Comment on Those Germans, they have a word for everything!

• lvxferre@mander.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  The association between gender and the noun is in large part (albeit not completely) arbitrary. In this case, since Halter is a “masculine” noun, the compound Büstenhalter is “masculine” too. So it gets the “masculine” article der.

  If it helps, instead of looking at German genders as “masculine vs. feminine vs. neuter”, look at them as “der gender vs. die gender vs. das gender”.

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  • Tja@programming.dev ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Just don’t look for “butter”.

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    • lvxferre@mander.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Wo ist der Bu… die B… fein, wo ist das gelbe Ding?

      Jokes aside, it’s common in gendered languages to have a handful of nouns with a variable gender. In this case, it was likely caused by regularisation; the word is originally feminine but it looks masculine, so eventually you got people using the masculine with it.

      (I think that der Butter is specially common in Ba-Wü and Switzerland, but I’m not too sure.)

      For reference, examples of the same happening in other languages:

      • Catalan - el mar (masculine) vs. la mar (feminine). Both mean “the sea”. I think that “el mar” is due to Castilian interference, given that Castilian uses primarily the masculine while Occitan uses primarily the feminine.
      • Portuguese - o omelete (masculine) vs. a omelete (feminine). Both refer to omelet, frittata etc. The masculine is more common but it makes pedants scream bloody murder.

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      • Tja@programming.dev ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        At least in castillian “la mar” is only used in poetry and phrases like “me cago en la mar” or “la mar de bonito”, otherwise is always masculine as you said.

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  • rockerface@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    I like calling them “noun classes”

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    • lvxferre@mander.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      That works too. Perhaps even better than simply calling them “genders”, as if the only systems using this “mechanic” had to do with social gender. (Often they don’t, as Bantu genders = noun classes show.)

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• lurch@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Of course they do. There is no actual rule to it. You just have to know. Often words ending in “er” are male, but not all of them. It’s one of the reasons German is so difficult. Just avoid it. English is easy and efficient.

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  • eunieisthebus@feddit.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Depends. There are advantages and disadvantages to having the whole ‘Kasus, Numerus, Genus’ stuff around. To put it simple, if it was so bad than why is it still around in so many languages?

    From a scientific point of view, one of the advantages is that it introduces redundancies (e.g. when adjective and the corresponding noun have the same suffix) and differences between the different syntactical parts of a sentence. This makes it easier to understand what someone else is saying even if you misunderstood them.

    For the same reason computers exchange messages not simply by exchanging ASCII code because a single bit flip would alter the messages meaning.

    You also need to keep in mind that languages weren’t designed to be easy to learn for non-native speakers. They have been developed by native-speakers simply using it.

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  • state_electrician@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Haha. If you just want to speak English, I think it is easier. But writing or reading aloud correct English, with all the bizarre nonsense its Germanic and Normannic history forced into it? It’s a fucking nightmare.

    Just an example: www.learnenglish.de/…/pronunciationpoem.html

    And there are many, many more.

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• weker01@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  What’s confusing? I am confused by your confusion. This is all confusing.

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