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> Grammatically, it is the same. Grammatical gender does not refer to biological sex, but rather a categorization system of nouns and their associated inflectio
by ACow_Adonis 6y ago
> Grammatically, it is the same. Grammatical gender does not refer to biological sex, but rather a categorization system of nouns and their associated inflection patterns.
Funny story: I've always remembered my german teacher getting flaberghasted at our inability to gender a table (as english speakers).
She was all: "Come on! what kind of qualities do you think a table has!"
And us high-schooler english speakers were just sitting there all :|
- DavidSJ 6y agoTeaching a foreigner one's native language is one of those situations where completely arbitrary conventions (including, by the way, how to segment and classify phonemes!) can misleadingly seem like "obvious" facts, and like the foreigner is just being weirdly obtuse by not having a built-in intuition for those arbitrary conventions.
- ddalex 6y agoFunny, in German a "table" is masculine (der tisch) but in Romanian (romance language) is feminine (o masa), in Spanish is feminine (la mesa), Italian is masculine (il tavolo) unless you talk about having a supper (la tavola). What I'm trying to say is that logic has nothing to do with it.