10mo ago

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

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Polish speaker here. We not only have gendered nouns but also verbs and adjectives.
- 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
  
  Dick in French is, you guessed it, female.
  
  As are mustache and balls. Meanwhile, bra, vagina and boobs are male.
  
  Don't tell Republicans
  
  Maybe you are interested in Finnish. We do not have gendered pronouns either. Everyone is just "hän".
  
  So you're saying Hän is Solo?
  
  Hän man is Speedy
  
  Hold my Duolingo owl, I'm gonna look up Finnish that sounds awesome
  
  Can I keep it after that? I always wanted a pet.
  
  Clearly, because chairs are obviously male (German). Anything else is just silly.
  
  I'm sorry, French here, but a chair can be both. It depends of the type : Une chaise is obviously feminine while un siège or un fauteuil are definitely masculin. Also Germanic language like English and German mixing these two meaning are silly languages.
  
  Why. Just why? It's just you French and your obsession for...
  la silla vs el asiento (Spanish)
  Fuck.
  
  I think we just spotted a cultural fracture btw people of Romance language and the one of Germanic language.
  
  Yes, also, mice are obviously female.
  
  ... but rats aren't.
  
  Chairman, chairwoman, or chairperson?
  
  Somone has to come up with the word chairdude. And some corporate bean counter will invent the word chairhuman to show how diverse they are.
  
  Employee.
  
  Grammatical genders are just that. Grammatical. It's a classification scheme. Latin had neutral nouns and plenty of languages make grammatical differences between animate and inanimate nouns. That current romance languages make a deliberate division between "male" and "female" nouns does not mean they have to correspond to actual features of human beings.
  That being said. It's ridiculous that agua is femenine but with the definite article it has to be el agua in singular but las aguas in plural. All the explanations by RAE simply amounts to "we like it this way, lolol".
- polish speaker too, polish is weird smh
- How does that work out? I mean in french you'd gender it by what it is defining. A yellow car, the "A" is gendered the same as the cars gender.
  Oh.
  I think I get it. That must be confusing for foreigners!
  Cheers Polish brothers and sisters!
  
  Nah. Having pronouns would be too easy. We are changing the end of the word. Yellow would be "żółty" if male, "żółta" if female and "żółte" if genderless or plural. Unless male plural, then it would be "żółci".
  
  So a bit like French maybe, faché, fachée, fachés or fachées for example depending on gender and numbers.

358 comments