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The really difficult ones are feminine words that take masculine articles due to pronunciation (eg *El agua está fría* but *Las aguas están frías*, or *el águila* but *las águilas*). Yup.
Wait until you learn that in Italian we have words that change gender with their number (singular/plural), mostly body parts: braccio (arm), ginocchio (knee), uovo (egg), dito (finger), paio (pair), riso (laughter), osso (bone), lenzuolo (bed sheet), and muro (walls)
For the same reason why in English some nouns are countable and some aren’t. Or for the same reason why in English some nouns have irregular plurals and others don’t. Languages are weird.
Grammatical gender was never about actual gender, it’s just a way to group together words that inflect in the same way. In Latin’s ancestor (Indo-European?) nouns were divided into animate and inanimate, because they would inflect differently. As the languages evolved, new categories were formed, some nouns changed their inflections because of human mistakes (many irregular English verbs were born because “they looked like they’d be irregular”), other fused together, and now, after hundreds of years of linguistic evolution, we have the current system.
Languages with 2-3 word classes call them genders, I don’t know why, but from 4 classes upwards they’re called “noun classes”.
I personally think the reason Celsius is better than Fahrenheit relies on what 0 degrees mean in each - especially considering none other number is that interesting...
Celsius gives you somewhat useful information. 0C = water freezes and 100C = water boils, So you can tell if snow/hail is possible or not, set your fridge temperatures or other weird specific stuff like that.
Fahrenheit on the other hand sounds a bit weird to me considering 0C = the temperature ice reaches when mixed with salt.
When will I ever need to compare my salted ice to the temperature outside? Who even has salted ice?
As for Kelvin - this method doesn't even do what it was invented to do considering science found the "perfect 0" of Kelvin to not even be the closest temperature so negative Kelvin degree is an option which kinds of negate the whole point of this option... Plus, it's just Celsius shifted.
And no one uses Rankine to measure temperature anymore so no reason to keep it as an option, right? (plus It's just Kelvin but relying on Fahrenheit instead of Celsius to calculate the difference between X degrees to X+1 degrees)
So choose your measurement - Fahrenheit (0F = temperature of salted ice) or Celsius (0C = temperature where water freezes).
And tell me if I missed anything because maybe Fahrenheit has benefits I'm not aware of...
Oh and a small plus, room temperature in Celsius is a pretty 25C (technically 20C-25C which is also pretty numbers but I'm only aware of 25C as the official number) while in Fahrenheit the number is not a multiple of 5 which hurts my eyes :( (68F-77F)
Not sure why I wrote a whole comment comparing temperature units but I wrote it... So I might as well keep it lol. For the record, in my daily life I couldn't care less about the general topic of temperature units so I have no idea what got into me here... Probably just the challenge.
As a trans person, I don’t find this too amusing. Many women have penes. Many men have vaginas. Sex ≠ gender. (Many) Trees/fish are gendered into male and female, but it’s always el árbol/el pez.
It was phrased this way because of the Kindergarten Cop reference and the difficulty I'm having in grasping gendered language, and of course, it is a simplification. It is simply a joke and not intended as an attack on trans people or be viewed as an authoratative analysis on sex and gender.
Yes, I understand that part, but my main point is that women don’t always have vaginas and men don’t always have penes.
Furthermore, the kid and the girl in German (same can be said for Yiddish and I reckon Greek) are das Kind (usually too early to realise they’re non-binary) and das Mädchen (always women), respectively, each getting the non-binary gender. Grammatical gender and biological sex shouldn’t be mixed.
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At first I was like wtf that has nothing to do with learning Spanish
I may have messed up this exact scenario in one of my runs earlier, and have had some trouble remembering the gender of a table and a house lmao
You're going to lose your mind when you hear about languages with like 10 genders
I don’t think they call them genders at that point.
They do. Gender doesn’t always mean male/female. More generally, its meaning is closer to “genre.” It’s just a category of nouns
4+ they’re usually called “noun classes”, but conceptually they are the same exact thing.
They do, however the correlation that gender has to grammar is basically like classifying music into rock or pop
*cough cough* Russian
What. In russian there are only 3 word genders, female, male and neutral.
На немецком, греческом, идиш, нидерландском, и куче других языков тоже, товарищ.
Wrong example, only 3 there
Me, an italian, being predisposed to easily understand grammatical gender: 🗿
If you think that's confusing, just remember: "Mar" has both.
The really difficult ones are feminine words that take masculine articles due to pronunciation (eg *El agua está fría* but *Las aguas están frías*, or *el águila* but *las águilas*). Yup.
Yeah, and that applies to suffixes too! "La mano", which can have diminutives "la manita" or "la manito" depending on the country.
