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I took a few semesters of Dutch in college, and it has both gendered and neuter nouns for non-human objects. Interestingly though, the professor told us that in
by saghm 6mo ago
I took a few semesters of Dutch in college, and it has both gendered and neuter nouns for non-human objects. Interestingly though, the professor told us that in the northern parts of the Netherlands people don't really bother using the feminine ones ever and refer to every non-human gendered noun as masculine, which apparently also includes animals, meaning that a sizable portion of Dutch speakers will refer to cows using masculine language.
- nothrabannosir 6mo agoBecause the article for masculine and feminine are the same (“de”) so absolutely nobody knows the gender of anything. Source: am Dutch. Can’t wait for us to just ditch gendered nouns.
- saghm 6mo agoDutch is one of the few languages where it's actually pretty plausible for something like this to happen! It blew my mind that sometimes you'll all (or I guess more specifically your government) will make changes to the language to clean up issues, but I guess that's one of the benefits to having a language that's mostly based in one country (and some seemingly political baggage for the few others with any significant number of speakers; my professor said that Flemish is basically also Dutch, but my naive impression is that the half of Belgium who speak it might not be happy with that description).