Tfw the washing machine is gender fluid
English may be a hot mess but at least we don't have to worry about this nonsense
Submitted 8 months ago by robocall@lemmy.world to [deleted]
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/cbcdb078-ef68-4793-b477-5df67986f83d.webp
Comments
SubArcticTundra@lemmy.ml 8 months ago
I_Miss_Daniel@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I believe women sometimes use them to aid in the release of gender fluid.
Bunnylux@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I tried this it doesn’t work :(
mellowheat@suppo.fi 8 months ago
“Je voudrais un baguette” I once asked in a parisian boulangerie. I don’t think anyone has looked at me with the same level of disgust before as the older lady selling the breads.
“Voilà, une baguette.”, the “une” flying through me like an icicle.
Stamets@lemmy.world 8 months ago
“Stupid fucking foreigner thinking my bread has a dick…”
brbposting@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
Rodeo@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
Baguettes are distinctly penis shaped, so the French are just wrong about that.
azertyfun@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
Just wait to learn how we gender “dick” and “cunt” in French (hint: it’s not the way you’d think).
It’s the one thing people who aren’t fluent in a gendered language usually fail to grasp: Grammatical gender is in most situations completely separate from social gender. The grammatical gender in “une bite” has absolutely no social function and is not in any way contradictory to its traditionally opposite social gender.
Ironically it’s also why using the wrong grammatical gender feels so wrong/unnatural to a native speaker (not that it’s an excuse to be a dick to non-native speakers ofc): gender is not just “a social concept attached to a word”, it is an inherent property of the word that matters fundamentally to sentence structure and so misusing it throws everything off-balance.
Spoilt@jlai.lu 8 months ago
Does this means i’m gay ?
GreatAlbatross@feddit.uk 8 months ago
My solution is replacing all les/la/l’ with a vaguely sounding “ll” sound.
I get the odd scathing look.
And occasionally someone will stop the conversation, and ask me to use the correct word, fully away of the shit I’m trying to pull.
No_Change_Just_Money@feddit.de 8 months ago
Female, and I am sure there hides a boomer joke here
zaphod@feddit.de 8 months ago
I’m countering with a lave-linge which is masculine, now where’s the boomer joke?
Mr_Blott@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Me speaking to a French guy last week -
“We’ve just been the the musée de l’automobile in Mulhouse”
“Sorry, where?”
“Mulhouse”
“Where?”
“Mulhouse”
"Aaaaaah I see! It’s pronounced [pronounces Mulhouse *exactly the same FUCKING way I just pronounced it]
😂 Happens very regularly
tiredofsametab@kbin.run 8 months ago
Just because your ears can't hear a difference doesn't mean that there is none. I deal with this a lot when Japanese ask me for help and can't differentiate between certain sounds
force@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Yeah in Japanese a few consonant sounds like ‘r’ and ‘l’ sounds or ‘h’/‘f’ or ‘s’/‘th’ or ‘z’/‘ð’ are basically heard as the same (an American ‘r’ might even sound like a weird ‘w’ to Japanese), and English has around 17 to 24 distinctive vowel sounds generally (based on quality) while Japanese has 5 plus vowel length and tones (pitch accent). As a result of the phonetic differences between the languages, it can be hard to hear or recreate the differences in sound quality (especially when it’s Japanese on the speaking/listening end, but Americans also sure have a terrible time trying to make Japanese sounds like the “n” or “r” or “ch”/“j” or “sh”/“zh” or “f” or “u”. they just perceive it as the same as the closest sounds in English)
Ethalis@jlai.lu 8 months ago
No offense intended since I’m fully incapable of pronouncing tons of English words properly (fuck “squirrel” specifically), but as a Frenchman who has lived near Mulhouse for a few years and interacted with a lot of foreign students, what you said probably wasn’t close to being the exact same as that guy
kommerzbert@feddit.de 8 months ago
For all languages I have learned so far ‘squirrel’ is really hard to pronounce for non-native speakers.
English: squirrel
French: écureuil
And the germans kill it with: Eichhörnchen
GreatAlbatross@feddit.uk 8 months ago
If it makes you feel better, most Americans can’t pronounce squirrel either.
“Skwerl”
AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Ignore the letters in English, it helps just as much as ignoring the letters in French.
