this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2023
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I don't know if this is the case for Spanish, but it is worth noting that grammatical gender and human gender don't always line up when they are both present either. Like German's Mädchen, meaning "girl" or "young woman", is not a feminine word. If that sort of thing is common it might help enby people feel a little more comfortable with it, or at least I imagine it might since I'm not one
Well yes, but actually no.
The reason grammatic gender is called gender is because almost all nouns referring to men (boy, men, father, uncle...) are in one group and almost all nouns referring to women are in the other.
In German, Mädchen is not in the female group because -chen is a diminutive changing any noun's group to neuter. The word Jungchen, from "Junge" meaning "(young) boy" exists as well and is also neuter.
~~Similarily, all plural nouns are in the female group.~~ Just because grammar has some more quirks doesn't mean grammatical gender doesn't line up with actual gender.
The only exception in German I know of would be the word "Weib", cognate to wife, translating to women, which is in the neuter group. Except this word is archaic and an insult nowadays. All other words referring to gendered people should be in their corresponding grammatical group.
All plural nouns are not female im german.
They just happen to use "die" as their definite article when they are nominative, which doubles up as the feminine article for fem. nominative. But they by no means "change" their grammatical gender. Within the german declination system, articles are very often reused for different cases. That does never change the gender of the noun.
Just like saying "der Frau" in genitiv singular does not make Frau a masculine noun, saying "die Männer" in nominative plural does not make Männer a feminine noun.
Whoops, yeah that part was bollocks.
I appreciate the clarification! My German is awfully rusty
Im sorry, but what this person told you is untrue though. A noun retains its gender in whatever declination it is, however, articles often double up within the german declination system. And it just happens to be that the plural definite article for nouns of all genders is "die", which is also the nominative singular definite article for feminine nouns. But the article never determines the gender of the noun, the gender of the noun determines which article to use. It's just sometimes, the article looks like looks like another article already used for something else. That's why every school book and german learning course tells you to put the noun in nominative singular before trying to tell the gender.
Funniest example I know is how vagina is masculine in French.
In Spanish some words for vagina are femenine and some masculine. The same happens with penis.
La vagina, la concha, el coño. How many more are there?
El chocho, el chichi, la chirla, la almeja, el papo, el potorro, ...
And a lot more.
Haha, fair enough. Lots of them if you count every dialect.
Linguistically, the term "grammatical gender" is really a historical mistake based on linguistics the discipline being born in Indo-European languages, (twice -- first with the first Sanskrit grammar, then for serious with people noticing suspiciously many similarities between Sanskrit and Latin)
The new and more inclusive term is "noun classes", e.g. Swahili has nine, e.g. "mtu" is person, class "animate/human singular", then you have "utu", "humanity", from the same root but in the class for abstractions. All Indo-European languages have three, and in that context "female gender" is really "the noun class that the word 'woman' is part of", same for "man" and "thing". Girl is neuter in German because it's a diminutive and all diminutives are neuter, "person" is female and "human" male because that's how the language assigned them semi-randomly to classes (mostly through phonetics). Nouns constructed with infinitive+er (like baker, very similar formation rules as in English) are all male, feminists really don't like that because that covers basically all professions... but it also makes all murderers male. Which doesn't make all murderers male, same as me being a person doesn't make me female. Grammatical /= personal gender.
This is all that you can point to a chair (male) and table (female) and have a good chance to be able to refer to them very efficiently, like "his leg is broken" and it being clear that you don't mean the table: That wouldn't make any sense as it's female and you'd say "her leg is broken".
But that’s because all diminutives are neuter in German. Like das Mädchen is the diminutive of die Mäd (the girl) same with das Fraulein (the young woman) is the diminutive of die Frau (the woman). Mäd and Frau are feminine words
It’s also the same in Dutch. De meid (the girl) is gendered (Dutch doesn’t have a distinct article for masculine and feminine words anymore) and the diminutive het meisje (the little girl) is neuter.