4 ms·
Exactly. Language like Italian, French, German (and more) assign a "gender" to any word. "Chair" is female in Italian, male in Germsn (iirc). And articles like
by Pamar 3y ago
Exactly. Language like Italian, French, German (and more) assign a "gender" to any word. "Chair" is female in Italian, male in Germsn (iirc).
And articles like a, the, this, that have slightly different forms for male and female (German also has "neuter").
Articles also have to match the gender of the word: "la sedia rossa" (the red chair in Italian) vs "il divano rosso" (the red couch).
English has "gendered" words in rare, exceptional cases (master/mistress?) but for Latin-based languages it is the opposite.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Zak 3y agoEnglish has several of them for professions, e.g. waiter/waitress, aviator/aviatrix, actor/actress, but in modern English the masculine is always treated as neuter/generic. If I post an ad hiring an aviator, nobody would think that means means only men can apply either grammatically or factually, nor is anyone likely to correct me if I describe Natalie Portman as an actor instead of actress. German can be weird in that the grammatical gender of a word doesn't always match the sex or gender of the person it describes. The most famous example is probably that das Mädchen (the girl) is grammatically neuter but unambiguously describes a female person. Nouns describing professions, however usually (always?) have a masculine and a feminine form and do describe the sex or gender of the person. An ad hiring a Fahrer would have the same meaning as "male driver" in English. That would be illegal sex discrimination in the USA or Germany. The linked ad also included the following text, which has no connection to reality for the English translation: > Note: In order to improve the readability of the text, the masculine form is used to refer to persons, functions, etc. However, it stands for all genders without exception.