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Trick question, washing machines come in many different genders:
I thought pans came in many different genders
Bi only in two.
Only the first two are genders. The others are psychological illnesses
Edit: /s
If you get the wrong one just accuse the examiner of being transphobic.
please no baiting trans folk
Die Waschmaschine die
Die Bart die
No one who speaks German could be an evil man.
Gut ausgedrückt.
Ich kenne die Szene, danke.
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Waschmaschine:*
Das ist die Kleidung der Waschmaschine
Ich stehe auf der Waschmaschine
German grammar cannot be trusted
Have you tried asking the washing machine for its preferred pronouns?
mate, can you please not bait trans folk? thanks
Stop regulating how other people live their lives. Fascist.
Female in Russian, because the word machine/машина ends with A, and so any machine, from tattoo gun to steam engine is female gendered. I always thought French and German worked in somewhat similar manner?
I didn’t learn of any rhyme or reason to it in German when I took classes on it. In fact, in a few cases, the gender changes the meaning of the word. Der See und die See, for example. One means lake and the other means sea/ocean.
OMG, I’ve been doing my Duolingo lessons and never realised that they had different meanings, I just thought Germans used one word for all bodies of water 😭
“Die See” denotes an ocean, “der See” denotes a lake. You will more often hear “das Meer” instead of “die See” tho.
There’s more shenanigans with “umfahren” and “umfahren”, where Intonation matters. One means “drive around”, the other “run over”.
Also one is a strong and one is a weak verb, meaning that in certain cases, one will be split apart:
Ich umfahre jemanden: I drive around someone.
Ich fahre jemanden um: I run someone over.
That’s a rather rare occurence. Most often, only the grammar will be incorrect if you use the wrong article.
it is in German too.
It is die Waschmaschine. and a Steam Engine ist die Dampfmaschine. And it is a very straight foreard naming convention. Just add what kind of machine it is to the front of the noun.
It works like that in French until you use a different word for the machine.
“Mon ordinateur est une bonne machine”. In a single sentence my computer was described with words both male and female.
It’s just vocabulary and grammar, not the deep essence or identity of things or people.
Spanish, Italian and Portuguese do, i believe… French has some rather… Unusual conventions i think, not matching the rest
The general rule of thumb in French is the word is feminine if it ends with “-le” like “la table”, the table is feminine with it the article “la” to denote feminine. But this is not always the case. For example, house in French is “la maison” which doesn’t end in “-le”.
End-syllables help a long way:
For example the often cited neutral: girl/Mädchen is a diminutive. So everything with -chen or -lein becomes neutral and therefore: das.
(Brötchen, Männlein, Häuschen, Fräulein)
https://mein-deutschbuch.de/genusbestimmung.html#nachsilben
As a bonus: in plural everything is “die” so just formulate everything in plural and you are always right.
The problem though is when you get into figuring out if it is in the nominative, accusative, dative, or genitive case.
Der Hund can easily be turned into den Hund, dem Hund, or des Hundes if you aren’t careful.
And for the love of God, don’t ask me anything about subjunctive case 😮💨
How aggregious is misgendering items in other languages? I assume it’s no big deal and may not even be worth correcting most of the time?
It sounds very weird and you know immediately it’s a foreigner speaking. When you are fluent the genders just come naturally, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a native making a mistake like that, maybe children.
I wouldn’t correct anyone unless they want to learn though, the noun itself is more important and it carries the meaning across.
This is for Brazilian Portuguese at least.
I can vouch it’s the same for Mexican Spanish.
In spoken language? As other said, you notice and ypu know you don’t talk to native speaker. You might correct them just ao they can learn and carry on.
On exam, which is the contextnof the meme? Pretty aggregious.
French is just kind of compact (they even have the ‘de’ to un-ambigous things I figure) so sometimes the phrase rolls on but means something completely different, it might work out or not but can be confusing.
My master mistake, at dinner with my SOs family;
Tout le monde veut rentrer dans le moule.
This is the correct version.
Edit: BTW Swedish is the other way around and it’s quite easy to understand even if you missgender.
That must’ve generated some thunderous laughter :D
Every once in a while there are two words that are written the same but have different gender, if you use the wrong article it’ll get confusing for a second and you’ll have to figure out from context what was actually meant.
How do gendered languages handle neologisms?
(this is a very difficult question to search btw)
At least for romance languages, there is a rhyme and reason for the gender each noun gets, so neologisms and borrowed words tend to follow the same logic.
