Hacker News Reader

> Danish, outside of specific persons, has two genders. German and French have three genders

Given that Norwegian and German have three I would expect Danish to also have three. French has two (le + la).

Danish (and Swedish) used to have three grammatical genders, but the feminine and masculine merged at some point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_in_Danish_and_Swedish

Ah. I'm a norwegian speaker, and didn't know that about the other two languages. Actually the norwegian dialect I speak also features a merged masculine and feminine, but it is non-standard.

Dammit, you're right that French does have two. Not sure why I flubbed that.

Danish indeed has "only" two genders, one too many for my taste.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com