It’s because of the -chen. Die Maid - Das Mädchen (Maidchen). Der Bub - Das Bübchen
All words with a Verkleinerungsform (-chen, -lein, …) are gender neutral
Edit: Magd geht auch, Maid ist ein veraltetes Wort, dass meiner Meinung wahrscheinlicher der Ursprung von Mädchen ist
That's the thing: many native speakers don't know, why it is the way it is. You just proofed this, when you said, that you never noticed before, that girls are genderneutral in German
Isn’t Dutch still “gendered” as there’s De or Het so words are still split in two groups, the groups just don’t happen to align with gender?
Learning Dutch atm
Idk French, but I assume it's female. Because it is also female in my language.
English is the weird language here. Like how can you not know that a table is a female.
There are things that aren't consistent.
For example.
"El coche" = "la voiture"
"El color" = "la couleur"
"La leche" = "le lait".
And there are a lot more.
According to the [WALS](https://wals.info/feature/30A#0/27/148), that is correct, but not by much: 112 of the indexed languages on the website are gendered, 150 languages are not.
I don't know if it accounts for word classes that aren't categorised as genders (the difference between gender and word class as in Chinese can be very ambiguous depending on the language)
It's in the very small minority among Indo-European languages. It used to be gendered and had a complicated case system like German, but only small remnants of it have stuck around.
It depends though. Despite the fact that we don’t have gendered words, English-speakers often personify objects or phenomenons to be gendered in nature, either male or female. There are a lot of examples of the latter
A good example of this is a boat or a ship – classically, people will refer to a ship using female pronouns. People also sometimes do this with other vehicles, like cars.
The ocean is also often referred to as female by sailors.
Hurricanes used to be named after only women until around 50 years ago. Storms and hurricanes have often historically been referred to by female pronouns.
The Earth itself is also thought of as feminine in nature by many, and English speakers will use the term “Mother Earth.”
That’s more of an anthropomorphization we do with the things we like. At least in the case of cars, boats, instruments, etc. you just hear a lot of female pronouns because when it comes to hobbies around these things they’re pretty male dominated. But I have a friend who’s a woman and she tends to give her stuff male names.
That’s just male normativey in language, I imagine there’s a lot of it in every language regardless if they gender tables or not.
Someone who serves food is called a waiter, a man who serves food is called a waiter, a women who serves food it called a waitress (female waiter lol). Another example of male normativey in language.
Yeah but that only applies to human objects for the most part. I think what they meant was that English doesn't have gendered pronouns for inhuman objects, like "la" and "el;" or "un" and "una" in spanish. English just has "the," "a" and most words don't have specific gender.
It's a bit of a debate, but "grammatical gender" is often taken as a synonym with "noun class", meaning that it's not just masculine/feminine, but also counts things like the English use of animate/inanimate. Really, English has 3 noun classes: masculine, feminine, and inanimate (he/she/it). Unlike (e.g.) French, it's not reflected in things like gendered adjectives, only at the level of pronouns, but it certainly exists.
English is in the extreme minority in this respect as far as Indo-European languages (the language family of all European, Persian, and north Indian languages) are concerned
And an even rarer example is Turkish, it has NO gender pronouns, not even for people! "He", "she" and "it" are all just "o". One letter. It also doesn't have "the" or something else.
It gets even worse if you have to learn two langueges with gendered nouns, because most countries can't even agree on the gender of the moon or the sun.
Tisto sonce. ~~Male~~ Neutral
Tista luna. Female
Unless it's "mesec" (another word for moon, also meaning month). Then it's male.
Nevermind, my brain mixed it up. "Tisto" is for neutral.
The nominativ, dativ and akkusativ isn't that complex of a system (still didn't learn genitiv). My primary problem with german isn't even that genders are completely random, it's that they settled for 3 gender articles, i know languages don't make sense anywhere but this is specifically egregious to me, why is tea masculine and milk is feminine but water is neutral? How do you come up with the idea of gendering lifeless objects but then also ungender other lifelss objects? What kind of twist happened during the language's development that led to this?
It's like the neutral article was found once germans realized calling lifeless objects with genders makes no sense and decided to correct it but just ended up stopping half way and made a jumbled mess.
A lot of European languages involve gender in their nouns. It's European languages like English that don't have something similar that should be regarded as "strange".
