Enter German and Gendering: You can not say Programmer to address all Programmers in the room. You have to call them Programmerin und Programmer or Programmer:in or Programmende. And yes, most of these words aren’t even German but if you don’t use them you are a Grammar Nazi.
And btw, the fact that we address females with “die” does not mean we want them dead, thank you and have a good day.
We also don’t have 13 different words for I (glances at Japan)
Not the worst example for Japanese. The verb kakeru 掛ける is very common and has ~25 different meanings. This is before you count the other verbs also pronounced as kakeru such as 翔ける、賭ける etc
It’s a she, because that’s a woman job. Same goes for dish washer !
Me as a German wondering if it’s the same or different than in my language.
What gender is it in German?
Luckily, for washing machine it’s the same (female) but with others like sun, moon, or table we’re not so lucky. And German having three genders for words and french only two often makes things more complicated.
Non-neutral nouns have always struck me as odd. They provide no info gain whatsoever outside of actually providing a gender if you’re referring to a person or animal (for example, in Spanish, gato -> male cat, gata -> female cat). And in those situations, a short sentence can provide instant clarification if needed in a non-gendered language like English.
It’s a language feature built to be helpful in one use case, whilst simultaneously being worse in about a bazillion others. It’s a very odd choice.
Wait until you hear that sometimes we can use both pronoums with some words but not others.
We can say “el mar” the(male) sea, or “la mar” the(female) sea. But you would never say “la oceano” it’s only “el oceano” the(male) ocean.
There’s an argument to be made that it might help clarifying when speaking to someone. Consider these two German sentences:
“Der rote Apfel” – the red apple
“Die rote Ampel” – the red traffic light
Imagine a noisy environment, a quiet speaker or some other problem and you only understand
“Die rote A***el” – the red x***xx
In a language like English, you don’t have enough information to understand the meaning. The German gender system helps to direct your possible matching words (Ampel or Apfel) to the correct one, as “Die rote Apfel” is grammatically incorrect.
Another point I want to make is that it isn’t “being worse in about a bazillion other” use cases. Native speakers don’t really have an issue with noun class systems. It’s just very unintuitive and tedious for non-native language learners to memorize all the genders of nouns.
I’d like to interject for a bit, if I may.
While german has cases, somewhat more complex verbs and gendered nouns, english also has its peculiarities that make it hard for non-natives to learn. Things like spelling and using the same word in a bazillion contests and methaphor-based idioms come to mind first. There are also simple-to-understand pecularities like its/it’s and paid/payed which not even natives get right sometimes.
The point being, for all the “hard” and “useless” parts of one language the other language (as it’s always comomparing apoles to oranges) has similarily “hard” and “useless” features itself, so in my opinion it more or less evens out.
What makes a language “easier” or “harder” to learn is how much of it you already know. In other words that’s usually how similar it is to the languages you know already.
I mostly agree. Sorry if it came out that way, but my comment was not meant to be stating that English is way easier than German. Just wanted to point out that this “hard” and “useless” feature is not that useless and only hard for language learners.
That doesn’t mean that a language can’t have more pointlessly convoluted things than another language. For example, counting in French.
I’d argue english ortography is a lot more pointlessly convoluted than french numbers (*cough* *cough* ough)
Die Waschmaschine die
So it’s a girl?
Polish speaker here. We not only have gendered nouns but also verbs and adjectives.
polish speaker too, polish is weird smh
Spanish speaker here. For as chaotic and wild as English is, I’ve always appreciated that it has no gendered nouns. Why are chairs female? Makes no sense
Chairman, chairwoman, or chairperson?
Clearly, because chairs are obviously male (German). Anything else is just silly.
Yes, also, mice are obviously female.
Germany has three genders lmao
Of course! Hitler proved all right wing Germans are pussies with dicks.
Technically so does English, we just stopped using the male gendered pronoun sometime in the Renaissance, Early Modern Period, or Victorian Period, I don’t know when.
