thereās a cheat code called ānot giving a fuckā where you just say ādieā or ādasā for every word, and natives will just cringe slightly and then forget about it
Afrikaans (one of my mother tongues) uses ādieā for everything. The first time my (German speaking) partner overheard me saying ādie manā he was so freaked out š He still canāt deal with it, itās just too wrong for his brain.
tbf i empathize, sweden has remnant gendering and hearing someone use the wrong suffix makes me barely able to parse it as the same word
hell in some cases it literally just ends up being a different word, āthe tableā is ābordetā but āthe tablesā is ābordenā, while āthe chairā is āstolenā
itāll be interesting to see if this changes in the future, considering we have a significant diaspora of middle-eastern immigrants who just give up and use ā-etā for everything.
youāre forgetting to mention the best part about swedish grammatical gender: since itās all vestigial there are no rules left for which word gets what. the words are not gendered, but the suffixes are.
in languages with grammatical gender, the gender is affixed to the noun, and that affects how the word is used (think der/die/das, or the endings of words in french). in languages without, like english, thereās usually just one way to modify a noun (the table). swedish has somehaw ended up with the worst of both words, where we have multiple ways to modify nouns but no gender affixed to them. or rather, we have two; ācommonā, and ānoneā. we used to have a system like in german, but it all sort of collapsed in on itself and nouns basically sorted themselves into the two current categories at random depending on dialects and stuff.
but it all sort of collapsed in on itself and nouns basically sorted themselves into the two current categories at random depending on dialects and stuff.
Thatās how it started out in the first place! Indo-European noun classes donāt really have anything to do with gender, there just happens to be three and the words for āmanā, āwomanā, and āthingā are in distinct classes, so thatās what the classes get referred by. Otherwise itās semi-random, that is, by phonology. Unless people disagree (itās die Nutella btw).
Classes are useful because they allow for concord between nouns and other parts of speech. The German the sentence āHe holds a pen (Stift) and a bag (TĆ¼te) and puts him on the tableā unambiguously tells you that itās the pen which is put on the table: Bag makes no sense because itās feminine. There are rules as to how words are distributed into classes but no native speaker will be able to explain them short of the dead obvious. Not part of native-level German lessons, thatās literature and grammar analysis, not phonetics. Romanes ite domum.
swedish never teaches word classes because a) the difference between neutrum and utrum is very hard to explain and b) nothing is consistent because we used to have three grammatical genders (four sometimes apparently) and none of them persist today, except sometimes.
like, itās pretty common knowledge that in swedish, āclockā is female (vad Ƥr klockan? hon Ƥr halv tre) but thereās no longer a rule that says it is because nouns arenāt gendered since a language reform in like the 1800sā¦
Speaking of clocks, let me congratulate you on being one of the Germanic languages where āclockā and ābellā are the same word, as is proper.
In Low Saxon nobody really knows the gender of anything any more because gender markers are basically extinct, noun gender is ever so subtly different from Standard German, and native proficiency jumped a generation. Iād really rather mark the objective case everywhere than make a distinction that only masculine nouns are marked. Having a similar evolutionary trajectory as English is all fine and good, theyāre closely related languages, but forgetting about āwhomā? Gods no.
Been living in Sweden for 9 years (though I donāt speak Swedish at work nor at home, so Iām not fluent). You can fucking use hon for klockan? Youāre kidding right? This is the first time I hear about this. I guess I would have used ādenā?
I suspect thatās what happened with Afrikaans. The Dutch colonialists mixed with English and native speakers, leaving a language derived from Dutch but without gendered nouns, a different accent, and many foreign words integrated.
Thatās weird, Germans have usually heard Dutch before which also uses āDeā for most things (except randomly some words still have vestigal neuter article āhetā), same in plattdeutsch in their own damn country (they have ādatā for neuter).
The word āthatā is either ādassā when used as a conjunctive, or gendered when used as an adjective, adverb or pronoun. So depending on the part of speech and case, āthat manā could be translated as āder Mannā, ādieser Mannā, āder daā, ādenā, āwelcherā, or ājenerā.
Die is also the plural form, so they will say ādie MƤnnerā, but never ādie Mannā singular.
Iām talking about Dutch, sorry for being unclear, I thought āmanā rather than āMannā would make it clear. Iām just saying the phonetic sequence ādie manā is something many Germans will have heard before from nearby and related languages. I understand that it could be surprising the first time.
Iām a native Dutch speaker and have a German partner and live in a German speaking country (although my standard German isnāt amazing, B1-2ish) so Iām not totally ignorant of the parts of speech in Germanic languages.
