Comment on English may be a hot mess but at least we don't have to worry about this nonsense
vsis@feddit.cl 8 months agoI’m not an expert. But I believe it is something to do with information redundancy.
If you mishear a word but surrounding words must match gender and number, you may reconstruct the misheard word.
As a native spanish speaker, I don’t think of the actual sexuality of objects, it’s just a characteristic of the word that should match other words in the sentence. For example the word screen (pantalla) is femenine, and the word monitor (monitor) is masculine. So when I see my monitor I don’t think of an actual female or male object. But the nouns should match adjectives gender, so if someone says “broken monitor” (monitor roto) or “broken screen” (pantalla rota) I have this kind of redundancy if a misheard a word.
But I’m not an expert of linguistics. Don’t quote me.
Starbuck@lemmy.world 8 months ago
This sounds right. I think it’s just a hint for listeners for what the noun might be, and it happens to align to the male/female genders.