854
why (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 9 months ago by to c/memes@sopuli.xyz
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[–] 85 points 9 months ago (31 children)

You'd love German – there is absolutely zero system or logic behind what word has which of the three genders.

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  • [–] 25 points 9 months ago (15 children)

    three?!

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  • [–] 44 points 9 months ago (7 children)

    German is woke

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  • [–] 12 points 9 months ago (6 children)

    It totally isn't unfortunately, the gender neutral pronoun (if that's what it's called?) doesn't work for humans.

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  • [–] 4 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    The neuter pronoun ("it") doesn't work for humans in English either.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago

    Yeah, but in English you don't go around and label EVERYTHING with the other two genders (only if you're a bit weird and pretend your car is a she or something) and our they is the same as the female pronoun (sie), which makes that unusable as well.

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  • [–] 7 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    Yep. Masculine, feminine, and neuter. It’s annoyingly hard to learn. Plus all the other adjectives and such change to match. It’s wild.

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  • [–] 5 points 9 months 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

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  • [–] 15 points 9 months ago* (12 children)

    There are some general guidelines, which hold true more often than not: https://germanwithlaura.com/noun-gender/

    For example, planets that don't end with an e and which aren't Venus tend to be male

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  • [–] 22 points 9 months ago (8 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 13 points 9 months ago (6 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago (5 children)

    But there's no Mäd.

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  • [–] 3 points 9 months ago (4 children)

    Maid. Man kann sich auch lernresistenter geben als man ist.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago* (3 children)

    Alles voll logisch, stimmt. Ich geh' dann mal das Waschmaschine befüllen 👌

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  • [–] 5 points 9 months 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!

    edit: also a very weird example, with a weird rule about ending in "e"; venus and earth (erde) are the only female planets...

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  • [–] 3 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months 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

    Edit: I actually just read masculine is about 2x as common as other genders, so always guessing masculine should take you to 50% alone

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