• assembly@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    For all of the shit people talk about the English language, this is a big thing I appreciate about it. What the hell was the point of even gendering random things from the start? In German, the main gendering are die, der, and das with das being gender neutral. I would like to see a world where in scenarios like that they just move everything to das.

    • Hawke@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      I think it’s to make it less ambiguous.

      In English you just use the same word and figure it out from context. Someone else gave some other Spanish examples but I like “right” (direction) = “la derecha” vs “right” (human rights) = “los derechos”.

      Of course there’s still so many variants of meaning that grammatical gender doesn’t help much.

      • QuestionMark@lemmy.world
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        15 hours ago

        If you’re writing a poem in German, you can apparently switch the positions of the subject, object and indirect object without changing the meaning, since the gender and article of the word indicate whether it’s the subject (Nominativ), object (Akkusativ) or indirect object (Dativ). (e.g. subject: der Mann, object: den Mann, indirect object: dem Mann)