As Someone Learning German, I Know This Pain

You're viewing a single thread.

233 comments

How do gendered languages handle neologisms?
(this is a very difficult question to search btw)
- At least for romance languages, there is a rhyme and reason for the gender each noun gets, so neologisms and borrowed words tend to follow the same logic.
  For word morphology, as an example, in Portuguese nouns ending in a are almost always female, so new words that end with a are very likely to be female.
  There are semantic rules too, for example brands and companies are typically (I want to say always but there's probably edge cases) female, so even though Netflix and Amazon didn't exist before they're still female.
  
  That's... Curious. In Spanish both Netflix and Amazon are male.
  
  there is a rhyme and reason for the gender each noun gets
  There is? I only took high school level French, so I'm very ignorant on the topic and happy to admit so, but any time I asked that about that very idea all I ever got in response was "that's just how it is!", so I would love to learn if you're willing to elaborate.
  And I don't think "it ends in A" is solid enough foundation to call it "rhyme and reason"
  
  Yes, there is a rhyme and reason, but because that requires actually delving into linguistics studying (plus etymology for all those edge cases that got carried over from Latin and other languages), most people don't get too deep into it apart from shallow rules (eg: if word starts/ends in X then it's male/female).
  Not even natives of gendered languages usually bother learning the nitty gritty rules, they just pick it up as they go, that's how all of us learn our languages.
  On a practical level, it's also much easier to teach a 6 year old in elementary that something is male/female just because, and to remember that, than to go into each and every individual case (morphology, syntax, semantics, etc.), which themselves typically have edge cases due to history and whatnot. Especially because that child will naturally pick it up as they absorb the language around them so it really doesn't matter much.
  And then there's just those cases where we actually don't know because the etymology got lost. Yeah, that's fun.
  In school I was never taught why something is male/female yet I can always distinguish them naturally in my. day to day because that's how I've always lived. That's just one of the amazing things of human language.
  If you ask a native of a gendered language why they think X word should be male instead of female they'll probably just tell you it sounds wrong otherwise, and that's literally the end of it for most of us. We don't think about it, we just intuitively know it sounds right or wrong. I'm sure that's frustrating to hear for a foreigner trying to learn, but you can't teach what you don't know. In the end, other than very broad rules, the best way typically is to just start memorizing it one by one.
  Also, "ends in A" is definitely rhyme or reason in Portuguese, that's actually a rule. Although to be more specific it's a tonic A, but even that has an exception if it's a nasal Ã, but I didn't want to get into phonology too, I just wanted to give a simple example.
  
  I speak French and it probably doesn't help but it just sounds wrong when misgendered except for words that begin with a vowel syllable for some reason. Even we, struggle with those. E.g. avion, hélicoptère, école. We also use the l' for those words instead of le/la but it becomes harder when we're have to choose un/une. Maybe that's a hint to what's happening. Any language expert can chime in?
- In slav languages, you just go with how the neologism sounds. "Computer" ends in hard r, so it's masculine, for example.
  Every once in a while there's going to be shit like with "coffee" though. It sounds neutral-gendered and is officially neutral-gendered, but there's been a big period when people believed it should be masculine because of the source language or some shit. Still a lot of people arguing about it.
- Native German speaker here but I also speak Spanish, Portuguese, French and Swedish. Each of these languages handles them differently so I am thinking there’s not a general answer here.
  It also can depend within each language on some context. For example in German many neologisms are automatically neuter (das) unless they happen to resemble some common pattern. For example a lot of German words that end with an -e are feminine and sometimes that is applied to neologisms too.
- Sometimes it changes. For example, Covid in French, everyone was using "le covid" (i guess cos it's a virus, and virus is a masculin word), but then I believe the French academy weighed in that it should be "la covid" because it's not the virus but the disease (la maladie) we're talking about. Anyway. Yeah other than the official sources, many of us peasants all still say Le covid because by the time they weighed in we were all saying Le and so now saying La sounds weird.

233 comments