Squirrel is pronounced like skwir-rel.
chemicalwonka@discuss.tchncs.de 8 months ago
crying in German
GregorGizeh@lemmy.zip 8 months ago
Disclaimer: this is terrible advice if you are trying to actually learn the proper grammar, don’t follow it.
That being said, you can get by in everyday situations perfectly fine using “De” for anything, especially if you have a foreign accent people will forgive you.
De junge, de Mädchen, de Baby, de Tisch, de Stuhl, de Feuerzeuggas-Nachfüllkartusche. People will understand.
EunieIsTheBus@feddit.de 8 months ago
A washing machine is obviously female because doing laundry is a thing for women.
And now I will sit back and watch how many people get mad at me because they don’t understand sarcasm.
Goblin_Mode@ttrpg.network 8 months ago
And now I will sit back and watch how many people get mad at me because they don’t understand sarcasm.
Really getting worked up over that imaginary person you created huh? Lol
Konstant@lemmy.world 8 months ago
If he hadn’t point out the sarcasm, I’d say the odds were in his favor.
Taniwha420@lemmy.world 8 months ago
No. It’s feminine because you put dirty things in it.
Lemmygizer@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Not knowing anything about French, this was my assumption and reasoning.
WalrusDragonOnABike@reddthat.com 8 months ago
Is sarcasm male, female, neutral, or other?
uis@lemm.ee 8 months ago
Not sarcasm: washing machien is female in Russian.
Dasus@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Due to the increased acceptance of non-conforming identities, it’s become more prevalent to either ask for pronouns, tell them to a person you meet, or have them somewhere visible in things like gameshows.
That’s quite as silly to me as this whole “what gender is this washing machine” nonsense is to English-speaking people.
Here in Finland, we don’t have gendered language. Even with third person pronouns, we usually default to “it” instead of “him/her/they”. Except for pets. They always get the proper pronoun “hän”. It’s just respectful.
So yeah, just like the English wonder why they have to learn different words for something needlessly gendered in France, I too, as a Finn, wonder why I have to learn different words for something needlessly gendered in English.
groats_survivor@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Right or wrong, calling a person “it” in English is incredibly disrespectful
Verat@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
I think they maybe meant the gender neutral they/them, which we turn to “it” for the inanimate?
hOrni@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Polish speaker here. We not only have gendered nouns but also verbs and adjectives.
BambiDiego@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Spanish speaker here. For as chaotic and wild as English is, I’ve always appreciated that it has no gendered nouns. Why are chairs female? Makes no sense
TheCheddarCheese@lemmy.world 8 months ago
polish speaker too, polish is weird smh
Dasnap@lemmy.world 8 months ago
What exactly does gender achieve in a language? Is English missing out on any nuance? Is it literally thinking about nouns as male or female, or is it just a weird name for the concept? Who decides gender when a new noun is made? What about borrowed words from other languages? Do you sound stupid if you speak French without using it?
Language, dude…
vsis@feddit.cl 8 months ago
I’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.
thisisbutaname@discuss.tchncs.de 8 months ago
Speaking as a gendered language user (Italian) it is sometimes weird.
For example, car is feminine but our name for an off-road vehicle is masculine, as is the word for truck. Since you have to apply the gender of the noun to verbs, articles and adjectives, which one do you use when talking about your SUV? Feminine because it’s a car or masculine because it’s an offroader?
For borrowed words there’s usually a consensus on gender that forms over time. Sometimes a borrowed word inherits its gender from the translation of that word that fell out of use. One example of this could be the word computer. An equivalent term exists in Italian (calcolatore) which fell out of use but gave it a definite gender, masculine.
uis@lemm.ee 8 months ago
For example, car is feminine
Thet’s why fuck cars
amio@kbin.social 8 months ago
What exactly does gender achieve in a language? Is English missing out on any nuance?
Sort of. Grammatical gender and the interplay with grammatical case (the "role" of a noun in a sentence) allows some extra meaning to be packed in. For example, German has 3 genders and 4 cases leading to 12 different contexts for nouns to be in. Many of those have their own conjugation patterns, and separate words for the articles "a/the".
