Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Please don't post about US Politics. If you need to do this, try [email protected]
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected].
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
It's kinda weird because you somehow intuitively know which gender it's gonna be, it's got to have some pattern to it in some way. I think it comes down to sounds, "la/une table" vs "le/un table", "le/un bureau" vs "la/une bureau". Except when we decide fuck it we'll just say "l'amour", "l'argent" so it's like, only tangible things can be gendered but also intangible things inherently sound weird if you do try to slap a "le/un" or "la/une" before it, so like the whole sound of the word somewhat carries its gender? Things in "-ette" are pretty much always female.
The more you think about it the weirder it gets with exceptions and edge cases.
Thinking about it, it sounds about right. If I were to name a thing, I'd probably just pick what sounds best kinda like you'd name a pet or baby except you're not constrained to a gender.
I'd definitely enjoy a good read on how the fuck we ended up there. It seems to affect most romance languages so it's gotta go way back. I think the genders are mostly matched with spanish too, like, tables are also female in spanish iirc.