> [0] Yeah, in Dutch, there are two articles: "de" which is gendered, and "het" which isn't. Compare to French "le" and "la", which are both gendered, one male

> [0] Yeah, in Dutch, there are two articles: "de" which is gendered, and "het" which isn't. Compare to French "le" and "la", which are both gendered, one male and one female, and there's no neural article. In Dutch there is, but the gendered article doesn't care whether it's male or female; it works for both and doesn't actually care about gender, just that it's there. So it's gendered in a neutral way. Wrap your head around that. That's a curious way to present it. "het" is gendered, it corresponds to the neuter gender. There is nothing neutral about it, that's just a (bad) name. In Russian for example, they call it the middle gender. Dutch nouns take one of two genders (three in some Belgian dialects), just like in French. Both Latin and Proto-Germanic had three genders, which correspond to what we would now call male, female and neuter. Over the span of centuries Latin merged male and neuter into one, leaving French with male/female, whereas in the Germanic languages usually male and female merged into a common gender, leaving common/neuter. But apart from that, it's exactly the same phenomenon.