ngl im so glad i dont speak german i dont know what fucking gender my dresser is
How about:
Die Garderobe, Der Garderobe, die Garderoben
“Guck mal die Garderobe an.”
“Bring mir ein T-Shirt aus der Garderobe”
“Das sind ja viele Garderoben”
@marie I dont store guards or robes in my dresser tho
@puppygirlhornypost2 but but guards is Wächter*in (factory security guards) or Sicherheitsbeamte/Sicherheitsbeamtin (if we are talking normal security guards)
@puppygirlhornypost2 it’s feminine fwiw (Kommode, or maybe Truhe, depending on what kind of dresser)
@AppleAmps @peachymist @puppygirlhornypost2 ok but like…… not quite (applicable for all romance languages and German)
The thing is that grammatical gender has to do with grammar rules, more than assigning a gender to objects. I remember when learning German that there was this table of “words ending with these letters are usually masc, with these are usually fem, and these are usually neuter”. For Portuguese I can say that if you see a word that ends in -a, over 90% of the time it’ll be feminine, ending in -o it’ll be masculine. I can’t speak for other romance languages, because I am not fluent enough in them, but i know that this pattern holds. These classifications developed as extra redundancy, so that if you only heard the rest of the phrase but you know that it is all in the feminine, you can ignore about 50% of the relevant nouns in context, and might be able to guess what the noun was without needing the other person to repeat themself.
And the fact that it is called grammatical gender is more because we separate gendered words based on those grammatical rules (like “teacher” or “doctor”), and then when other nouns that follow the convention show up, we just use the same words. there’s no assigning gender to object, only associating noun endings with verbs, adverbs and adjectives.
(This is actually applicable to most classification-based systems. to my knowledge Czech also works like this which would imply slavic languages will follow that formula. The one exception that I know of is chinese where they have like 30 classes and it has more to do with the shape and size of the object, and seems to be used more to differentiate homonyms than anything else)
@gwenthekween @peachymist @AppleAmps @puppygirlhornypost2 ...which is technically true, but I can't help seeing it teach people from infancy to sort everything in the world into a very small set of gender-boxes.
Or, in the case of Dutch, gendered and genderless, because WTF is even with that language.
@KatS @peachymist @AppleAmps @puppygirlhornypost2 I mean, yeah, this does leak out and causes people to think in gendered ways more frequently, and also add cultural biases for genders onto the nouns.
But the same could be said about having plural forms, you’re learning to only identify a situation by whether you’re alone or not, or because we don’t imbue how we learned of something (first hand experience, was present but didn’t happen to you, heard from a third party) like some languages do, we don’t learn to fact check.
And in both situations, society has accounted for this (somewhat anyway) with sayings like “better to be alone than in bad company” or actively trying to teach people to fact check. I think we just need to get to the point where we distance “grammatical gender” from “human gender” enough, in the same way we distance “singular or plural forms” from how we perceive quantities
@gwenthekween @peachymist @AppleAmps @puppygirlhornypost2 Strongly gendered language felt really weird to learn about for me in German class, but it seems like a method of error correction for a natural language.
@peachymist @gwenthekween @AppleAmps @puppygirlhornypost2 I agree, but I think the reason for it is error correction.
@peachymist @jackemled @AppleAmps @puppygirlhornypost2 I got your point, but also in my comment I’m saying: it isn’t unnecessary. It is error correction. Would you say that error correcting codes are unnecessary in internet connections, just because they don’t encode any new information?
Communication is an incredibly lossy process, from noise around, to the listener being distracted, to difficulties with accents, and much more. Error correction is very important, and classifications like that are one kind of error correction.
The unnecessary and silly post is tying it to a biological thing, but when have we not done that?
@peachymist @jackemled @AppleAmps @puppygirlhornypost2 yes you’d need to correct things.
If we’re chatting about life, and I mention planned on seeing a doctor (woman) and a therapist (man), but unfortunately I had to cancel the appointment because <loud noise> will be busy and he can’t see me
Despite the loud noise, error correction makes the sentence still understandable.
Gendered nouns do that, for every single noun. And sure, doesn’t work all the time, but neither does computer error correction, that’s why internet packets are dropped
@peachymist that’s the thing though, you DON’T have to learn by heart every noun. It is a grammar-based rule. If I come up with a new Portuguese noun like, idk, zhurino, you immediately go “that’s a masculine noun”. You wouldn’t need to ask me, you’d know just by looking at it, because this is actually based on a set of rules that mostly boil down to word ending, and when you see -o you know the word is masculine.
You need to know as much by heart as using verb derivations, and certainly a lot less than whatever the fuck English spelling ended up deciding to do
@peachymist That’s why I said it is no harder than verb derivation (which should’ve been declension, but brain failed me). We have plenty of irregular verbs, some incredibly common ones like Dizer and Ser, but I don’t think most people would say verb declension causes more problems than it solves (and having learned chinese - a language where all verbs only have the form that we’d call infinitive - I can tell you that declensions absolutely make sentences clearer)
@peachymist @gwenthekween @AppleAmps @puppygirlhornypost2 The gender of the thing is not what's being corrected. The gendering is the correction code. If the word for "chest" & "cabinet" sound similar in a language, but have separate genders that affect conjugation of nearby words, that helps you tell them apart if you aren't able to hear well.
@gwenthekween @peachymist As someone that has been through a foreign language class for a language that makes heavy use of gendering, I can confirm that gendering is not the hard part, at least for German, despite my lack of understanding of the entire idea of gender, because German uses them as error correction codes. Here are two examples:
Ich möchte die Löffel. Könnte Sie es mir bitte geben?
(I want the spoon. Could you please give it to me?)
Ich möchte das Messer. Könnte Sie es mir bitte geben?
(I want the knife. Could you please give it to me?)
"Knife" & "spoon" are gendered, so if I don't hear those words right, the gendered conjugations of "the" correct for that, & I can tell which piece of silverware I'm being asked for. Also, I know I gave both the neuter gender here for the second sentence, but that's because I'm not sure if the gender is carried to the second sentence or if it resets; I'm not fluent in German. If it does, you would say "her" instead of "it" for the spoon in the second sentence.
@gwenthekween @peachymist If you want to know the hard part of German, it's modal verbs.
fuck modal verbs!!!!!!!!!!
@jackemled I personally was fine enough with modal verbs, since I learned english as a foreign language and it already uses some… but fricking CASES -.-
mich versus mir versus whatever else, it just wouldn’t go in and is the main part I’ve forgotten already