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(lemmy.dbzer0.com)
Both! Un lave-linge. Or, une machine à laver.
¿Por qué no los dos?
female of course
English is such a poor language that they only have the article The and nouns without genders.
Seethe and cope.
My native language doesn't have any articles and there is no distinction between he and she.
Gender is a social construct powered by language.
no rules, no sens, only disdain
L'Académie Française existed since the 18th century to make the language too complex "for the common and the women"
Female. Obviously. 😏
Yes, but what if you're a man married to a man? Which one is the washing machine? 🤌
My body is a MACHINE that turns DIRTY things into CLEAN things. /skeleton-deadlift-meme
I am.
(j/k; I'm pretty poor at cleaning things.)
Pierre-Frédérique-Antoine and Mike having llunch after french class. Mike : Oh wregaarde un mouche! PFA : non, on dit UNE mouche. Mike: wow t'as de bons zyeux!
Uh-oh. I've heard this one before.
How do you call a herd of washing machines?
Bonjour
you don't. they call you.
On the phone?
remember to raise those washing machines and feed them the best laundry detergent you can! i recommend arm and hammer (partly because of the logo - the logo was used a lot in de leonism, and armand hammer supports socialism)
I've found that most of the time, just pick the most sexist answer you can think of, and you'll typically be right!
I really don't like gendered languages.
There was a whole battle about whether covid was masculine or feminine. I think feminine won, probably because it sucked.
You'll be right 50% of the times. Or 33% in german. And it doesn't match between languages. Like, cat is a she in german and a he in french. Often synonyms have different genders : une lettre/un courrier (both mean a mail).
The issue is that you are searching your mind for correlations between gender and sexism-related, which is often easier than searching for non-correlation. If I ask you "quick, think of a singer that wears leather", you'll find one instantly. But if I ask "quick, find a singer that doesn't wear leather" it takes a while.
If you want a better impression of the phenomenon, open a dictionary, go over words one by one and count the points.
And also "organ" (the instrument) in french is male when singular and female when plural. "C'est un bel orgue" and "Ce sont de belles orgues".
You'd love German – there is absolutely zero system or logic behind what word has which of the three genders.
There are some general guidelines, which hold true more often than not: https://germanwithlaura.com/noun-gender/
For example, planets that don't end with an e and which aren't Venus tend to be male
Yeah, no, it doesn't make sense:
Der Mann (the man - male article)
Die Frau (the woman - female article)
Der Junge (the boy - male article)
Das Mädchen (the girl - neutral article)
Like, come on gendered articles, you had one job.
Anything with -chen/-klein (a diminutive) is neuter.
E.g. in addition to Mädchen there is Jungchen (~"youngster") that is also neuter rather than masculine.
But there's no Mäd.
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three?!
German is woke
It totally isn't unfortunately, the gender neutral pronoun (if that's what it's called?) doesn't work for humans.
oh, it does work...
...if you're bigoted enough.
Yep. Masculine, feminine, and neuter. It’s annoyingly hard to learn. Plus all the other adjectives and such change to match. It’s wild.
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I asked my Francophone buddy that grew up in backwoods Quebec how the hell he kept it all in his head. He said that he never bothered.
If it had an "e" on the end, he just assumed it was feminine.
If he was drunk, he didn't give a single flying tabernak.
It's likely the same as English spelling. Just years and years of repeated exposure, and you eventually pick up most of it through osmosis
How does anyone manage to keep allll the words pronunciation and spelling they know is already amazing, craming pronouns on top of that isn't much worse
Is it possible to bash your way though this, as a foreigner, by getting the gender wrong half the time? Are mis-genedered nouns sometimes homophones for completely different things, or can you be understood with bad grammar, regardless?
I say this since sometimes "bad/wrong" is less about understanding and more about "that sounds funny" or "nobody talks like that."
You will be understood, it will just give people a small pause.
Sometimes it may cause confusion, like "the phone (he) went through the washing machine (she) and now <she/he> is broken" changes meaning if you get the pronoun wrong. But then if you are used to disambiguate thIs kind of situation - and you have to in english - it shouldn't happen too often
Mark Twain also struggled with language
To continue with the German genders: a tree is male, its buds are female, its leaves are neuter; horses are sexless, dogs are male, cats are female—tomcats included, of course; a person's mouth, neck, bosom, elbows, fingers, nails, feet, and body are of the male sex, and his head is male or neuter according to the word selected to signify it, and NOT according to the sex of the individual who wears it—for in Germany all the women wear either male heads or sexless ones; a person's nose, lips, shoulders, breast, hands, and toes are of the female sex; and his hair, ears, eyes, chin, legs, knees, heart, and conscience haven't any sex at all. The inventor of the language probably got what he knew about a conscience from hearsay.
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this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2025
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