869
why (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 11 months ago by to c/memes@sopuli.xyz
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[–] 83 points 11 months ago (18 children)

You'd love German – there is absolutely zero system or logic behind what word has which of the three genders.

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  • [–] 25 points 11 months ago (12 children)

    three?!

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  • [–] 44 points 11 months ago (4 children)

    German is woke

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  • [–] 14 points 11 months ago (3 children)

    It totally isn't unfortunately, the gender neutral pronoun (if that's what it's called?) doesn't work for humans.

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  • [–] 4 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    The neuter pronoun ("it") doesn't work for humans in English either.

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago

    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.

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  • [–] 7 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    Yep. Masculine, feminine, and neuter. It’s annoyingly hard to learn. Plus all the other adjectives and such change to match. It’s wild.

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  • [–] 5 points 11 months ago

    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

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  • [–] 15 points 11 months ago* (2 children)

    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

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

    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

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