this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2023
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[โ€“] BluesF@feddit.uk 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

In gendered languages the "gender" of things other than people doesn't really relate to human gender at all. It's just a grammatical construct.

Mostly yes, but a few gendered languages (Wikipedia lists the Yeniseian and most Dravidian languages, Dizi and Zande) use strict semantic criteria, so that the grammatical gender does correlate strictly with the actual gender 99% of the time.