• BambiDiego@lemmy.world
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    9 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

      • pseudo@jlai.lu
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        9 months ago

        I’m sorry, French here, but a chair can be both. It depends of the type : Une chaise is obviously feminine while un siège or un fauteuil are definitely masculin. Also Germanic language like English and German mixing these two meaning are silly languages.

        • neutron@thelemmy.club
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          9 months ago

          Why. Just why? It’s just you French and your obsession for…

          la silla vs el asiento (Spanish)

          Fuck.

          • pseudo@jlai.lu
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            9 months ago

            I think we just spotted a cultural fracture btw people of Romance language and the one of Germanic language.

    • neutron@thelemmy.club
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      9 months ago

      Grammatical genders are just that. Grammatical. It’s a classification scheme. Latin had neutral nouns and plenty of languages make grammatical differences between animate and inanimate nouns. That current romance languages make a deliberate division between “male” and “female” nouns does not mean they have to correspond to actual features of human beings.

      That being said. It’s ridiculous that agua is femenine but with the definite article it has to be el agua in singular but las aguas in plural. All the explanations by RAE simply amounts to “we like it this way, lolol”.