Doesn't French have 'la' and 'le' as well?
this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2023
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They should be non binary, like in the US.
How do gendered languages handle neologisms?
(this is a very difficult question to search btw)
At least for romance languages, there is a rhyme and reason for the gender each noun gets, so neologisms and borrowed words tend to follow the same logic.
For word morphology, as an example, in Portuguese nouns ending in a are almost always female, so new words that end with a are very likely to be female.
There are semantic rules too, for example brands and companies are typically (I want to say always but there's probably edge cases) female, so even though Netflix and Amazon didn't exist before they're still female.
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In slav languages, you just go with how the neologism sounds. "Computer" ends in hard r, so it's masculine, for example.
Every once in a while there's going to be shit like with "coffee" though. It sounds neutral-gendered and is officially neutral-gendered, but there's been a big period when people believed it should be masculine because of the source language or some shit. Still a lot of people arguing about it.
Native German speaker here but I also speak Spanish, Portuguese, French and Swedish. Each of these languages handles them differently so I am thinking there’s not a general answer here.
It also can depend within each language on some context. For example in German many neologisms are automatically neuter (das) unless they happen to resemble some common pattern. For example a lot of German words that end with an -e are feminine and sometimes that is applied to neologisms too.
Sometimes it changes. For example, Covid in French, everyone was using "le covid" (i guess cos it's a virus, and virus is a masculin word), but then I believe the French academy weighed in that it should be "la covid" because it's not the virus but the disease (la maladie) we're talking about. Anyway. Yeah other than the official sources, many of us peasants all still say Le covid because by the time they weighed in we were all saying Le and so now saying La sounds weird.
Washing machines have genders?
Where do you think new washing machines come from? The sturgeon brings them? Don't be ridiculous! They are far too heavy!
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Also in German, there's a neutral gender which applies to diminutive nouns ending in -chen, which means that men are male (Der Mann), women are female (Die Frau), boys are male (Der Junge) and girls are neutral (Das Mädchen). Which is fun to learn for the first time lol.
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Same as the dish washer.
Depends on which word you use. At least in German.
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