Submitted 2 hours ago by Stamets@lemmy.dbzer0.com to memes@sopuli.xyz
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/pictrs/image/82118c66-aad9-4274-b613-30a06296a513.webp
I asked my Francophone buddy that grew up in backwoods Quebec how the hell he kept it all in his head. He said that he never bothered.
If it had an “e” on the end, he just assumed it was feminine.
If he was drunk, he didn’t give a single flying tabernak.
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.
You’d love German – there is absolutely zero system or logic behind what word has which of the three genders.
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.
Mark Twain also struggled with language
To continue with the German genders: a tree is male, its buds are female, its leaves are neuter; horses are sexless, dogs are male, cats are female—tomcats included, of course; a person’s mouth, neck, bosom, elbows, fingers, nails, feet, and body are of the male sex, and his head is male or neuter according to the word selected to signify it, and NOT according to the sex of the individual who wears it—for in Germany all the women either male heads or sexless ones; a person’s nose, lips, shoulders, breast, hands, and toes are of the female sex; and his hair, ears, eyes, chin, legs, knees, heart, and conscience haven’t any sex at all. The inventor of the language probably got what he knew about a conscience from hearsay.
Dogs are male? In Russian dogs are female. So I guess there is no standard for gendered language.
It is said that when English went from old English (which was gendered) to modern English, part of the problem was that the genders of the Germanic roots didn’t match the genders of the French influences so the people chose to just skip it all together.
Dunno about German but in french dogs are male or female depending on their actual gender (obviously the female word has been adopted as a slur towards women, to be fair sometimes the masculine also is used that way for men).
I like when the gender changes what the noun is. Here are a couple Spanish examples: la cometa = the kite (feminine) or el cometa = the comet (masculine) la papa = the potato (feminine) or el papa = the Pope (masculine).
Swahili has 18 genders, though only 16 are in active use.
Oh hey, someone that used gender in regards to Spanish correctly.
I say that in regards to one of my Spanish teachers from high school who would always grade us wrong when we say male/female instead of masculine/feminine. One day he explained that by saying “Objects have gender! People have sex!”
I didn’t know Swahili was that progressive.
Here’s a simple trick:
Apply misogyny and sexism /s
Buuuut cars are a men thing aren’t they? And yet it’s la voiture… Curious…
See… You have to get into the mind of a straight man from the 1950s and ask yourself one of 2 questions: Is this a woman’s thing? Or would I fuck this thing? Cars are considered “beautiful” and “sexy” and therefore fuckable by a man. I hope this has been a good lesson in outrageous sexism.
If you can make mysoginistic jokes about it, then it works : men get in cars just like in women. => so it’s “la”
😏
For all of the shit people talk about the English language, this is a big thing I appreciate about it. What the hell was the point of even gendering random things from the start? In German, the main gendering are die, der, and das with das being gender neutral. I would like to see a world where in scenarios like that they just move everything to das.
I think it’s to make it less ambiguous.
In English you just use the same word and figure it out from context. Someone else gave some other Spanish examples but I like “right” (direction) = “la derecha” vs “right” (human rights) = “los derechos”.
Of course there’s still so many variants of meaning that grammatical gender doesn’t help much.
Try Polish. Our verbs and adjectives are also gendered.
Feminine too, like all the machines
It’s the same gender than all machines, which is obviously feminine.
There’s no fixed rule for this but if a noun ends with a consonant it’s probably masculine and if it ends with a vowel it’s possibly feminine. Again, not a consistent rule and it will not work for everything, but if you must take a guess, this might help, or not.
Now this reminds me of Sebastian Marx and his videos on French. Like this one on pronunciation.
Same as italian
In my language we have genders for every noun. But it is trivially deducted from the spelling/pronunciation of that noun.
Tell me the Gender of Nutella, then :)
La nutella (she) y el (he) yogurt.
Is the gender of yogurt under debate in Germany? I am only aware of Nutella and butter. Yogurt was always male.
so much pain
bystander@lemmy.ca 11 minutes ago
My two main fluent languages are not gendered. It was such a weird concept when I started to learn French.