You know what’s worse? When the language has a neutral gender, but it’s not actually used for most objects, thus effectively just making it more likely to pick the wrong one when you’re guessing! And it’s full-on clown show when the native speakers don’t even agree on the gender.
I am from a bilingual region where some words are the same but have different genders. And I ended up learning a language where there is a neutral gender but it’s made by combining the male and female forms in singular and plural forms, so you can’t even tell what gender a word uses just by looking at it, you just have to know.
Isn’t grammatical gender fun? Got even more fun when trendy progressives saw anglophones argue about gender-neutrality for people and decided to apply it to grammatical gender, which really doesn’t work nearly as well in languages that use it and ended up being one of many self-inflicted defeats in the culture wars (yes, much more than neutral pronouns in English, because those are actually useful and fit the language well).
You know what’s worse? When the language has a neutral gender, but it’s not actually used for most objects, thus effectively just making it more likely to pick the wrong one when you’re guessing! And it’s full-on clown show when the native speakers don’t even agree on the gender.
I am from a bilingual region where some words are the same but have different genders. And I ended up learning a language where there is a neutral gender but it’s made by combining the male and female forms in singular and plural forms, so you can’t even tell what gender a word uses just by looking at it, you just have to know.
Isn’t grammatical gender fun? Got even more fun when trendy progressives saw anglophones argue about gender-neutrality for people and decided to apply it to grammatical gender, which really doesn’t work nearly as well in languages that use it and ended up being one of many self-inflicted defeats in the culture wars (yes, much more than neutral pronouns in English, because those are actually useful and fit the language well).
Washing machine could be both male and female in my language. And yes we have neutral.