3 ms·
The point is: grammatical gender (noun classes) are arbitrary. Even though a girl is a person the gender of a girl (das Mädchen) is neuter in German. You need
by brettp 2y ago
The point is: grammatical gender (noun classes) are arbitrary.
Even though a girl is a person the gender of a girl (das Mädchen) is neuter in German. You need to know that grammatical gender to form a grammatically correct sentence - you do in fact need to say "it" ("er") in your sentence referring to the girl you met yesterday.
A girl is person and a burger isn't, but in German a girl is an "it" and a burger is a "he".
- thaumasiotes 2y agoNoun classes aren't arbitrary in general. Conflation of random objects with male and female life forms is arbitrary. But it's more arbitrary than is typical for noun classes. Taking sex-based gender distinctions for our example, we can observe that Chinese speakers aren't able to correctly choose between the English pronouns he and she, despite the fact that this distinction isn't arbitrary in the slightest (and Chinese speakers routinely make it themselves in other contexts!). The reason is simply that their native language doesn't make the distinction, not that the distinction is theoretically difficult to make.