this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2024
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So as far as I can tell the rule for deciding if a french word is feminine is "does it end with an e".
There are exceptions and French people claim that's not how it works, but it is an incredibly useful heuristic
umm that's not french btw
It's almost a 50% successrate!
The joke here is bad things are feminine (no science to back that up lol).
I feel that 'gender' is probably a misleading term for the languages that have 'grammatical gender', it rarely has anything to do with genitalia. 'Noun class', where adjectives have to decline to agree with the class would fit better in most cases.
English essentially does not have decline adjectives, except for historical outliers like blond/e where no-one much cares if you don't bother, and uses his / hers / its / erc using a very predictable rule. So no 'grammatical gender'.
The problem is that the noun class that is used to refer to you is based on your gender. As long as that is the case, grammatical gender will probably be the most apt name for the concept.
in humans the gender can be any, even when the person has specific genitalia. so saying gender is a misleading term because it rarely has to do with genitalia doesn't make much sense to me.
so basically i dont see why not just call it gender when the pronouns given to each word in such languages is gendered
English has the peculiarity of having two variants of the same word: "gender" and "genre" with slightly different meanings.
You could lean on it and go with genre. But just changing the word is unlikely to help much, the concept itself is deeply associated with genitalia in English culture, you'd still need to explain it.
great,now explain why the water in spanish fits into a noun class with incorrect "the" and why hands do the same thing, but for the opposite class.
bonus : why are fire and door in different noun classes?
the source of this arrogance : first language had no noun classes , nor indefinite articles.