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> even if I know the very word I want to utter The gender is part of the word. If you don’t know the gender, then no, you don’t know the word. There is no way
by School-Cotton 1y ago
> even if I know the very word I want to utter
The gender is part of the word. If you don’t know the gender, then no, you don’t know the word.
There is no way to compute that “dog” begins with the letter “d”, even if you know that the remainder is “og”. So should we ban words that begin with “d”? Of course not. In German you must memorize “der Hund”, not just “Hund”, just like in English you must memorize “dog”, not “_og with unspecified first letter”.
- penguin_booze 1y agoThe spelling of the word, and its assigned gender, are two different things. Spelling makes you recognize the word. Gender doesn't contribute anything to semantics, is my point. It's not also the case that 'der' is merely a 3-letter prefix to any or every other word. It is rather irregularly applied, completely unrelated to the function the word serves. Not only that, the entire sentence has to be phrased differently depending on what the gender is. So, no: gender is not just longer spelling. Gender exists even if you decide not to write down the word.