And thank god for that. Learning japanese is already hard enough. I'm glad their verbs and nouns don't change depending on who or what it's about. Their counting is different depending on the object being counted tho
Honestly, keigo is pretty easy for me, it's the counters that are so hard. Well, that and kanji. Other than those two things Japanese is actually a really easy language to learn.
A LOT of languages other than English include genders/pronouns for objects.
Sometimes it's simple like male/female/neutral.
Sometimes it's... German...
German is also male/female/neuter. What you do have tho is the added difficulty of the Nominative/Genitive/Dative/Accusative cases but those are distinct from grammatical gender.
that's... not at all how it works. Feminine/Masculine/Neutral words are decided by how they sound and have pretty much no involvement in actual gender. That is why in Russian, for example, "beard" is feminine. I am not sure why it is called gendered, but it is definitely not due to the people viewing things as having ACTUAL gender
Also i am not sure if this is a joke or not so perhaps sorry in advance
I like that English only has gendered terms for things that can actually have gender. It's a lot easier to tell the difference between a male waiter and a female waitress vs. a male table and a female table.
Because French has some... inconsistencies... when choosing genders for nouns, especially when compared to other languages. You Englishmen have it easy because English just yeeted this system out the window
Inconsistencies? Compared? Every language that has it is fully arbitrary regarding that crap. My fork is a girl, my spoon is a guy and my knife is their pet or whatever.
German could be worse...I don't really speak french but....its DER spoon. But if you want a spoon its Give me DEN spoon. When you are talking about a stain on the spoon, its the stain on DEM spoon.
Anyone? Hm?
In Portuguese one "trick" for you to know how to differentiate gender, feminine usually start and ends with "**a**" and masculine starts and ends with "**o**".
In this case for example "the table" is "**a** mes**a**" or in another example "the fork" is "**o** garf**o"**
Of course this does not apply to everything, for example "the wall" is "**a** pared**e",** but is very common.
To be fair, English has all the same tenses/times as French:
* I had eaten *(pluperfect),* I ate / I have eaten *(perfect)*
* I was eating / I used to eat *(imperfect),* I just ate *(recent past)*
* I eat *(simple present)*, I am eating *(present progressive),* eat, now! *(imperative)*
* I'm gonna eat *(near future)*, I will eat *(simple future)*
* I will have eaten *(future perfect)*
La/une Table
Der/ein tisch
German: What gender is a girl?
Lol i never noticed that it's gender neutral. Because i was used to it.
It’s because of the -chen. Die Maid - Das Mädchen (Maidchen). Der Bub - Das Bübchen All words with a Verkleinerungsform (-chen, -lein, …) are gender neutral Edit: Magd geht auch, Maid ist ein veraltetes Wort, dass meiner Meinung wahrscheinlicher der Ursprung von Mädchen ist
I guess that makes sense. I should know that as a native speaker lol.
That's the thing: many native speakers don't know, why it is the way it is. You just proofed this, when you said, that you never noticed before, that girls are genderneutral in German
Proved ^I'm ^^helping
In Dutch anything and everything is neutral(just like with English) but instead of The/A we use De/Het/Een
Isn’t Dutch still “gendered” as there’s De or Het so words are still split in two groups, the groups just don’t happen to align with gender? Learning Dutch atm
In German there is Der (masculine) Die (feminine) Das (Genderless) And since it is "Das Mädchen" (the girl) A girl is genderless
But not a woman! Die Frau.
Das Weib
Ten stół
This ^
No tisch
Ten stůl (yeah stůl = Tisch and not stuhl 🪑)
Der/die/das Ananas
Die, Bart, Die
Die Ketchup
Idk French, but I assume it's female. Because it is also female in my language. English is the weird language here. Like how can you not know that a table is a female.
In Russian, table is masculine. Probably in the other slavic languages as well.
Почему-то пока я не проговорил это слово на русском, я думал, что table это женский род
Табурет или табуретка? They're synonyms, refer to exactly the same item, but different genders.
табурет is a chair... not a table
La mesa in Spanish. I don't know French, but it's has be female. I am also assuming it is consistent accross all 5 Romance Languages.
There are things that aren't consistent. For example. "El coche" = "la voiture" "El color" = "la couleur" "La leche" = "le lait". And there are a lot more.
Il/un tavolo (italian)
Chad male table. How can you look at a table and say “damn that sure is feminine”?
battutomeaquello (r/beatmetoit)
Votosuarrabbiato (r/angryupvote)
What if it identifies as male?
