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this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2023
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English doesn't even has definite articles.
Biggest English W
As a german I agree, even if I never have to think about it
This is giving me stress daymares about Spanish in high school.
Still, it's an interesting point you make.
But then again, with definitive articles you have a bunch of things that are not supposed to convey gender conveying gender. Like a toaster... It would suck to have to remember the gender of a toaster, or, well toasters in general.
It's "der Toaster" which makes it masculine. On the other hand, a girl ("das Mädchen") is neuter. The grammatical gender is somewhat arbitrary and does not follow any "real" rules.
As a German you somehow "feel" if the correct article is used, though.
Yeah, fuck that. English is bs enough.
Edit: yeah, that "feeling" is knowing it so well, you don't totally understand it, and also means it's hard to convey
It's less about magical feelings but rules that native speakers know but aren't aware of. Toaster is clearly male because nouns constructed from verb+er are always male.
Also "male gender" is kinda misleading, it's basically a mistake early linguistics made because it was so centered around Indo-European languages. The modern term is noun class, and Indo-European languages share the trait that they have three noun classes, one containing the word for "woman", the other the one for "man", and another the word for "thing". That's where the names come from: Bridges aren't female in German they simply share a noun class with women.
And girl is neuter in German because all diminutives are. "Deern" is definitely female.
Embarrassingly for someone whose native language is german, I often use the masculine when the neuter should have been used, because they feel the same to me. I never was taught any formal grammar in german, though, so that might play a role.
We got diff'ernt words fer lightbulb and pear though, I tell ya hwat.
German has different words, too. Even multiple one depending on accuracy
German also has multiple other terms to describe a lot of different light bulb shapes and types. Germans can even make up completely new types of light bulbs due to the heavy use of compound words, and every other German can understand that on the fly without further explanation.
Let me just imagine some.
That's really cool. For whatever it's worth I was joking. I've always admired German and almost elected to learn it in highschool, but socio-geographically(an off the cuff word combination in English), learning Spanish made more sense, as there are many Spanish speakers. But I digress; thank you for explaining such a neat feature of your language to me. I also must admit that the English word is not totally dissimilar in origin; a light-bulb glows in a lamp, but an onion is a bulb in the ground, so it isn't too different from glowpears.