this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2025
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Afrikaans (one of my mother tongues) uses "die" for everything. The first time my (German speaking) partner overheard me saying "die man" he was so freaked out 😂 He still can't deal with it, it's just too wrong for his brain.
Das Mädchen und das Weib haben kein Mitleid für die man
Stimmt
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, "the table" is "bordet" but "the tables" is "borden", while "the chair" is "stolen"
it'll 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 "-et" for everything.
you're forgetting to mention the best part about swedish grammatical gender: since it's all vestigial there are no rules left for which word gets what. the words are not gendered, but the suffixes are.
hm, isn't 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, there's 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; "common", and "none". 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.
That's how it started out in the first place! Indo-European noun classes don't really have anything to do with gender, there just happens to be three and the words for "man", "woman", and "thing" are in distinct classes, so that's what the classes get referred by. Otherwise it's semi-random, that is, by phonology. Unless people disagree (it's die Nutella btw).
Classes are useful because they allow for concord between nouns and other parts of speech. The German the sentence "He holds a pen (Stift) and a bag (Tüte) and puts him on the table" unambiguously tells you that it's the pen which is put on the table: Bag makes no sense because it's 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, that's 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, it's pretty common knowledge that in swedish, "clock" is female (vad är klockan? hon är halv tre) but there's no longer a rule that says it is because nouns aren't gendered since a language reform in like the 1800s...
Speaking of clocks, let me congratulate you on being one of the Germanic languages where "clock" and "bell" 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. I'd 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, they're closely related languages, but forgetting about "whom"? Gods no.
i mean we did also import "ur" from german so that we don't have to wear wristbandbells.
speaking of, it just hit me than i have no idea where the convention of saying "Uhr" or "o'clock" after the time comes from. need to do some reading on that.
No idea about Uhr but clock most likely dates back to the great wave of clocktower building, 14th century, when timekeeping became mainstream. In Low Saxon "[It is] one o'clock" is "[Dat is] Klock een", also klock == bell as well as clock, "Uhr" and "hour" both come from French, ultimately PIE *yōr-ā which is also responsible for year. Clock apparently comes from Celtic, onomatopoetic formation.
Been living in Sweden for 9 years (though I don’t speak Swedish at work nor at home, so I’m not fluent). You can fucking use hon for klockan? You’re kidding right? This is the first time I hear about this. I guess I would have used ”den”?
oh yes. there's a whole bunch of them. we used to have this really weird thing where we gendered nouns based on whether they described "dead" things, and what counted as dead was a bit nebulous... so humans, clocks, most trees, and things like cities and harbors are feminine, while things like communion and the moon are masculine, and doors and rocks are non-gendered, in a category called "reale". then masculine and feminine just... merged into "utrum", and some stuff switched to reale, and some switched to utrum.
which means clocks are non-binary, i think.
while the swedish wikipedia article listing feminine nouns is one of the worst written i've ever seen (it reads like the original swedish lord of the rings translation), it does have a list of general rules and a """complete""" (apparently) alphabetical list of all feminine words that don't follow any sort of rule... which is most of them.
the article on utrum is shorter, and has like five actually interesting examples.
Wow thanks for writing that up. I’ve skimmed the first article. But, does anyone actually still use ”hon” for these formerly feminine nouns? Or is that mostly helpful when reading older texts? The article is not very clear on that (what I’ve seen of it anyway).
it doesn't show up in daily use, no.
I suspect that's 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.
That's weird, Germans have usually heard Dutch before which also uses 'De' for most things (except randomly some words still have vestigal neuter article 'het'), same in plattdeutsch in their own damn country (they have 'dat' for neuter).
De is not a german word, whereas die is feminine in german.
Yeah, but die is also "that" so people say "die man" all the time.
The word "that" is either "dass" when used as a conjunctive, or gendered when used as an adjective, adverb or pronoun. So depending on the part of speech and case, "that man" could be translated as "der Mann", "dieser Mann", "der da", "den", "welcher", or "jener".
Die is also the plural form, so they will say "die Männer", but never "die Mann" singular.
I'm talking about Dutch, sorry for being unclear, I thought "man" rather than "Mann" would make it clear. I'm just saying the phonetic sequence "die man" is something many Germans will have heard before from nearby and related languages. I understand that it could be surprising the first time.
I'm a native Dutch speaker and have a German partner and live in a German speaking country (although my standard German isn't amazing, B1-2ish) so I'm not totally ignorant of the parts of speech in Germanic languages.
Ah, that makes sense. Apologies for the grammar lesson :)
We don't 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 ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Nah you're good, hopefully other people reading will find it interesting. You're right, English usually works better across that border, unless they speak Platte in which case it can be a tossup if someone doesn't have great English.
I can communicate in Afrikaans to someone speaking Dutch if both of us speak slowly and use simple language. It's painful though, so I haven't needed it often. Lucky me that English is so widespread :D