Holy transgender table
new response just dropped?
Call the surgeon.
Then its Le/Un
Now only if my French teacher understood that my table has balls
Un table
I feel like a an Englishman trying to speak french even tho i’m french
Hak una matata
that's how many languages work
Yeah English is in the minority of languages without having genders Edit: yeah I get it I was wrong also why am I getting up votes.
Minority of *European* languages. Worldwide, most languages aren’t gendered.
According to the [WALS](https://wals.info/feature/30A#0/27/148), that is correct, but not by much: 112 of the indexed languages on the website are gendered, 150 languages are not. I don't know if it accounts for word classes that aren't categorised as genders (the difference between gender and word class as in Chinese can be very ambiguous depending on the language)
Thank you for looking that up!
I don’t know if this is a fact however I’m to lazy to look it up so as a redditor I must call out cap on you
Actually, English is in the slight majority of all Languages for being genderless.
It's in the very small minority among Indo-European languages. It used to be gendered and had a complicated case system like German, but only small remnants of it have stuck around.
No it isn't; only ~25% of languages have genders
Just looked it up it seems it’s actually like 44% which is not the majority But still a way larger number
English still sort of has the masculine gender for an unknown party, like "should he be found to have..." but we're moving away from that.
That’s informal. Formally it is “they” not “he”
Also she deppending on the text or person
It depends though. Despite the fact that we don’t have gendered words, English-speakers often personify objects or phenomenons to be gendered in nature, either male or female. There are a lot of examples of the latter A good example of this is a boat or a ship – classically, people will refer to a ship using female pronouns. People also sometimes do this with other vehicles, like cars. The ocean is also often referred to as female by sailors. Hurricanes used to be named after only women until around 50 years ago. Storms and hurricanes have often historically been referred to by female pronouns. The Earth itself is also thought of as feminine in nature by many, and English speakers will use the term “Mother Earth.”
That’s more of an anthropomorphization we do with the things we like. At least in the case of cars, boats, instruments, etc. you just hear a lot of female pronouns because when it comes to hobbies around these things they’re pretty male dominated. But I have a friend who’s a woman and she tends to give her stuff male names.
But I think this would only be done when you personify words. Boats and sea would be a great example. But otherwise objects would be genderless.
I'm pretty sure Mother Earth comes from Greek myth actually. Gaia, or personified Earth, was the mother of the Titans.
That’s not what gender means in language.
That’s just male normativey in language, I imagine there’s a lot of it in every language regardless if they gender tables or not. Someone who serves food is called a waiter, a man who serves food is called a waiter, a women who serves food it called a waitress (female waiter lol). Another example of male normativey in language.
Is a Ship a she or he?
In Slovak language is it she.
And in Polish it's he
In portuguese is a he but depends on wich one it is
It does. Actor - Actress Waiter - Waitress
Which aren't objects but humans, but yeah
These are not objects
Yeah but that only applies to human objects for the most part. I think what they meant was that English doesn't have gendered pronouns for inhuman objects, like "la" and "el;" or "un" and "una" in spanish. English just has "the," "a" and most words don't have specific gender.
It's a bit of a debate, but "grammatical gender" is often taken as a synonym with "noun class", meaning that it's not just masculine/feminine, but also counts things like the English use of animate/inanimate. Really, English has 3 noun classes: masculine, feminine, and inanimate (he/she/it). Unlike (e.g.) French, it's not reflected in things like gendered adjectives, only at the level of pronouns, but it certainly exists.
I never really realized that, huh
Blond and Blonde as well. It’s just basically irrelevant since most people don’t know or use stuff like that interchangeably.
I never realized this, but now I’m thinking back to all the times I used either form incorrectly.
That’s just a loanword from french right?
I always use the one with the E no matter who it is lol
Oh wow I've never realized that
Technically those feminization’s are made up. Actor and Waiter originally applied to people of either gender working the job.
>Technically those feminization’s are made up. The entirety of a language is made up Languages define dictionaries, not the other way around.
English is in the extreme minority in this respect as far as Indo-European languages (the language family of all European, Persian, and north Indian languages) are concerned
And an even rarer example is Turkish, it has NO gender pronouns, not even for people! "He", "she" and "it" are all just "o". One letter. It also doesn't have "the" or something else.
