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> Every noun has a gender, and there is no sense or system in distribution; so the gender of each must be learned separately and by heart. There is no other way

> Every noun has a gender, and there is no sense or system in distribution; so the gender of each must be learned separately and by heart. There is no other way. To do this one has to have a memory like a memorandum-book. And yet, every German speaker seems to be able to remember this, without evidence of them being better at memorization than others? As usual, it's easy to forget how hard things are for others when you're the expert. I'm sure Twain never thought about how ridiculously hard many English words are to spell, and how people learning English as a second language struggle quite a lot with it. But the thing is, with practice, we do learn these things. With practice speaking German, you'll learn and remember the gender of each noun, it simply becomes part of the noun itself. And with practice writing English, you'll learn the spelling - illogical as it is, it simply becomes part of the word itself. But looking at my language, I'm not so sure how much of this is pure memory. Swedish, like all Scandinavian languages, has four genders for nouns, but only one of them stick out and modify words and sentences. Being a native speaker, I of course know the gender for each noun, and you could argue that I have memorized this. But I can also properly gender new words. I can gender words I've never heard before. I can construct new words, and gender them correctly as well, and have other Swedish speakers independently agree with me on what the gender of this new word is. So clearly there are rules, it's not the case that someone else decided the genders, and then everyone else had to memorize what this person arbitrarily chose. And I'm pretty sure German actually works the same way.

misja111 5y ago
Could you tell something or give a link about that Swedish fourth gender? You made me interested when you wrote about it but I can't find anything about it on the Internet. E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_in_Danish_and_Swedish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_in_Danish_and_Swedish mentions only 3 genders, and says that in modern Swedish two of those have merged so now there are only 2?
- henrikschroder 5y ago
  All four genders are listed on that page: masculine, feminine, common, neuter. The first three are grammatically identical, but the fourth one sticks out. In English, the indefinite article is either a/an, depending on the vowel sound of the noun. In Swedish it's either en/ett, depending on the gender. Examples: en mus - a mouse ett hus - a house But the grammatical gender carries and modifies more things like the definite article (den/det) and every adjective. den musen - that mouse det huset - that house en grå mus - a grey mouse ett grått hus - a grey house
- henrikschroder 5y ago
  Holy crap what a shit article, btw... > As a solution some feminists in Sweden have proposed to add a third class of gender-neutral pronouns for people. Uh, no, we borrowed it straight up from our neighbours in Finland, because Finnish doesn't have gendered third-person pronouns! As an added bonus, "hen" slots in perfectly among the other two pronouns (han/hon), it follows broad vowel rules for gender, and it's perfectly understandable even if you've never seen the word used before.
- usr1106 5y ago
  > so now there are only 2? Correct, there is only en-ord and ett-ord and it has been so for centuries. There are 3 personal pronouns (One of them less than 20 years old for politically correct language to describe either woman or man.) But grammatically all 3 cause declensions like en-ord, so they don't form a different grammatical gender.
kergonath 5y ago
> As usual, it's easy to forget how hard things are for others when you're the expert. I'm sure Twain never thought about how ridiculously hard many English words are to spell, and how people learning English as a second language struggle quite a lot with it. Exactly. You most often cannot guess the gender of a noun in quite a lot of languages (German, Spanish, French, etc), but most of the time you also cannot guess how an English word is pronounced without having heard it before (and made the connection with the spelling, which is sometimes very tricky).
- aspaviento 5y ago
  > You most often cannot guess the gender of a noun in quite a lot of languages That's far from true. In Spanish it's quite easy most of the time: Female form (-a): casa (House) taza (cup) armadura (armour) luna (moon) leona (lioness) escritora (female writer) Male form (-o/-or/-on): camión (truck) sillón (sofa) león (lion) escritor (male writer) You don't even need the article to guess which one is which one.
  - pezezin 5y ago
    It's not so clear and cut. For example, "acción" and any other noun that express the result of a verb ends in -ón, but they are female words. There are also plenty of male words that end in -a, and female words that end in -o: https://www.practicaespanol.com/mas-de-40-palabras-que-acaban-en-a-de-genero-masculino/ https://www.practicaespanol.com/mas-de-40-palabras-que-acaba...
    - flobosg 5y ago
      To add some female words ending in -o: - Female forms of occupations and roles, such as la modelo and la testigo - Shortened forms such as la foto - La mano - La líbido - La nao - La virago
merb 5y ago
> And yet, every German speaker seems to be able to remember this, without evidence of them being better at memorization than others? actually we don't the system is so stupid that we try to remove the gender altogether or try to make stupid words like "der Student"/"die Studentin" because Mark Twain tought it is only a linguistic gender, but unfortunatly a lot of people do not think that our gender is only linguistic, that's why we try to re-gender a lot of words. sometimes by splitting it into two, sometimes by using special characters. Our language reforms do not make it easier, they make it worse. to make it easy, for us we learn "der tisch" and not just "tisch" so the noun is learned aswell.
FabHK 5y ago
> I'm sure Twain never thought about how ridiculously hard many English words are to spell I'm sure Twain was well aware of it, and wrote the article on the awful German language tongue in cheek for amusement, rather than as an actual complaint.
bhaak 5y ago
This is Mark Twain. You can expect that he's writing tongue in cheek about things he likes. Look at this speech he gave in Vienna (apparently completely fluent in German). https://resources.german.lsa.umich.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/TwainSchrecken.pdf https://resources.german.lsa.umich.edu/wp-content/uploads/20... "I am indeed the truest friend of the German language - and not only now, but from long since - yes, before twenty years already. And never have I the desire had the noble language to hurt; to the contrary, only wished she to improve - I would her only reform. [...] After all these reforms established be will, will the German language the noblest and the prettiest on the world be." It would be very strange if he learned this language for his whole life and would despise it. But Mark Twain wouldn't be himself if he couldn't mock a thing he loved.
mejutoco 5y ago
You can very often guess the gender of a word in german using some heuristics. For instance, anything ending in -heit is feminine, and -chen neutral. I wrote an elaborate analysis os these heuristics (if someone is into this kind of thing) https://mejuto.co/statistical-grammar-guessing-a-german-nouns-gender/ https://mejuto.co/statistical-grammar-guessing-a-german-noun...
- zvr 5y ago
  Thanks for this link; it was very interesting! But you should take into account that some rules are more general expressions of others. For example, in your penultimate "(recommended)" table, there is no point in having both "-hen" and "-chen" for neutral, as the latter is a specialization of the former. Same for "-ung" and "-rung"/"-tung" in feminine.
  - mejutoco 5y ago
    Thanks! I will take a look. There is room for improvement with the repetitions, as you say.
- wink 5y ago
  But then you need people to grasp that the suffixes you present are suffixes and where to split the word Holzscheit, Lenkdrachen, ... ;)
  - mejutoco 5y ago
    That is a fine point :) It is never 100%, agree.
yongjik 5y ago
In fact, English does something very similar. There's a bookshelf, but never a furniture - you can say a piece of furniture if you want to be fancy. There's a cow, and cows, but never a cattle, or even cattles. (What do you mean they are uncountable. They are freaking cows.) Then there are crazy stuff like a pair of scissors. (I mean, has anyone seen a scissor?) Somehow native English speakers memorize all of this. At least genders are conceptually easy: given a word, you have one gender. (Though I'm sure there are complications.)
- mbg721 5y ago
  As Allan Sherman pointed out in "One Hippopotami", "What is half a pair of scissors?? It's a single scis!"
- MatmaRex 5y ago
  That's called plurale tantum, and it appears in many European languages, including German.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
benhurmarcel 5y ago
> But I can also properly gender new words. I can gender words I've never heard before. I can construct new words, and gender them correctly as well It's generally the case in French too, but there are cases for which people don't agree. A recent example is a nation-wide disagreement on whether to say "le" or "la" Covid.

