this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2023
766 points (96.3% liked)
Memes
45895 readers
1358 users here now
Rules:
- Be civil and nice.
- Try not to excessively repost, as a rule of thumb, wait at least 2 months to do it if you have to.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
My native language is genderless so I really dislike all the gendered grammar and words in different languages. English is very easy but in other cases when you start to have a male and a female version of each word which sometimes can be irregular and give you the clue that ohh yeah this should be male but noooo it's female and in many cases there is just simply no logic behind them it is just the way they are.
German even has a neutral gender because two aren't enough of a headache lol
Plus 4 cases which makes it so that there are 16 (Masc, Fem, Neutr, Plural X 4 cases) different ways of typing an article depending on the gender of the word and what the word is doing whereas in English this is all replaced by "The". And don't forget about declining the adjective and the noun in some cases.
Rant over.
And then like half of the articles are "der" and you just have to use context to figure out which one it is
Edit: I was randomly reminded of this graffiti I saw in Berlin:
So just get the whole country to use one “the”, simple 😎
English is barely gendered. In Slavic languages, as someone said, verbs are conjugated differently based on gender. In Serbian for instance, to say "I saw him", you would say "Video sam ga" if you were a man, and "Videla sam ga" if you were a woman. In Arabic I think even more things vary based on gender, like "to you" has different forms based on whether "you" are a man or a woman. It might not be specifically that, but I distinctly recall Arabic using gender-based forms for something that Slavic languages don't.
Hell, German has three genders. "The" is translated der, die or das depending on the noun
... Aaaand as it turns out, most European languages are gendered. At least more gendered than ours.
In most European languages you have to worry about misgendering a table.