Comment on WHY
wisely@feddit.org 5 days agoYeah 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 5 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 5 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 5 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?
wisely@feddit.org 5 days ago
Yes they do match up where if you are talking about a female animal or person it’s a feminine word etc. For inanimate objects I’ve been told they aren’t necessarily giving or thinking of them as having a gender though, not like it would be in English.
There seems to be no standard way to address someone nonbinary, it’s even worse than in English. Best I know is to ask. Until then most simply skip the pronoun and use their name instead, or Sie. Since Sie is respectful and is already used for people of any gender when used formally.
The nonbinary category itself is often called “divers”. Nouns that reference gender can be combined by adding an asterisk in the middle. “Lehrer*innen”. As a warning though some conservative and older people can get upset about the asterisk.
Do you know what level German you are at? My older relatives spoke German but passed away when I was young. I always regretted not learning it and being monolingual. So in my 30’s I decided I was just going to learn it even if it took years or I never fully got genders right. Now it’s been 15 months learning daily and am at the B1 level. So not an expert just intermediate with more to learn.