Turkish is not an Indo-European lenguaje, so, albeit that's is an interesting fact, it is not a relevant example.
We should definitely change them all to be gender neutral /s
It gets even worse if you have to learn two langueges with gendered nouns, because most countries can't even agree on the gender of the moon or the sun.
Moon is a female noun and sun is male idc what y'all say this is the right answer
El sol, la luna
O sol (male), A lua (female) - Portuguese
Der Mond (male), die Sonne (female)
Y'all are goofy that's all
Yeah cause the sun clearly has a cock, like how do you think CMEs are made?
But, Die Nacht(night, female), Der Tag(day, male)
Moon is female and Sun is neuter. But the star is female
correcte! le soleil, la lune!
En Español, es el sol y la luna
In Italiano, il Sole e la Luna
Tisto sonce. ~~Male~~ Neutral Tista luna. Female Unless it's "mesec" (another word for moon, also meaning month). Then it's male. Nevermind, my brain mixed it up. "Tisto" is for neutral.
Sonce je srednjega spola. Če bi bil moškega, bi bil "tisti".
Merda. Nisem razmišljala. Hvala za popravek!
Nope, moon is male (ten Księżyc) and sun is neuter (to Słońce)
In my language it’s the opposite. The moon is male and the sun is female.
Singular Plural Nominativ der Tisch die Tische Genitiv des Tischs /Tisches der Tische Dativ dem Tisch(e) den Tischen Akkusativ den Tisch die Tische
And they say german is hard.... lächerlich
wait till you see bulgarian
przypadek liczba pojedyncza liczba mnoga * mianownik stół stoły * dopełniacz stołu stołów * celownik stołowi stołom * biernik stół stoły * narzędnik stołem stołami * miejscownik stole stołach * wołacz stole stoły
I mówią, że polski jest trudny. Zabawne
The nominativ, dativ and akkusativ isn't that complex of a system (still didn't learn genitiv). My primary problem with german isn't even that genders are completely random, it's that they settled for 3 gender articles, i know languages don't make sense anywhere but this is specifically egregious to me, why is tea masculine and milk is feminine but water is neutral? How do you come up with the idea of gendering lifeless objects but then also ungender other lifelss objects? What kind of twist happened during the language's development that led to this? It's like the neutral article was found once germans realized calling lifeless objects with genders makes no sense and decided to correct it but just ended up stopping half way and made a jumbled mess.
Me remembering the french CE1 exams (, it was difficult 😀) Btw: the gender of table is Female in french
Féminin...
A lot of European languages involve gender in their nouns. It's European languages like English that don't have something similar that should be regarded as "strange".
And then you have Japanese where you can only tell if the noun is female, male, singular, or plural, by context
やさしいです -> I/He/She/It/They am/is/are nice/kind
isnt it future too?
Yep
And thank god for that. Learning japanese is already hard enough. I'm glad their verbs and nouns don't change depending on who or what it's about. Their counting is different depending on the object being counted tho
And don't forget the respectful speech
Honestly, keigo is pretty easy for me, it's the counters that are so hard. Well, that and kanji. Other than those two things Japanese is actually a really easy language to learn.
Learning it now and I agree. I find it way easier to learn than Spanish. The conjugations are so simple. Reading it is definitely way trickier
Though it seems to me that English had gendered nouns a few centuries ago
In Spanish the male genitalia is feminine gender, and female genetalia is masculine gender. Interesting world we live in.
El pene? La vagina? A menos que haya otro nombre para eso no veo de que estás hablando
The official ones are the correct gender. The vulgar ones are reversed, so true in a way.
I mean Im not a native Spanish speaker, my girlfriend is, and she uses the vulgar versions in that case. Most commonly coño.
French too. But then again, there are an uncountable number of synonyms for those words, just like in Spanish.
A LOT of languages other than English include genders/pronouns for objects. Sometimes it's simple like male/female/neutral. Sometimes it's... German...
German is also male/female/neuter. What you do have tho is the added difficulty of the Nominative/Genitive/Dative/Accusative cases but those are distinct from grammatical gender.
It's not the table that has the gender but the word itself and it's female
Correction: the grammatical gender itself is usually referred to as "masculine/feminine", not male/female.
