this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2025
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Its funny having French as your native tongue and having internalised all that. Like obviously a machine is feminine.
It can make for fun play on words, imagery and parallels, but it also sucks ass for neutral or degendered language..
Like obviously a machine is feminine
RATM are cancelled.
I think this is basically the position of left-neoliberal "more women war criminals" types
Spanish is more woke cuz El lavarropas
In latinoamerica it's La lavadora
Clothes washer transitioned when she moved across the ocean, now she goes by washer.
Yer calling Argentina crakkkers?
Same with Spanish. Learning Italian was significantly easier than for other people I know for a lot of reasons, but one of them is that the genders are like 95% the same. It helps if you know some Latin, i guess.
Agree on the fuckedness of using neutral or degendered language in romance languages, too.
Sometimes it leaks into my English. I default to saying he, the dog.
In Danish we have two genders like God intended: Agender and Common Gender (the radical West Jutlanders claims there are no genders at all, don't listen to them)
Wait, is it like an animate/inanimate split? We have that too in Czech, except each is also gendered
it's masculine because it's a compound word, which are all masculine in french. easy peasy
also grammatical gender and real life gender have nothing to do with each other. grammatical gender is more like a class or group that nouns fall into
I think you mixed up dishwasher and washing machine? Respectively, un lave-vaisselle, une machine à laver
😵
i was thinking of lave-linge for washing machine actually. no idea how common that is compared machine à laver or if that's a france vs. canada thing
France is typically machine a laver. Might vary by region tho
Actually nevermind I know people who use lave-linge but I associate it as old fashioned for some reason
Oh yes lave-linge is totally valid, I didn't think about it because it's less common where I live
why do ships have she/her pronouns
because they are girls
Then where are their girl bits
don't ask a ship what's down her pants
(BL 18-inch Mk I naval gun)
They don't need bits, they're ships. I can only aspire to be like them
Wrong question, the real question is where do girls keep their ship bits.
what that anchor do
It is rooted in historical grammar. Old English, like many other Germanic languages, had grammatical gender. As those genders were eventually lost they stuck on in a few places, including for ships.
A similar development happened in other Germanic languages.
Why did ships keep their grammatical gender when most other nouns didn't? I don't know. It could be because of the tradition of naming ships after women, which made sense back when ships did have grammatical gender. It could also be influenced by sailors' superstition and tendency to antropomorphise their ships.
Ships are not merely grammatically feminine, they are personified and given a feminine identity. In German ships are neuter, it is das Schiff, yet they are given a feminine identity. (This also goes for some other languages like Danish).
Danish grammar
In Danish the differentiation is between neuter/no gender and gendered. Since Danish collapsed masculine and feminine into one category. So technically a ship could at best be "gendered" grammatically rather than feminine. But it isn't gendered and the ship is still a woman.
I genuinely believe the answer is that it's a product of men owning them using them as a sort of status symbol. There is also a tradition of doing the same with guns (like a rifle named "Betsy" or whatever).
Very much one of those "I suspect so, but I can't prove it" things
Also, sorry for double posting but I just looked this up. Ships (Scif) in old english were grammatically masculine, and grammatic gender had nothing to do with cultural gender roles.
Wif, frow and wiffman all mean women and each has one of the 3 possible grammatic genders.
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La li lu le lo???
the bed where the water is
la lit où il est l'eau
Try German. Why is bread non-binary bro, why is the moon masculine and the sun feminine!?
Nothing is worse than Das Mädchen
Girls are agender says the nazis
That's because it ends on "-chen". It's a suffix to basically cutiefy whatever comes in front of it and makes every word agender. So like "Der Hund" (the dog) becomes "Das Hündchen" (the doggy). "Mädchen" originally comes from the word "Die Maid", which means young woman but is never used in modern German. So "Mädchen" is basically "girlie", not "girl". Don't ask me why this happened 
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I personally hate Die/Der See
bread, i dunno, but the moon is presumably masculine because the man in the moon, Tilion is a man. and the sun feminine because Arien is a woman and she's the pilot of the sun.
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Learning languages with a non-gendered native language has always been wild, but French was always particularly tricky.
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in portuguese the fatherland is trans
it's feminine in Icelandic, typical (although all machines are feminine)
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