[Multilingual Monday] Grammatical Gender

[aadroma]

Today the topic is grammatical gender. If you've ever studied a language like German, Russian, or Spanish, you know about grammatical gender. While, in English, we think of everything as "it" except for living beings (which then become "he" or "she"), in several languages like Spanish your only choices are é and ella, or "he" and "she". This

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[muckefuck]

German gets a bad rap for the whole Mädchen thing, but actually this is one of the few truly consistent gender rules of the language: All diminutives formed with -chen or -lein (and their dialectal variants like -ke and -li) are grammatically neuter. In fact, I joke with learners that if gender causes them headaches, the easiest solution is to make everything diminutive. So the real question isn't "Why are Mädchen neuter?" but "Why aren't young boys Knäblein?"

Moreover, German isn't the only language to do this. Irish has two common diminutive endings, -óg, which is always feminine, and -ín, which is always masculine. But only the latter is productive. So this means that cailín "girl" (source of the name "Colleen") has the same problems as Mädchen. Of course, referring back to a woman with a masculine bzw. neuter pronoun causes too much cognitive dissonance for modern speakers so they always substitute feminines, e.g. "Is í an cailín is cliste sa rang í" ("She's the cleverest girl in the class"), where strictly speaking the pronoun should be é rather than í.

[aadroma]

The Irish example reminds me of one of the grammatical rules of Swedish, which is that traditionally groups of mixed gender people or people of unknown gender are labeled as FEMININE, as opposed to masculine in many other languages.

Thus you get Den tidiga människan och hennes verktyg, "The Early Man and HER Tools".

[gorkabear]

Hey
English calls "it" to babies, whereas we distinguish their gender/sex from the moment they're born (tradition includes puncturing girls' ears also)