• folkrav@lemmy.ca
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    5 months ago

    Same is true about second language French speakers. French conjugates articles (or most things, really, the language is extremely gendered) with nouns. E.g. “the father and the mother” would be “le père et la mère” (le/la is the same definite article in masculine/feminine form, it has no neutral form). English speakers get rightfully confused. It gets even more confusing as there’s a clear trend in the language where many feminine gendered words end with an E (porte/door, table/table, arme/weapon), but not always (nuage/cloud, véhicule/vehicle).

    • rottingleaf@lemmy.zip
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      5 months ago

      extremely gendered

      Compared to English - yeah, but in general there’s nothing extreme about genders in French.

      • folkrav@lemmy.ca
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        5 months ago

        In what sense? If anything, the very concept of “everything is gendered” makes it sit at one extreme of the spectrum of languages, in the very literal sense of the word, wouldn’t you agree?

            • rottingleaf@lemmy.zip
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              5 months ago

              In Europe without even anything exotic - German, archaic Dutch and all insular Scandinavian languages, and all Slavic languages. I don’t know Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian, so I can’t talk about them, a plethora of cases, but genders - I don’t remember.

              The interesting thing to learn is that there are languages with more than 3 genders (M, F and thing). Or even more than 4 (M, F, N and thing), with additional genders being for kinds of animals, fish, plants, buildings, instruments. But I’ve only heard about that, haven’t studied any such language.