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…
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.