misja111 5y ago

Could you tell something or give a link about that Swedish fourth gender? You made me interested when you wrote about it but I can't find anything about it on the Internet. E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_in_Danish_and_Swedish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_in_Danish_and_Swedish mentions only 3 genders, and says that in modern Swedish two of those have merged so now there are only 2?

henrikschroder 5y ago
All four genders are listed on that page: masculine, feminine, common, neuter. The first three are grammatically identical, but the fourth one sticks out. In English, the indefinite article is either a/an, depending on the vowel sound of the noun. In Swedish it's either en/ett, depending on the gender. Examples: en mus - a mouse ett hus - a house But the grammatical gender carries and modifies more things like the definite article (den/det) and every adjective. den musen - that mouse det huset - that house en grå mus - a grey mouse ett grått hus - a grey house
henrikschroder 5y ago
Holy crap what a shit article, btw... > As a solution some feminists in Sweden have proposed to add a third class of gender-neutral pronouns for people. Uh, no, we borrowed it straight up from our neighbours in Finland, because Finnish doesn't have gendered third-person pronouns! As an added bonus, "hen" slots in perfectly among the other two pronouns (han/hon), it follows broad vowel rules for gender, and it's perfectly understandable even if you've never seen the word used before.
usr1106 5y ago
> so now there are only 2? Correct, there is only en-ord and ett-ord and it has been so for centuries. There are 3 personal pronouns (One of them less than 20 years old for politically correct language to describe either woman or man.) But grammatically all 3 cause declensions like en-ord, so they don't form a different grammatical gender.

