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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...
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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.
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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.
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I never heard anybody say la machine à laver la vaisselle, it sounds way too verbose, everyone says le lave vaisselle
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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".
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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?
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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.
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Gender in the grammatical sense just means category, from French genre, Latin genus.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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I think grammatical gender is just a feature of languages across many different families.
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Yes, every noun in French has a gender
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