It’s simple, table is for cooking and cooking is for female
Lol... this makes sense. You see, I understand male & female adapters... (The male goes into the female, obviously)... but the chair is also female!
that's... not at all how it works. Feminine/Masculine/Neutral words are decided by how they sound and have pretty much no involvement in actual gender. That is why in Russian, for example, "beard" is feminine. I am not sure why it is called gendered, but it is definitely not due to the people viewing things as having ACTUAL gender Also i am not sure if this is a joke or not so perhaps sorry in advance
I like that English only has gendered terms for things that can actually have gender. It's a lot easier to tell the difference between a male waiter and a female waitress vs. a male table and a female table.
That's lexical gender not grammatical gender, not the same thing.
You can identify the male table by looking at its third leg.
English people when they find out pretty much every other language genders fucking everything: ::surprised pikachu face::
Pretty much every other *European* language.
"Pretty much every language" if you only consider languages from Europe and South-West Asia.
I German it's masculine
Male table gang rise up
männliche Tisch bande erhebet euch
Why did I read this in an italian accent ?
I mean… it works i guess
Why do you guys have problems with that
Trying to learn another language is probably very confusing
And your sentence will still be understandable if you don't use the right gender for a common noun.
Because French has some... inconsistencies... when choosing genders for nouns, especially when compared to other languages. You Englishmen have it easy because English just yeeted this system out the window
Inconsistencies? Compared? Every language that has it is fully arbitrary regarding that crap. My fork is a girl, my spoon is a guy and my knife is their pet or whatever.
Sometimes I think that all this neo-pronouns thing came out of English grammar being so simple
Turkish, English and Finnish: I don’t have such weaknesses
Idk about yours but mine is definitely a female.
*unzips
Well, many European languages have gender in it. English is here not the rule, but the exception.
Sounds German to me.
Me waiting for my first German test knowing dame well I'm gonna be confused
Gendering is even worse in Arabic grammar
Its female and ehm ... that table is looking hella thicc
Tell me you only know English without saying you only know English
Female because it likes being on all 4!! 🫨🤫🤭🫢🫡
German could be worse...I don't really speak french but....its DER spoon. But if you want a spoon its Give me DEN spoon. When you are talking about a stain on the spoon, its the stain on DEM spoon. Anyone? Hm?
Female. Duhhh
As a French, what thE ACTUAL FUCK ???
Table? She. Female.
Female, obviously
A table is female
Feminine, la table
Feminine, of course. Duh
atleast you dont need to know 100 genders...
Tables are women!! lol
English is part of the minority of languages that don't have gendered nouns.
In Portuguese one "trick" for you to know how to differentiate gender, feminine usually start and ends with "**a**" and masculine starts and ends with "**o**". In this case for example "the table" is "**a** mes**a**" or in another example "the fork" is "**o** garf**o"** Of course this does not apply to everything, for example "the wall" is "**a** pared**e",** but is very common.
Female, in my language
Feminine
Female I am gonna be banned ?
Silly Frenchman, table is a gender now.
Your either male or female. I’m not calling you a “They”
Is this an Indo-European joke I'm too Hungarian to understand?
It's masculine, but if you are using it to eat on in that moment Then it's feminine
Bro, english is the only in europe without that.
I'm taking french, but learning from Spanish. English is the weird language.
Bro didn't know about the Germans adding "neutral" to the mix.
Spanish too
Nina Einstein:That's easy.It is a male.
Feminine ?
Tablesexual
german masucline.
Ok, next level: what gender is milk?
French: le lait (m) German: die Milch (f)
That face broke me
Same with many, many, mannnyy other languages...
French Exam: What gender is table? Me: Fluid
On Russian table has male gender
All frogs are females and all snakes are male!
Wait till they ask what time is a action, there's over 8 from what I don't remember from french class
To be fair, English has all the same tenses/times as French: * I had eaten *(pluperfect),* I ate / I have eaten *(perfect)* * I was eating / I used to eat *(imperfect),* I just ate *(recent past)* * I eat *(simple present)*, I am eating *(present progressive),* eat, now! *(imperative)* * I'm gonna eat *(near future)*, I will eat *(simple future)* * I will have eaten *(future perfect)*
Tables are girls in espanol
Doesnt a lot of languages gender objects but not English?
It’s a she
In German all tables are male. Chairs are too.
That’s the same with a lot of languages you know
Someone asking me to use their correct pronouns Me , speaking 2 languages that have neutral pronouns for everything " No "
Technically dutch also has genders to things however this is mostly unknown by people who speak the language correctly
feminine