For word morphology, as an example, in Portuguese nouns ending in a are almost always female, so new words that end with a are very likely to be female.
There are semantic rules too, for example brands and companies are typically (I want to say always but there’s probably edge cases) female, so even though Netflix and Amazon didn’t exist before they’re still female.
there is a rhyme and reason for the gender each noun gets
There is? I only took high school level French, so I’m very ignorant on the topic and happy to admit so, but any time I asked that about that very idea all I ever got in response was “that’s just how it is!”, so I would love to learn if you’re willing to elaborate.
And I don’t think “it ends in A” is solid enough foundation to call it “rhyme and reason”
I speak French and it probably doesn’t help but it just sounds wrong when misgendered except for words that begin with a vowel syllable for some reason. Even we, struggle with those. E.g. avion, hélicoptère, école. We also use the l’ for those words instead of le/la but it becomes harder when we’re have to choose un/une. Maybe that’s a hint to what’s happening. Any language expert can chime in?
Yes, there is a rhyme and reason, but because that requires actually delving into linguistics studying (plus etymology for all those edge cases that got carried over from Latin and other languages), most people don’t get too deep into it apart from shallow rules (eg: if word starts/ends in X then it’s male/female).
Not even natives of gendered languages usually bother learning the nitty gritty rules, they just pick it up as they go, that’s how all of us learn our languages.
On a practical level, it’s also much easier to teach a 6 year old in elementary that something is male/female just because, and to remember that, than to go into each and every individual case (morphology, syntax, semantics, etc.), which themselves typically have edge cases due to history and whatnot. Especially because that child will naturally pick it up as they absorb the language around them so it really doesn’t matter much.
And then there’s just those cases where we actually don’t know because the etymology got lost. Yeah, that’s fun.
In school I was never taught why something is male/female yet I can always distinguish them naturally in my. day to day because that’s how I’ve always lived. That’s just one of the amazing things of human language.
If you ask a native of a gendered language why they think X word should be male instead of female they’ll probably just tell you it sounds wrong otherwise, and that’s literally the end of it for most of us. We don’t think about it, we just intuitively know it sounds right or wrong. I’m sure that’s frustrating to hear for a foreigner trying to learn, but you can’t teach what you don’t know. In the end, other than very broad rules, the best way typically is to just start memorizing it one by one.
Also, “ends in A” is definitely rhyme or reason in Portuguese, that’s actually a rule. Although to be more specific it’s a tonic A, but even that has an exception if it’s a nasal Ã, but I didn’t want to get into phonology too, I just wanted to give a simple example.
That’s… Curious. In Spanish both Netflix and Amazon are male.
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In slav languages, you just go with how the neologism sounds. “Computer” ends in hard r, so it’s masculine, for example.
Every once in a while there’s going to be shit like with “coffee” though. It sounds neutral-gendered and is officially neutral-gendered, but there’s been a big period when people believed it should be masculine because of the source language or some shit. Still a lot of people arguing about it.
Native German speaker here but I also speak Spanish, Portuguese, French and Swedish. Each of these languages handles them differently so I am thinking there’s not a general answer here.
It also can depend within each language on some context. For example in German many neologisms are automatically neuter (das) unless they happen to resemble some common pattern. For example a lot of German words that end with an -e are feminine and sometimes that is applied to neologisms too.
Une machine, putain !
Noticed that space after putain ? When the sign has two things, like an exclamation mark or a colon, you put the space in between. Otherwise not !
Sorry for the the frenchification by using the “espace insécable” in the English text.
Except for ; because it’s no fun if there’s not at least one exception.
Are you sure about that? Seems all signs with a dot plus another thingy are concerned:
It’s even worse if your native language has genders for things, but the one you’re learning has different genders for the same things.
Same as the dish washer.
Depends on which word you use. At least in German.
No, it’s masculine in German and French.
Die Spühlmaachiene
Der Geschirrspüler
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OP, don’t you mean a rinsing machine?
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They should be non binary, like in the US.
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What is a “normal person”? Most people on the planet don’t communicate in English.
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I’m not saying they’re fancy, just that there are more people on the planet that can’t speak English than people who can.
Also, most people on the planet speak multiple languages. There are even less people on the world that only speak a single language than there are English speakers. So, if anything, speaking just a single language, even if it’s English, is the abnormal thing.
Lastly, it’s not about “feeling successful”, as you put it, but about being able to communicate with more people and being able to enjoy more things.
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