• thisisbutaname@discuss.tchncs.de
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    9 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.