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.
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
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.
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.
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
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).
I think 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, even though there more of them.
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” for easy girls should be considered different words, homonyms, likely with separate etymologies. 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
I only studied french for a short time, but I feel like that really doesn’t work for french:
chemisier, blouse, is masculine
ceinture, belt, is feminine
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)
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 root of the english word vessel.
(PS: I agree with you that gender in language is problematic and I prefer non gendered as well).
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”, because only these kinds of people actually think that the Académie is worth listening to.
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.
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.
You’d love German – there is absolutely zero system or logic behind what word has which of the three genders.
three?!
German is woke
It totally isn’t unfortunately, the gender neutral pronoun (if that’s what it’s called?) doesn’t work for humans.
The neuter pronoun (“it”) doesn’t work for humans in English either.
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.
Why not though? Just because it sounds rude or something?
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
Polish also has three. She, he, it/this.
Polish also distinguishes “oni” (they he) and “one” (they it/she). Probably most sexist language I know
I think most slavic languages in general, not just polish.
Yep. Masculine, feminine, and neuter. It’s annoyingly hard to learn. Plus all the other adjectives and such change to match. It’s wild.
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.
Just say d’. It’s not wrong, it’s an abbreviation for whatever it’s supposed to be!
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
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.
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
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 :/
-ung is always feminin (among others like -keit) and mostly -e but the exceptions are enough that you can’t relax.
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).
I think 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, even though there more of them.
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” for easy girls should be considered different words, homonyms, likely with separate etymologies. 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
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 root of the english word vessel.
(PS: I agree with you that gender in language is problematic and I prefer non gendered as well).
Une lave-vaisselle totally does not work.
Vaisselle is feminine, but lave-vaisselle is masculine.
Interesting how those words are reversed as far as genders go in Spanish:
Despite both languages having common Latin roots.
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.
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”, because only these kinds of people actually think that the Académie is worth listening to.
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
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.