That can, theoretically, allow meaning of the type "whose what did what to whom" to be obvious or pieced together in a sentence, whereas translating it into English you might need to spell it out, lose it, or rely on context.In practice, a lot of that sort of information is often redundant or clear from context anyway, and only matters if you're being clever or succinct. My German is shit, so I will not try to provide examples.
It's also worth pointing out that it's a naturally occurring feature, likely arisen by accident.
Is it literally thinking about nouns as male or female, or is it just a weird name for the concept?
It is mostly just a weird name. Some of it makes sense along (social) gender lines, much of it makes no sense at all. This thread is full of good examples of counterintuitive noun genders in all kinds of languages.
Who decides gender when a new noun is made? What about borrowed words from other languages?
The speakers of the language, collectively, usually with some disagreement, trial and error. Borrowing depends: a gendered noun borrowed into a non-gendered language would just slip in there. In the reverse case, people would just arrive at some gender for it arbitrarily or based on similar words, what gender any "parts" of the term might be if translated, or whatever other method. There's no correct answer.
Do you sound stupid if you speak French without using it, or are you just a language hipster?
Quite likely. There's no "without it" in gendered languages, it is a more or less fundamental part of the noun and the language, like how certain nouns and verbs are just different in English. Dropping random grammar and syntax from English would just be "doing it wrong", ranging from cute foreign accent quirks to Ralph Wiggum's cave-dwelling ancestor.
Of course, fucking up is unavoidable when learning languages, and most people will give you a lot of leeway due to being foreign. Maybe not everywhere in France, though...
force@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Russian speakers might say the same thing about things that exist in English but not Russian like articles (the words “a”/“an” and “the”), Afrikaans speakers may say the same thing about verb conjugation at all, Chinese speakers may say the same thing about tense, Japanese speakers may say the same thing about having a separate present & future tense. There is a good explanation here or two already, but language features that seem “useless” or “complex” to us are important in other languages and are there for a purpose. Every language has features that would make others question it.
chiwiu@lemmy.world 8 months ago
You sound odd, like a child or someone not fluent if you don’t use our misuse the genders of words.
That being said, as native Spanish that lived in the UK for a while, I noticed that genders and verb forms are useful for providing more context when talking.
Cannot think of specific examples now, but in general in a phrase if you don’t hear a word or don’t know the meaning, it is easier to guess it because the rest of the phrase is constructed around the gender and more complex verbal forms.
JeyNessuno@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 months ago
You can’t speak french without using it, because the gender of a word changes the gender of particles attached. Think as if in English there was a male “the” and a female “the”, like “mthe” and “fthe”. You can’t just not choose on of those to talk about fthe sun!
Gender in nouns exists to reduce ambiguity (in general, complexity reduces ambiguity), especially in times before widespread dictionaries or even the internet.
More ancient languages with more widespread use tend to be even more complex: think of latin, where particles are inserted within the word depending on their function in the phrase. It’s as if in English to say “I go to work” we’d say “I go workt”, but to say “this is for work” we’d say “this is workf” Again, more complex to be less ambiguous
joel_feila@lemmy.world 8 months ago
on borrowing we can look at nouns borrowed into Spanish. They take the word change any sounds in native language to match Spanish sounds. Then they just slap on a gender ending. Yes it just what ever catches on. Which means we could have lived in world with potata.
Dasnap@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Crass_Spektakel@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Enter German and Gendering: You can not say Programmer to address all Programmers in the room. You have to call them Programmerin und Programmer or Programmer:in or Programmende. And yes, most of these words aren’t even German but if you don’t use them you are a Grammar Nazi.
merdaverse@lemmy.world 8 months ago
While gendered nouns are stupid, I at least appreciate Italian because you can just learn the word and get its gender from the end part of the word. In German, however, it’s completely random and you have to learn the gender with the word.
JusticeForPorygon@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Germany has three genders lmao
sebinspace@lemmy.world 8 months ago
die das der
reverendsteveii@lemm.ee 8 months ago
intentionally misreading as wholesome - the idea is to subvert the concept of gender.
“You’ll never be a real woman!”
“Neither will the chair I’m sitting in but you keep calling it ‘her’ so maybe stfu.”
vsis@feddit.cl 8 months ago
Spanish enters the room: words have gender, but there are special cases where the definite article switches gender.
