cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/25565846
WHY
this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2025
160 points (96.5% liked)
Language Learning
488 readers
35 users here now
A community all about learning languages!
Ask / talk about a specific language or language learning in general.
Other active Lemmy language communities:
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
Other communities outside Lemmy:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The easy way to be correct 80% of the time is to apply sexism.
I assume a washing machine is female in that case.
All machines are. I'd say it's at least 90% completely arbitrary, what makes streets, tables, power, or cars feminine? What makes some countries feminine and some masculine? The only thing you could believably argue that it's historic sexism is job titles, because most of them are masculine with derived feminine words.
I believe you're wrong to assume the gender is a property of the thing the word refers too, it's a property of the word itself. Synonyms can have different genders, like "vélo" is masculine and "bicylette" is feminine, both mean "bicycle". "Vagin" is masculine. There's no 100% consistent mean to determine a words gender, but helpful patterns that are right most of the time would be more in the word's ending.
To take the example of "machine", I can't think of any word ending in "-ine" that isn't feminine, safe for some Russian names.
Also, if a noun doesn't end in "-e", it's most likely masculine. But the reciprocal isn't true!