Back in Shakespeare’s day, woman = female, man = gender neutral, (kinda like the word “Dude” it can be used for both women and wifmen,) and finally wifman = male.
Still not sure why the male gendered pronoun fell out of common parlance.
Shakespeare was known to use archaic language for his plays but by his time this was largely codified into what we would recognize as modern usage. You are thinking of old English. It also goes beyond just man (used more or less like we would use the word human) , other gendered words originally had specific meaning independent of gender. You also got it a bit backwards. Wifman is female, wereman is male. Others include.
Boy : knave or troublemaker
Girl : Neutral word for young child. Basically like “kid”
Thanks! No wonder his plays were so hard to read. I haven’t read Shakespeare in a good 20 years so it’s no surprise that I’ve mixed up the words and usages.
He is an interesting literary figure. And in personal opinion quite frankly kind of a hack. You got to appreciate the audacity of someone who tries to use “Dost” nearly two centuries out of date and then just out of the blue makes up wholesale complete words from scratch to fit iambic pentameter.
I love his stuff don’t get me wrong but he wasn’t exactly highbrow entertainment of his day. Still his early modern English is easily legible. Chaucer’s middle english is distinctly more garbled and if you go back to your Old English where these terms originate it’s like trying to read another language entirely. Like this is technically English :
Hwæt. We Gardena in geardagum, þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon, hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon. Oft Scyld Scefing sceaþena þreatum, monegum mægþum, meodosetla ofteah, egsode eorlas. Syððan ærest wearð feasceaft funden, he þæs frofre gebad, weox under wolcnum, weorðmyndum þah, oðþæt him æghwylc þara ymbsittendra ofer hronrade hyran scolde, gomban gyldan. þæt wæs god cyning.
Technically so does English, we just stopped using the male gendered pronoun sometime in the Renaissance, Early Modern Period, or Victorian Period, I don’t know when.
around 900 ad.
While gendered nouns are stupid, I at least appreciate Italian because you can just learn the word and get its gender from the end part of the word. In German, however, it’s completely random and you have to learn the gender with the word.
I don’t know what you’re on about. It’s “die Waschmaschine” (washing machine, female), “das Waschmittel” (laundry detergent, neutral) and “der Trockner” (dryer, male).
Pretty self explanatory /s
And after going on Die Toilette (female toilet), you use Das Spulbecken (neutral washbasin) and stand in front of Der Spiegel (male mirror).
Despite accepting this all as perfectly normal, conservatives still manage to make a stink when someone writes or speaks in a way that addresses two different genders :-S
I feel violated in 3 languages
And of course this is reformed German to make it easierish
Das Mädchen (girl, neutral)
To be fair most French words are like what you’re describing in Italian. Why does German even have gendered nouns?
Damit andere Länder nichts verstehen können.
Well that clears that up, thanks!
Länder:innen
oh, that’s so easy! It’s both, depending how you translate it: une machine à laver or un lave-linge.
Word gender is easy as fuck to learn. Only anglophones seem to have their minds blown BY A FEATURE WHICH DID EXIST IN ENGLISH (and still does in fringe cases)
Uh? I’m Portuguese and it works in the same in my language. I don’t know what the big deal is. You get the gender by the arti…
Oh…
Yet the English speaking countries are the one pushing for a far-left gender ideology that is centered around “gender neutral” language and other crap. lol
I’ll help you.
The word “machine” in French is… “machine”, yeah it’s spelled exactly the same. Just pronounce it a lot more like French (stress falls on the 1st syllable instead of the 2nd). Oh, and it’s feminine, which gives you “une machine”.
Washing in French is “laver”. In French, there’s this thing called “complément de nom”, where you add a noun to another noun to make a compound noun. However, there must be a preposition in between, and each compound noun has its own preposition, which means, you gotta learn them by heart (like the phrasal verbs in English except the meaning is actually related to the word).
In the case of this word, you’d use the preposition “à”. You will end up with “une machine à laver”, which translates literally to “a machine to wash”.
Yeah, languages are complicated.
The only way to know for sure is to ask the washing machine how it identifies
