Just wait until you look into French numbers.
How different languages say 97:
🇬🇧: 90+7 (ok, there is some jank in English numbers - 13-19 are in line with the Germanic pronunciation, i.e. pronounced “right to left”, as a weird hold-over from the more Germanic Old English)
🇪🇸: 90+7
🇩🇪: 7+90
🇫🇷: 4x20+10+7
And if you think that’s bad, the Danes actually make the French look sane…
🇩🇰: 7+(-½+5)x20
Even Danes generally don’t really know why their numbers are like that, they just remember and go along with it.
what the actual fuck is wrong with you, denmark?
…whats not?
Cope hagen?
You know everytime your mention French number, there is always belgian or Swiss who will tell you :
🇧🇪🇨🇭: 90+7
☝️🤓
please… french swiss…
Me speaking to a French guy last week -
“We’ve just been the the musée de l’automobile in Mulhouse”
“Sorry, where?”
“Mulhouse”
“Where?”
“Mulhouse”
"Aaaaaah I see! It’s pronounced [pronounces Mulhouse *exactly the same FUCKING way I just pronounced it]
😂 Happens very regularly
No offense intended since I’m fully incapable of pronouncing tons of English words properly (fuck “squirrel” specifically), but as a Frenchman who has lived near Mulhouse for a few years and interacted with a lot of foreign students, what you said probably wasn’t close to being the exact same as that guy
For all languages I have learned so far ‘squirrel’ is really hard to pronounce for non-native speakers.
English: squirrel
French: écureuil
And the germans kill it with: Eichhörnchen
While gendered nouns are stupid, I at least appreciate Italian because you can just learn the word and get its gender from the end part of the word. In German, however, it’s completely random and you have to learn the gender with the word.
I don’t know what you’re on about. It’s “die Waschmaschine” (washing machine, female), “das Waschmittel” (laundry detergent, neutral) and “der Trockner” (dryer, male).
Pretty self explanatory /s
Das Mädchen (girl, neutral)
That’s because of the so called “Dimitutiv”. What it does is basically, it say that the object in queue is smaller version of it. Some examples:
Der Baum - Das Bäumchen
Der Junge - Das Jüngchen
It’s always neutral. The original word is “Die Magd” and the Dimitutiv is Mädchen.
Also, das Mädchen is just a cute/small Made (maggot).
Yeah. I have no clue why it’s the #standard word" but yes.
And after going on Die Toilette (female toilet), you use Das Spulbecken (neutral washbasin) and stand in front of Der Spiegel (male mirror).
Despite accepting this all as perfectly normal, conservatives still manage to make a stink when someone writes or speaks in a way that addresses two different genders :-S
And then there’s also the fabolous gender swap in the kitchen:
You walk into Die Küche(female kitchen) and after that you come out of Der Küche(male kitchen).
Female, and I am sure there hides a boomer joke here
I’m countering with a lave-linge which is masculine, now where’s the boomer joke?
What exactly does gender achieve in a language? Is English missing out on any nuance? Is it literally thinking about nouns as male or female, or is it just a weird name for the concept? Who decides gender when a new noun is made? What about borrowed words from other languages? Do you sound stupid if you speak French without using it, or are you just a language hipster?
Language, dude…
Gender from french genre, latin genus, means category and that’s all it is, a category system, with confusing category names and no real rules for which word belongs to which category. There’s nothing masculine, feminine or neuter about words, nothing “sexual” or whatever, otherwise every person would be a woman because the word for person (from latin persona) is feminine in a lot of european languages, or French and German people would have to think really different about stuff like tables because in French it’s “feminine” and in German it’s “masculine”. Btw, looking at English adjectives with French origin they almost always are the feminine version, like feminine or masculine. Some people think there is a hidden sexual meaning though and they come up with lots of different systems for gender neutral language, stuff like latinx.
die das der
wer wie was 🎶
Me as a German wondering if it’s the same or different than in my language.
What gender is it in German?
Luckily, for washing machine it’s the same (female) but with others like sun, moon, or table we’re not so lucky. And German having three genders for words and french only two often makes things more complicated.
Seems like both?
le lave-linge / la machine à laver
and
die Waschmaschine
Die Waschmaschine die
So it’s a girl?
Die Maschine. So yes all machines are girls /s
Non-neutral nouns have always struck me as odd. They provide no info gain whatsoever outside of actually providing a gender if you’re referring to a person or animal (for example, in Spanish, gato -> male cat, gata -> female cat). And in those situations, a short sentence can provide instant clarification if needed in a non-gendered language like English.
It’s a language feature built to be helpful in one use case, whilst simultaneously being worse in about a bazillion others. It’s a very odd choice.
There’s an argument to be made that it might help clarifying when speaking to someone. Consider these two German sentences:
“Der rote Apfel” – the red apple
“Die rote Ampel” – the red traffic light
Imagine a noisy environment, a quiet speaker or some other problem and you only understand
“Die rote A***el” – the red x***xx
In a language like English, you don’t have enough information to understand the meaning. The German gender system helps to direct your possible matching words (Ampel or Apfel) to the correct one, as “Die rote Apfel” is grammatically incorrect.
Another point I want to make is that it isn’t “being worse in about a bazillion other” use cases. Native speakers don’t really have an issue with noun class systems. It’s just very unintuitive and tedious for non-native language learners to memorize all the genders of nouns.
And why did we in school made listening comprehensions for English where you would need to understand people speaking in the middle of a construction side next to a heavy used road?
I mean even in German I wouldn’t have understood them but I got an bad grade because I didn’t understand it in English.
is that like how you have to memorize every single articels (der, die, das) for every word in german?
But at least pronunciation is mostly consistent.
In English two words can be written almost exactly the same but sound wildly different.
Looking at you, words with “ough”
Enter German and Gendering: You can not say Programmer to address all Programmers in the room. You have to call them Programmerin und Programmer or Programmer:in or Programmende. And yes, most of these words aren’t even German but if you don’t use them you are a Grammar Nazi.
And btw, the fact that we address females with “die” does not mean we want them dead, thank you and have a good day.
Are you for real?
It is real. People have gotten mad at me for saying the 1 general (in my opinion in that case not-gendered) word instead of the slight pause and adding *innen. It’s quite difficult for non-native speakers to get used to it.
Meanwhile, in Dutch language, many female doctors, bosses, directors etc all prefer to be spoken to with the general “male” word, because they prefer to be spoken to on an equal term as their male colleagues and for the difference not to be made. Witnessing Germanic languages growing apart a tad further I guess.
Is “dokter” even a male word? What’s the female version “dokterin”,“dokteres”?
The female version is Doktorin.
A washing machine is obviously female because doing laundry is a thing for women.
And now I will sit back and watch how many people get mad at me because they don’t understand sarcasm.
