for “woman”, the other the one for “man”, and another the word for “thing”. That’s where the names come from: Bridges aren’t female in German they simply share a noun class with women.

        And girl is neuter in German because all diminutives are. “Deern” is definitely female.