Comment on WHY
JuxtaposedJaguar@lemmy.ml 1 month 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 1 month ago
JuxtaposedJaguar@lemmy.ml 1 month 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 1 month ago
JuxtaposedJaguar@lemmy.ml 1 month 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?