“El hacha roja/Las hachas rojas”, “El agua fría/Las aguas frías”
Also, some words may have both genders:
“El computador/La computadora”
Lath@kbin.social 8 months ago
Romance fans will tell you the French language is the adoration of beauty.
The British will tell you that the french taste for beauty is the same as their taste for cheese: it stinks.jyte@lemmy.world 8 months ago
It’s a she, because that’s a woman job. Same goes for dish washer !
Tukma@lemmy.cafe 8 months ago
I don’t know about French, but in Spanish is feminine.
summerof69@lemm.ee 8 months ago
English is incredibly easy. My mother tongue is Russian and I’m learning German, both have genders… which are quite often different. That makes things even harder :D
Kolanaki@yiffit.net 8 months ago
“Spell ‘colonel.’ Remember to sound it out.”
ImplyingImplications@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
If it ends with an ‘e’ it’s probably feminine. Moustache is feminine. There’s a handful of exceptions that are easy to remember
TheControlled@lemmy.world 8 months ago
The baguette, croissant, and beret are killing me.
Toes@ani.social 8 months ago
Someone once told me everything is feminine unless it has something to do with power or industry.
aggelalex@lemmy.world 8 months ago
It’s neuter in greek, even though “machine” is feminine, cause the greek word is like “washer” instead of “washing machine”. Although I think you have better things to ponder about when writing greek.
Maultasche@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Me as a German wondering if it’s the same or different than in my language.
Jake_Farm@sopuli.xyz 8 months ago
Most of the issues English has were inherited from French.
TheCheddarCheese@lemmy.world 8 months ago
We also don’t have 13 different words for I (glances at Japan)
r00ty@kbin.life 8 months ago
I'd argue though that it's ultimately similar levels of complexity. Because sure in romance languages you need to know (and probably just "get" what gender objects are. But in English you need to remember/just "get" which words have "i before e" (because the "rule" is utter trash), and all the inconsistent pronunciation of similarly spelt words.
Most European languages with accented vowels (and some with accented other letters too) have a pretty consistent pronunciation (when the accented letters are used).
TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Just wait until you look into French numbers.
Frozzie@lemmy.world 8 months ago
You know everytime your mention French number, there is always belgian or Swiss who will tell you :
🇧🇪🇨🇭: 90+7
☝️🤓
darkmogool@feddit.de 8 months ago
please… french swiss…
problematicPanther@lemmy.world 8 months ago
what the actual fuck is wrong with you, denmark?
FiskFisk33@startrek.website 8 months ago
…whats not?
Moghul@lemmy.world 8 months ago
While learning Danish I figured out that’s just the arcane incantation for the number. It’s language juju, and you just have to know that it be like it do. Yes, it’s syv og halvfems, but the reason behind it doesn’t matter anymore. The rest of the double digit numbers are a mess as well; 30 is tredive (three tens in old norse) but starting with 50 it’s this weird score (20) and half-to-score system.
isthingoneventhis@lemmy.world 8 months ago
When I first started learning my brain was desperately trying to make heads or tails of it and rationalize it somehow. And then I realized that was stupid, abandoned reason, and now I just utter these backwards ass numbers and we all nod and everyone is happy lol. Language is weird.
casmael@lemm.ee 8 months ago
youtu.be/s-mOy8VUEBk?si=1dudvGSjUd9VI11D
🇩🇰🫡
It’s not easy running an isenkramstornunung when nobody remembers what anything is called
quilan@lemmy.world 8 months ago
An absolute classic that I watch every single time. Kamelåså!
MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
I can’t stop giggling about the Danish way of saying that. Like, I don’t even understand how that’s 90? LMAO.
gmtom@lemmy.world 8 months ago
That’s not real. I refuse to believe that.
nilaus@lemmy.world 8 months ago
It is, but we just say seven and half fives these days. Everybody knows the twenty are implied…
Kusimulkku@lemm.ee 8 months ago
I think Finnish would be
🇫🇮: 9•10+7
Nine-tenths seven
KoalaUnknown@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Same for Japanese
🇯🇵: 9•10+7
kyuu juu nana 九十七
Raikin@feddit.de 8 months ago
Btw french Switzerland just uses 90+7 as well, so anyone who learns french, just tell them you’re learning Swiss French.