why
why
113 comments
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Both! Un lave-linge. Or, une machine à laver.
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¿Por qué no los dos?
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English is such a poor language that they only have the article The and nouns without genders.
Seethe and cope.
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My native language doesn't have any articles and there is no distinction between he and she.
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How progressive.
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Gender is a social construct powered by language.
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female of course
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Female. Obviously. 😏
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Yes, but what if you're a man married to a man? Which one is the washing machine? 🤌
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The one that is sent from the future that consists of living tissue over a metal endoskeleton.
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One of the few genders German and French agree on is that a machine is female.
So, if a man is considered to be a machine he is female in that field.
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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.)
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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"
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Is that when they decided to make counting past 70 complicated?
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That's four goddamn numbers in a row!
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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!
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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.
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There was a whole battle about whether covid was masculine or feminine. I think feminine won, probably because it sucked.
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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).
I think 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, even though there more of them.
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".
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You'd love German – there is absolutely zero system or logic behind what word has which of the three genders.
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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
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I only studied french for a short time, but I feel like that really doesn't work for french:
- chemisier, blouse, is masculine
- ceinture, belt, is feminine
Those were the two onces I could remember like this half a year after ending my french studies, but could be that those are only two uncommon counterexamples.
Also, both of these are what you would "expect" in German (die Bluse, der Gürtel)
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That's what I love about my native Hungarian, even pronouns are ungendered.
Everything else is stupid complicated though. We have tonal harmony to worry about instead.
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I also found that if you really want to be understood in French, you have to force yourself into an over the top, bordering on ridiculous French accent.
So the key to speaking good French is to default to the most sexist position possible and intentionally speak like an asshole.
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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.
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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
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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
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How do you call a herd of washing machines?
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Bonjour
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you don't. they call you.
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On the phone?
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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)
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Uh-oh. I've heard this one before.
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What do you mean you heard it before, it’s a brand new?
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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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Dogs are male? In my language dogs are female. So I guess there is no standard for gendered language.
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It is said that when English went from old English (which was gendered) to modern English, part of the problem was that the genders of the Germanic roots didn’t match the genders of the French influences so the people chose to just skip it all together.
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Dunno about German but in french dogs are male or female depending on their actual gender (obviously the female word has been adopted as a slur towards women, to be fair sometimes the masculine also is used that way for men).
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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."
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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
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I like when the gender changes what the noun is. Here are a couple Spanish examples: la cometa = the kite (feminine) or el cometa = the comet (masculine) la papa = the potato (feminine) or el papa = the Pope (masculine).
Swahili has 18 genders, though only 16 are in active use.
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Oh hey, someone that used gender in regards to Spanish correctly.
I say that in regards to one of my Spanish teachers from high school who would always grade us wrong when we say male/female instead of masculine/feminine. One day he explained that by saying "Objects have gender! People have sex!"
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I didn't know Swahili was that progressive.
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Tanzanians pride themselves on everybody getting along.
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Here's a simple trick:
Apply misogyny and sexism /s
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Doesn't work for le lave-linge though.
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Buuuut cars are a men thing aren't they? And yet it's la voiture...... Curious.......
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See... You have to get into the mind of a straight man from the 1950s and ask yourself one of 2 questions: Is this a woman's thing? Or would I fuck this thing? Cars are considered "beautiful" and "sexy" and therefore fuckable by a man. I hope this has been a good lesson in outrageous sexism.
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on dit un char.
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If you can make mysoginistic jokes about it, then it works : men get in cars just like in women. => so it's "la"
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😏
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Y'all would love Irish. There is no word for "yes" or "no".
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How do you say “no means no”
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I'm a bit rusty but I think it's "Feck'off ya'cunt".
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Eh, that's a great question. My Irish used to be good enough that I'd be able to answer that but I'm not sure what the direct translation would be. There is a word that's very close to "no" which is "níl" (neel) but in general it's short for "níl mé" (neel may - I am not).
In the present tense there is "tá" (taw) which is essentially short for "tá mé" (taw may - I am) but for example the answer to the question "Were you?" is "Ní raimh mé" (nee r-ow may) which is "I was not" but it is contextual. The pronunciation of "raimh" also varies by each of the 4 provinces along with every other word which is confusing as fuck. Some would say "rev" for "raimh".
In general it's the positive or negative of the verb though - were you? I was. Did you? I did. Will you? I will. Did she? She did etc.
Someone with better Irish may be along to hopefully make a show of me.
edit: Google translate says "ciallaíonn ní nach bhfuil" is "no means no" but there is no way in hell any actual Irish speaker would say those words when the context is so simple.
"ní nach bhfuil" (nee noch will) is "no is not", kinda. ciallaíonn is "means" straight up though.
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For all of the shit people talk about the English language, this is a big thing I appreciate about it. What the hell was the point of even gendering random things from the start? In German, the main gendering are die, der, and das with das being gender neutral. I would like to see a world where in scenarios like that they just move everything to das.
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I think it’s to make it less ambiguous.
In English you just use the same word and figure it out from context. Someone else gave some other Spanish examples but I like “right” (direction) = “la derecha” vs “right” (human rights) = “los derechos”.
Of course there’s still so many variants of meaning that grammatical gender doesn’t help much.
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If you're writing a poem in German, you can apparently switch the positions of the subject, object and indirect object without changing the meaning, since the gender and article of the word indicate whether it's the subject (Nominativ), object (Akkusativ) or indirect object (Dativ). (e.g. subject: der Mann, object: den Mann, indirect object: dem Mann)
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Now if you would level up once more and stopped having gendered pronouns.
That’s the ultimate level 😀
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My two main fluent languages are not gendered. It was such a weird concept when I started to learn French.
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Try Polish. Our verbs and adjectives are also gendered.
A washing machine is feminine, how is it in french?
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Feminine too, like all the machines
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I'm just happy that washing machine has the same gender in French as my language and not a different one
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It's the same gender than all machines, which is obviously feminine.
There's no fixed rule for this but if a noun ends with a consonant it's probably masculine and if it ends with a vowel it's possibly feminine. Again, not a consistent rule and it will not work for everything, but if you must take a guess, this might help, or not.
Now this reminds me of Sebastian Marx and his videos on French. Like this one on pronunciation.
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so much pain
113 comments
In French, it's 'le pénis,' but nobody says that. 'Dick,' is feminine (la bite.)
Also, 'vagina' is masculine, but 'pussy' is feminine, because if you were to say 'le chat' it would mean a cat, but by feminising the word, it becomes 'la chatte,' meaning pussy.
As someone who grew up Anglophone, I actually find gendered languages much more precise. On the other hand, in order to make yourself understood one must have a rich vocabulary, because the definitions of words are often more narrow than in English.
And don't even get me started on phrasal verbs... English is messy.
I would love to see that discuss
Sorry, I don’t understand what I am seeing here. Is that someone xeeting a screenshot of someone reporting to Duolingo that penis should be feminine, not masculine in Spanish?