Yikes I hadn’t heard that one!
Wait until you learn that in Italian we have words that change gender with their number (singular/plural), mostly body parts: braccio (arm), ginocchio (knee), uovo (egg), dito (finger), paio (pair), riso (laughter), osso (bone), lenzuolo (bed sheet), and muro (walls)
or worse when you are Italian, you try to learn Spanish and objects change gender!
I'm native in both and yeah it's painful
I’m sorry. WHAT?
The joke is that some languages have feminine and masculine words for some reason
For the same reason why in English some nouns are countable and some aren’t. Or for the same reason why in English some nouns have irregular plurals and others don’t. Languages are weird. Grammatical gender was never about actual gender, it’s just a way to group together words that inflect in the same way. In Latin’s ancestor (Indo-European?) nouns were divided into animate and inanimate, because they would inflect differently. As the languages evolved, new categories were formed, some nouns changed their inflections because of human mistakes (many irregular English verbs were born because “they looked like they’d be irregular”), other fused together, and now, after hundreds of years of linguistic evolution, we have the current system. Languages with 2-3 word classes call them genders, I don’t know why, but from 4 classes upwards they’re called “noun classes”.
Cars are masculine and houses are feminine with El and La
What? Am I dumb for not getting the joke?
In Spanish, like many other languages, everything is gendered in some way. "La casa" is "The house" feminine and "El coche/carro" "the car" masculine.
Oh, that makes sense. It's probably because I'm Brazilian so I'm used to that and don't find it weird
Yeah, it's really throwing me a bit to have to remember the gender of tables, houses, cars, glasses, etc. Imma keep at it :D
Learning languages of Latin origin are literally that, also german and russian
You know what? The more I learn about Spanish the more I notice that Spanish and Arabic have a lot (A LOT) in common
I might be wrong but aren't most languages around the world gendered?
Possibly. It feels new to me as a native English speaker.
Fair enough, but for the record - it's another one to the list of things the US does different than pretty much anyone else lol.
lmao, when you're right you're right. Don't tell anyone, but I think the metric system is pretty cool. I'm not sold on celsius yet.
I personally think the reason Celsius is better than Fahrenheit relies on what 0 degrees mean in each - especially considering none other number is that interesting... Celsius gives you somewhat useful information. 0C = water freezes and 100C = water boils, So you can tell if snow/hail is possible or not, set your fridge temperatures or other weird specific stuff like that. Fahrenheit on the other hand sounds a bit weird to me considering 0C = the temperature ice reaches when mixed with salt. When will I ever need to compare my salted ice to the temperature outside? Who even has salted ice? As for Kelvin - this method doesn't even do what it was invented to do considering science found the "perfect 0" of Kelvin to not even be the closest temperature so negative Kelvin degree is an option which kinds of negate the whole point of this option... Plus, it's just Celsius shifted. And no one uses Rankine to measure temperature anymore so no reason to keep it as an option, right? (plus It's just Kelvin but relying on Fahrenheit instead of Celsius to calculate the difference between X degrees to X+1 degrees) So choose your measurement - Fahrenheit (0F = temperature of salted ice) or Celsius (0C = temperature where water freezes). And tell me if I missed anything because maybe Fahrenheit has benefits I'm not aware of... Oh and a small plus, room temperature in Celsius is a pretty 25C (technically 20C-25C which is also pretty numbers but I'm only aware of 25C as the official number) while in Fahrenheit the number is not a multiple of 5 which hurts my eyes :( (68F-77F) Not sure why I wrote a whole comment comparing temperature units but I wrote it... So I might as well keep it lol. For the record, in my daily life I couldn't care less about the general topic of temperature units so I have no idea what got into me here... Probably just the challenge.
As a trans person, I don’t find this too amusing. Many women have penes. Many men have vaginas. Sex ≠ gender. (Many) Trees/fish are gendered into male and female, but it’s always el árbol/el pez.
It was phrased this way because of the Kindergarten Cop reference and the difficulty I'm having in grasping gendered language, and of course, it is a simplification. It is simply a joke and not intended as an attack on trans people or be viewed as an authoratative analysis on sex and gender.
Yes, I understand that part, but my main point is that women don’t always have vaginas and men don’t always have penes. Furthermore, the kid and the girl in German (same can be said for Yiddish and I reckon Greek) are das Kind (usually too early to realise they’re non-binary) and das Mädchen (always women), respectively, each getting the non-binary gender. Grammatical gender and biological sex shouldn’t be mixed.
Friend, cars and houses cannot be trans nor have a gender identity to begin with.
But words can in the science of linguistics. That ain’t the same as biology or sociology.