• Random Dent@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    In German:

    Man = male (der Mann)

    Woman = female (die Frau)

    Boy = male (der Junge)

    Girl = neutral (das Mädchen)

    No idea why lol.

    Also I’m learning French and everything has a gender but I don’t see any pattern to it at all. Pizza is female, books are male, a suitcase is female, hats are male and so on.

    Also in French, the names of numbers go absolutely mental once you go above about 50. That’s got nothing to do with gender but I want to complain it whenever I can.

    • SpaceCadet@sopuli.xyz
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      1 year ago

      Girl = neutral (das Mädchen)

      No idea why lol.

      Mädchen is a diminutive, and all diminutives are grammatically neutral.

      It’s the same in Dutch btw, and my girlfriend who is learning Dutch is frequently abusing this as a cheat code: whenever she doesn’t know the gender of a word, she’ll just use the diminutive and it will automatically be neutral.

    • Sebeck0401@feddit.nl
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      1 year ago

      I think it’s das Mädchen because it’s a sort of diminutive (by use of chen). But it’s been a while since I studied German.

    • Drew Belloc@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      So french is just like portuguese, but in portuguese you normally know if something is male or female by the ending of the words (with a feel exceptions), for example pizza is female because ends with “a”

    • DarkenLM@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Ah, yes the famous quatre-vingt-dix-neuf (commonly pronounced “quatre-vingt-deez-nuts”). Numbers are quite a mouthful in French. One of the reasons I erased it from my memory the moment I didn’t need it no more.

    • sonnenzeit@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      No idea why lol.

      This always confused me, even as a native speaker so I looked it up some. Ultimately it’s because modern German is the confluence of multiple older, historic languages one of which came from a tree with a strict male/female rule for nouns while the other one’s grammar defaulted to a neutral case.

      As languages merge or adopt from others they often becomes a conjoined mess of multiple rules coexisting at the same time. A contemporary example is that in English the plural of a word is usually formed by attaching the suffix “s” to the singular form, aka house becomes houses. However there’s plenty of exceptions (mouse, mice) in particular if the words stem from a different language (octopus, octopi but nowadays octotuses is also acceptable). In that sense to people not privy to the etymology of words and who only study/learn the language per se there would be no perfectly accurate mechanism to predict the plural of a word.

      • sonnenzeit@feddit.de
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        1 year ago

        Also bonus content:

        singular: “das Mädchen” (neutral) - the girl

        plural: “die Mädchen” (female) - the girls

        So in the plural form you have to use a female article again, but the actual spelling of the word is unchanged. Go figure 🤷‍♂️ 🇩🇪.

          • sonnenzeit@feddit.de
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            1 year ago

            Well at least it consistently unlogical. But wait: it actually depends on the grammatical case for example:

            die Mädchen = the girls das Haus der Mädchen = the house of the girls // the girls’ house

            So depending on context male, female, neutral articles are all used (der Mädchen, die Mädchen, das Mädchen) 🤷‍♂️

        • Flumsy@feddit.de
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          1 year ago

          “Die” is always the plural article:

          DAS Auto - DIE Autos / DER Baum - DIE Bäume / DIE Fliege - DIE Fliegen /

        • Holzkohlen@feddit.de
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          1 year ago

          The simple past of read is read, but you pronounce it like red. I assume ever language on earth has its quirks.

        • Harrison [He/Him]@ttrpg.network
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          1 year ago

          That’s a misrepresentation of old English. Man used to be neutral, and was modified by were and wif respectively for man and woman. Wife comes from woman, not the other way around.

    • supercriticalcheese@feddit.it
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      1 year ago

      Ohh oui, french numbers I think they go mental after 69 ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

      70: 60+10 (soixante-dix)

      91: 4x20+11 (quatre-vingt-onze)

      Why? No clue I am not french.

      • jarfil@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        May or may not have some relation, but next to France/part of, lies the Basque country, where all numbers under 100 are base 20+10, except 11 and 19…

        57: 2×20+10+7 (berr-ogei-ta-hama-zazpi)

        79: 3×20+19 (hiru-r-ogei-ta-hemeretzi)

        French (in Belgium, Switzerland, and former colonies) also allows simple base 10:

        70: 70 (septante)

        91: 90+1 (nonante-et-un)

        …so the geographic location seems to have an impact.

        And just next to it, in Spain, everything is base 10… except 11 to 15 change the order from n×10+m, into 1+10 to 5+10.

        Italian does the same, except it’s 11 to 16… just like in French.

        English has a hiccup with eleven and twelve, then goes to n-teen, before going base 10 with n×10+m above 20.

        German does the same, except it goes to m+n×10 above 20.

        Overall, 20 seems to be a magic number, France just seems to have mixed in different ways of using it.

        https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vigesimal

    • crispy_kilt@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      Mädchen is neuter because it is diminuitive.

      Das Häuschen Das Bäumchen Das Hügelchen

      and so on. Diminuitive is always neuter, and Mädchen is diminuitive of Magd (or Maid, I forgot).

    • VikingHippie@lemmy.wtf
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      1 year ago

      Reminds me of a famous quote from Danish humorist Jacob Haugaard:

      French is an easy language to learn: a horse is called chevalle and it’s like that all the way

    • wewbull@feddit.uk
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      1 year ago

      They obviously ran out of fingers and toes at fifty, so they traditionally never went any further.

    • TheHottub@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I only speak English but I have always thought we should pronounce 11 through 19 as tendy one, tendy two, tendy three, tendy four… tendy nine, twenty.