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this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2023
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Well, I can't think of an English example from the top of my head, but in German the words for Pear and (light) bulb are the same. So there are some exotic use cases.
We have plenty of homographs as well, “lead,” “bow,” etc but every once in a while I’m struck by just how massive the vocabulary of English is compared to… well, every other language.
English doesn't even has definite articles.
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
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.
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.