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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 t

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.

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.