10mo ago

English may be a hot mess but at least we don't have to worry about this nonsense

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It's a she, because that's a woman job. Same goes for dish washer !
Also, there are a few words that even french (most of them) would have the gender wrong...
- Sorry to disappoint, a dish washer is "un lave-vaisselle", which is masculine. A car however is "une voiture", maybe there's a joke in there about how manly men love their car more than their gf.
  
  Un lave linge, une machine à laver le linge, un lave vaisselle, une machine à laver la vaisselle. It actually all depend on they way you phrase it. Agreed though. It was mostly for the joke.
  
  I never heard anybody say la machine à laver la vaisselle, it sounds way too verbose, everyone says le lave vaisselle
  
  Because "people" (my french self included) would just say (most of the time) "la machine à laver" (or even shorter : la machine) and out of context, you'd figure out which of the 2 is actually talked about.
  Also, as "machine à laver" litterally translate to "washing machine", it didn't even occure to me that it had to be understood as laundry machine, hence why I initially said it was a "she".
  
  I'm so confused. As a northerner from England with an IQ equal to the ply of toilet paper I use, does every object in French have a feminine or masculine alignment? Or is this some kind of joke privvy to those who don't have a concerning interest in sheep?
  
  A lot of languages including Germanic and Romance languages have "gendered" nouns, which is a weird term for "these are some arbitrary categories we put nouns into". While that idea of noun classes is often called "gender" and they are also named "gender-y" things like masculine and feminine, the idea doesn't have a lot to do with gender as in identity.
  Compare English irregular verbs - how come you don't say "swimmed"? You "just don't", that particular verb is in a different class. Same thing applies to nouns in certain languages, and affects (among other things) how they're conjugated.
  
  Gender in the grammatical sense just means category, from French genre, Latin genus.
  
  Yep. Most Latin languages have gendered nouns. Italian, Spanish, German etc. All have masculine/feminine objects.
  Eg. In Italian a fork is feminine (la forchetta) but a spoon is masculine (il cucchiaio). A table in your living room is a boy (il tavolo) but a table that you're eating lunch on is a girl (la tavola).
  It's bizarre.
  
  German isn't a Latin language, it's in the Germanic branch, along with English, Dutch and others. French, Italian and Spanish are Romance or Latin languages.
  
  True! It's not just a Latin thing and Slavic languages have it too. I wonder where it came from originally. Probably one of those Proto Indo European things. Though it's in some Indigenous Australian languages too (though not all) so might be even older?
  
  I think grammatical gender is just a feature of languages across many different families.
  
  Yes, every noun in French has a gender

358 comments