Comment on why
djsoren19@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
I’ve found that most of the time, just pick the most sexist answer you can think of, and you’ll typically be right!
I really don’t like gendered languages.
I only studied french for a short time, but I feel like that really doesn’t work for french:
Those were the two onces I could remember like this half a year after ending my french studies, but could be that those are only two uncommon counterexamples.
Also, both of these are what you would “expect” in German (die Bluse, der Gürtel)
Well it works for this example, because lave-vaisselle is feminine. The root vasselle (dishes) is feminine.
vaiselle is actually inhereting its gender in an unrelated manner.
It comes from Latin vāscellum which is a Neuter noun.
But the specific form that gave rise to vaiselle was the collective plural of that noun vāscella.
source
And it’s a common pattern that in vulgar latin, (what gave rise to french), collective plural nouns were interpreted as feminine. I think this is a general tendency and unrelated to the noun’s meaning. The reason often given is that neuter plural endings and feminine singular endings were the same in Latin.
BTW; this is also the latin route of the english word vessel.
(PS: I agree with you that gender in language is problematic and I prefer non gendered as well).
Vaisselle is feminine, but lave-vaisselle is masculine.
Une lave-vaisselle totally does not work.
Interesting how those words are reversed as far as genders go in Spanish:
Despite both languages having common Latin roots.
You’ll be right 50% of the times. Or 33% in german. And it doesn’t match between languages. Like, cat is a she in german and a he in french. Often synonyms have different genders : une lettre/un courrier (both mean a mail).
The issue is that you are searching your mind for correlations between gender and sexism-related, which is often easier than searching for non-correlation. If I ask you “quick, think of a singer that wears leather”, you’ll find one instantly. But if I ask “quick, find a singer that doesn’t wear leather” it takes a while.
If you want a better impression of the phenomenon, open a dictionary, go over words one by one and count the points.
*And also “organ” (the instrument) in french is male when singular and female when plural. “C’est un bel orgue” and “Ce sont de belles orgues”. *
My favorite example for people who think grammatical gender has more than a passing correlation to social gender.
That being said there is actual built-in sexism to grammatical gender in some areas, e.g. job titles (un chauffeur = a driver, une chauffeuse = a prostitute).
“penis” is masculine while “bite” is feminine, too
I would argue that “chauffeuse” for feminine drivers and “chauffeuse” have drifted appart so much that they should be considered different words, homonyms. A feminine driver should be called a chauffeuse, and theorically an easy boy could be called a chauffeur. It will not happen because nobody uses the slur this way, but that’s unrelated to the grammatical structure of the language. Wouldn’t call it built-in.
Words meanings always slide around and we have markers in some of them that determine whether the word describes a man or a women. Since we treat women and men differently, it’s not surprising that the feminine variant might end up with different connotations than the masculine one. But the words in question do not have gender, they inherit the gender of who they describe. It’s a different thing, unrelated to the assignment of genders to objects
To be clear, I am not defending the idea that you should give gender to things, nor that you should change the suffix in all the words that refer to women. I think it’s stupid and I wish we didn’t even have pronouns in the first place
Well, that’s because chauff-eur/euse means neither driver nor prostitute, but “heater”, as in “someone who makes hot”. One heats the steam engine, the other their clients. The sexism is not built in the language or the gender system, but in the patriarchal culture.
That’s what I love about my native Hungarian, even pronouns are ungendered.
Everything else is stupid complicated though. We have tonal harmony to worry about instead.
I also found that if you really want to be understood in French, you have to force yourself into an over the top, bordering on ridiculous French accent.
So the key to speaking good French is to default to the most sexist position possible and intentionally speak like an asshole.
It sounds ridiculous to us, but that’s just how they talk. It also works in reverse for them; I sometimes have to remind my spouse when we’re among English speakers that she sounds like she doesn’t have enough mash potatoes in her mouth.
There was a whole battle about whether covid was masculine or feminine. I think feminine won, probably because it sucked.
Feminine is what the Académie settled on, months after everyone settled on Masculine.
That institution holds some normative power with other institutions (e.g. some media outlets) but has utterly failed to impose its outdated and reactionary outlook to anyone but other reactionaries. They’re constantly coming out with revisions for words that reached common parlance years earlier.
So common usage is Le covid. If someone used the feminine I’d have to assume they unironically use the word “Wokisme”.
I think it was masculine, I heard a lot of people saying, “I got Covid Man.”
And a lot of people still say le covid because that’s how language works
zakobjoa@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
You’d love German – there is absolutely zero system or logic behind what word has which of the three genders.
idunnololz@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
three?!
OrganicMustard@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
German is woke
jlow@discuss.tchncs.de 2 weeks ago
It totally isn’t unfortunately, the gender neutral pronoun (if that’s what it’s called?) doesn’t work for humans.
Demdaru@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Polish also has three. She, he, it/this.
de_lancre@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I think most slavic languages in general, not just polish.
Lysergid@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
Polish also distinguishes oni (they he) and one (they it/she). Probably most sexist language I know
hydrashok@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Yep. Masculine, feminine, and neuter. It’s annoyingly hard to learn. Plus all the other adjectives and such change to match. It’s wild.
rautapekoni@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
When I studied German a bit for fun I gave up on trying to memorize the genders and just used “das” for everything. Yeah it’s wildly incorrect but still mostly understandable which is fine for me.
KSPAtlas@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
Yeah, a lot of european languages have a three gender system: masculine, feminine and neuter
Proto-Indo-European, the language which most European (and some South Asian languages) originate from, had a three gender system
Even English used to have a three gender system before it disappeared in the Middle English period
Despite the name, the neuter gender tends to not be used for people, although in some languages (such as Polish) the use of the neuter gender to refer to non-binary people is gaining traction
Pilon23@feddit.dk 2 weeks ago
There are some general guidelines, which hold true more often than not: germanwithlaura.com/noun-gender/
kossa@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
Yeah, no, it doesn’t make sense:
Der Mann (the man - male article)
Die Frau (the woman - female article)
Der Junge (the boy - male article)
Das Mädchen (the girl - neutral article)
Like, come on gendered articles, you had one job.
skibidi@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Anything with -chen/-klein (a diminutive) is neuter.
E.g. in addition to Mädchen there is Jungchen (~“youngster”) that is also neuter rather than masculine.
samus12345@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
The girl one was always funny to me. “The girl ran to its mother.”
9bananas@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
doesn’t work at all, completely breaks down for the planetoids and moons…
which makes sense, since those names are not german, which is why german grammar doesn’t apply to them.
latin loanwords work the same way in german as they do in latin: completely at random and just have to be memorized…but at least they do follow the gender of the deity, so if you know your greco-roman pantheon it’s pretty easy!
LwL@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Still mostly only good as a guessing guideline because there’s no real system, just etymological patterns, but yea you can guess more than 33% for sure.
Pilon23@feddit.dk 2 weeks ago
It’s not perfect, no, but I feel like you can identify feminine words based on their endings alone in 90% of cases, and if you can use a few general rules to make masculine/neuter better than a 50-50 guess, you’re already right more often than you’re wrong. Maybe even 75% with no rote menorization whatsoever
LegoBrickOnFire@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
There are some rules. Some of them are easy. One word ending is always feminine. I don’t remember which tho. which is a shame :/
nightlily@leminal.space 2 weeks ago
-ung is always feminin (among others like -keit) and mostly -e but the exceptions are enough that you can’t relax.