kergonath 5y ago

> As usual, it's easy to forget how hard things are for others when you're the expert. I'm sure Twain never thought about how ridiculously hard many English words are to spell, and how people learning English as a second language struggle quite a lot with it. Exactly. You most often cannot guess the gender of a noun in quite a lot of languages (German, Spanish, French, etc), but most of the time you also cannot guess how an English word is pronounced without having heard it before (and made the connection with the spelling, which is sometimes very tricky).

aspaviento 5y ago
> You most often cannot guess the gender of a noun in quite a lot of languages That's far from true. In Spanish it's quite easy most of the time: Female form (-a): casa (House) taza (cup) armadura (armour) luna (moon) leona (lioness) escritora (female writer) Male form (-o/-or/-on): camión (truck) sillón (sofa) león (lion) escritor (male writer) You don't even need the article to guess which one is which one.
- pezezin 5y ago
  It's not so clear and cut. For example, "acción" and any other noun that express the result of a verb ends in -ón, but they are female words. There are also plenty of male words that end in -a, and female words that end in -o: https://www.practicaespanol.com/mas-de-40-palabras-que-acaban-en-a-de-genero-masculino/ https://www.practicaespanol.com/mas-de-40-palabras-que-acaba...
  - flobosg 5y ago
    To add some female words ending in -o: - Female forms of occupations and roles, such as la modelo and la testigo - Shortened forms such as la foto - La mano - La líbido - La nao - La virago

merb 5y ago

> And yet, every German speaker seems to be able to remember this, without evidence of them being better at memorization than others? actually we don't the system is so stupid that we try to remove the gender altogether or try to make stupid words like "der Student"/"die Studentin" because Mark Twain tought it is only a linguistic gender, but unfortunatly a lot of people do not think that our gender is only linguistic, that's why we try to re-gender a lot of words. sometimes by splitting it into two, sometimes by using special characters. Our language reforms do not make it easier, they make it worse. to make it easy, for us we learn "der tisch" and not just "tisch" so the noun is learned aswell.

FabHK 5y ago

> I'm sure Twain never thought about how ridiculously hard many English words are to spell I'm sure Twain was well aware of it, and wrote the article on the awful German language tongue in cheek for amusement, rather than as an actual complaint.

bhaak 5y ago

This is Mark Twain. You can expect that he's writing tongue in cheek about things he likes. Look at this speech he gave in Vienna (apparently completely fluent in German). https://resources.german.lsa.umich.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/TwainSchrecken.pdf https://resources.german.lsa.umich.edu/wp-content/uploads/20... "I am indeed the truest friend of the German language - and not only now, but from long since - yes, before twenty years already. And never have I the desire had the noble language to hurt; to the contrary, only wished she to improve - I would her only reform. [...] After all these reforms established be will, will the German language the noblest and the prettiest on the world be." It would be very strange if he learned this language for his whole life and would despise it. But Mark Twain wouldn't be himself if he couldn't mock a thing he loved.

mejutoco 5y ago

You can very often guess the gender of a word in german using some heuristics. For instance, anything ending in -heit is feminine, and -chen neutral. I wrote an elaborate analysis os these heuristics (if someone is into this kind of thing) https://mejuto.co/statistical-grammar-guessing-a-german-nouns-gender/ https://mejuto.co/statistical-grammar-guessing-a-german-noun...

zvr 5y ago
Thanks for this link; it was very interesting! But you should take into account that some rules are more general expressions of others. For example, in your penultimate "(recommended)" table, there is no point in having both "-hen" and "-chen" for neutral, as the latter is a specialization of the former. Same for "-ung" and "-rung"/"-tung" in feminine.
- mejutoco 5y ago
  Thanks! I will take a look. There is room for improvement with the repetitions, as you say.
wink 5y ago
But then you need people to grasp that the suffixes you present are suffixes and where to split the word Holzscheit, Lenkdrachen, ... ;)
- mejutoco 5y ago
  That is a fine point :) It is never 100%, agree.

yongjik 5y ago

In fact, English does something very similar. There's a bookshelf, but never a furniture - you can say a piece of furniture if you want to be fancy. There's a cow, and cows, but never a cattle, or even cattles. (What do you mean they are uncountable. They are freaking cows.) Then there are crazy stuff like a pair of scissors. (I mean, has anyone seen a scissor?) Somehow native English speakers memorize all of this. At least genders are conceptually easy: given a word, you have one gender. (Though I'm sure there are complications.)

mbg721 5y ago
As Allan Sherman pointed out in "One Hippopotami", "What is half a pair of scissors?? It's a single scis!"
MatmaRex 5y ago
That's called plurale tantum, and it appears in many European languages, including German.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

benhurmarcel 5y ago

> But I can also properly gender new words. I can gender words I've never heard before. I can construct new words, and gender them correctly as well It's generally the case in French too, but there are cases for which people don't agree. A recent example is a nation-wide disagreement on whether to say "le" or "la" Covid.