Ah, that makes sense. Apologies for the grammar lesson :)
We donāt travel to the Netherlands or Belgium all that often, and when we do everyone speaks English to us, whereas my mom just visited us for a month, so ĀÆ_(ć)_/ĀÆ
Nah youāre good, hopefully other people reading will find it interesting. Youāre right, English usually works better across that border, unless they speak Platte in which case it can be a tossup if someone doesnāt have great English.
thereās a cheat code called ānot giving a fuckā where you just say ādieā or ādasā for every word, and natives will just cringe slightly and then forget about it
Afrikaans (one of my mother tongues) uses ādieā for everything. The first time my (German speaking) partner overheard me saying ādie manā he was so freaked out š He still canāt deal with it, itās just too wrong for his brain.
tbf i empathize, sweden has remnant gendering and hearing someone use the wrong suffix makes me barely able to parse it as the same word
hell in some cases it literally just ends up being a different word, āthe tableā is ābordetā but āthe tablesā is ābordenā, while āthe chairā is āstolenā
itāll be interesting to see if this changes in the future, considering we have a significant diaspora of middle-eastern immigrants who just give up and use ā-etā for everything.
youāre forgetting to mention the best part about swedish grammatical gender: since itās all vestigial there are no rules left for which word gets what. the words are not gendered, but the suffixes are.
hm, isnāt that just how all grammatical gender works?
in languages with grammatical gender, the gender is affixed to the noun, and that affects how the word is used (think der/die/das, or the endings of words in french). in languages without, like english, thereās usually just one way to modify a noun (the table). swedish has somehaw ended up with the worst of both words, where we have multiple ways to modify nouns but no gender affixed to them. or rather, we have two; ācommonā, and ānoneā. we used to have a system like in german, but it all sort of collapsed in on itself and nouns basically sorted themselves into the two current categories at random depending on dialects and stuff.
Thatās how it started out in the first place! Indo-European noun classes donāt really have anything to do with gender, there just happens to be three and the words for āmanā, āwomanā, and āthingā are in distinct classes, so thatās what the classes get referred by. Otherwise itās semi-random, that is, by phonology. Unless people disagree (itās die Nutella btw).
Classes are useful because they allow for concord between nouns and other parts of speech. The German the sentence āHe holds a pen (Stift) and a bag (TĆ¼te) and puts him on the tableā unambiguously tells you that itās the pen which is put on the table: Bag makes no sense because itās feminine. There are rules as to how words are distributed into classes but no native speaker will be able to explain them short of the dead obvious. Not part of native-level German lessons, thatās literature and grammar analysis, not phonetics. Romanes ite domum.
swedish never teaches word classes because a) the difference between neutrum and utrum is very hard to explain and b) nothing is consistent because we used to have three grammatical genders (four sometimes apparently) and none of them persist today, except sometimes.
like, itās pretty common knowledge that in swedish, āclockā is female (vad Ƥr klockan? hon Ƥr halv tre) but thereās no longer a rule that says it is because nouns arenāt gendered since a language reform in like the 1800sā¦
Speaking of clocks, let me congratulate you on being one of the Germanic languages where āclockā and ābellā are the same word, as is proper.
In Low Saxon nobody really knows the gender of anything any more because gender markers are basically extinct, noun gender is ever so subtly different from Standard German, and native proficiency jumped a generation. Iād really rather mark the objective case everywhere than make a distinction that only masculine nouns are marked. Having a similar evolutionary trajectory as English is all fine and good, theyāre closely related languages, but forgetting about āwhomā? Gods no.
Been living in Sweden for 9 years (though I donāt speak Swedish at work nor at home, so Iām not fluent). You can fucking use hon for klockan? Youāre kidding right? This is the first time I hear about this. I guess I would have used ādenā?
I suspect thatās what happened with Afrikaans. The Dutch colonialists mixed with English and native speakers, leaving a language derived from Dutch but without gendered nouns, a different accent, and many foreign words integrated.
Das MƤdchen und das Weib haben kein Mitleid fĆ¼r die man
Stimmt
Thatās weird, Germans have usually heard Dutch before which also uses āDeā for most things (except randomly some words still have vestigal neuter article āhetā), same in plattdeutsch in their own damn country (they have ādatā for neuter).
De is not a german word, whereas die is feminine in german.
Yeah, but die is also āthatā so people say ādie manā all the time.
The word āthatā is either ādassā when used as a conjunctive, or gendered when used as an adjective, adverb or pronoun. So depending on the part of speech and case, āthat manā could be translated as āder Mannā, ādieser Mannā, āder daā, ādenā, āwelcherā, or ājenerā.
Die is also the plural form, so they will say ādie MƤnnerā, but never ādie Mannā singular.
Iām talking about Dutch, sorry for being unclear, I thought āmanā rather than āMannā would make it clear. Iām just saying the phonetic sequence ādie manā is something many Germans will have heard before from nearby and related languages. I understand that it could be surprising the first time.
Iām a native Dutch speaker and have a German partner and live in a German speaking country (although my standard German isnāt amazing, B1-2ish) so Iām not totally ignorant of the parts of speech in Germanic languages.
Ah, that makes sense. Apologies for the grammar lesson :)
We donāt travel to the Netherlands or Belgium all that often, and when we do everyone speaks English to us, whereas my mom just visited us for a month, so ĀÆ_(ć)_/ĀÆ
Nah youāre good, hopefully other people reading will find it interesting. Youāre right, English usually works better across that border, unless they speak Platte in which case it can be a tossup if someone doesnāt have great English.