Comment on WHY
JuxtaposedJaguar@lemmy.ml 6 days agoI don’t know how German compares to French or Spanish, but in German things can be masculine, feminine, or neutral. What I do—which is partially as a protest, and partially out of laziness—is to assume every non-person noun is neutral.
It works surprisingly well in IT where basically all nouns are neutral, but I probably sound like Kevin from The Office in every other context.
wisely@feddit.org 6 days ago
Yeah as an English speaker using neuter seems very natural. Modern loan words such as from IT are often neuter for that reason.
However in general, words are statistically most likely to be masculine and least likely to be neuter. So if the word ending isn’t obviously feminine and it’s not a category such as IT that has a common gender you may be better off guessing masculine.
JuxtaposedJaguar@lemmy.ml 6 days ago
This is arguably subjective, but I think making masculine and feminine words neuter is the only way to counteract the inherent sexism of gendered nouns. If you make everything masculine, you’re still tacitly supporting the previous categorization of masculine nouns as correct, and vice versa for making every noun feminine.
wisely@feddit.org 6 days ago
My understanding was that it’s not seen as a male or female like it would be in English. Like der Tisch, they aren’t thinking of the table being manly, it’s just the way it’s said. Also neuter is seen more like a child gender than nonbinary. I have heard nonbinary people find neuter as being offensive because it’s infantilizing them. At least that’s how it was explained to me.
Would love to know more if anyone has any experience with that. I could be wrong as I am still learning and don’t know about gender theory in German. Are there gender politics for objects in German?
JuxtaposedJaguar@lemmy.ml 6 days ago
I don’t remember most of the grammatically correct genders, but when I was trying to learn them I had the distinct impression that stereo-typically manly nouns were masculine and stereo-typically womanly things were feminine.
I haven’t heard anything about that but that’s really interesting. Do you know how they prefer to be addressed?