English may be a hot mess but at least we don't have to worry about this nonsense

robocall@lemmy.world to Lemmy Shitpost@lemmy.world – 1098 points –
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Spanish speaker here. For as chaotic and wild as English is, I've always appreciated that it has no gendered nouns. Why are chairs female? Makes no sense

Maybe you are interested in Finnish. We do not have gendered pronouns either. Everyone is just "hän".

Hold my Duolingo owl, I'm gonna look up Finnish that sounds awesome

Can I keep it after that? I always wanted a pet.

Clearly, because chairs are obviously male (German). Anything else is just silly.

I'm sorry, French here, but a chair can be both. It depends of the type : Une chaise is obviously feminine while un siège or un fauteuil are definitely masculin. Also Germanic language like English and German mixing these two meaning are silly languages.

Why. Just why? It's just you French and your obsession for...

la silla vs el asiento (Spanish)

Fuck.

I think we just spotted a cultural fracture btw people of Romance language and the one of Germanic language.

Chairman, chairwoman, or chairperson?

Somone has to come up with the word chairdude. And some corporate bean counter will invent the word chairhuman to show how diverse they are.

Grammatical genders are just that. Grammatical. It's a classification scheme. Latin had neutral nouns and plenty of languages make grammatical differences between animate and inanimate nouns. That current romance languages make a deliberate division between "male" and "female" nouns does not mean they have to correspond to actual features of human beings.

That being said. It's ridiculous that agua is femenine but with the definite article it has to be el agua in singular but las aguas in plural. All the explanations by RAE simply amounts to "we like it this way, lolol".