Hacker News Reader

In old Swedish (~19th century) nouns were divided into three grammatical genus: femininum, masculinum and neutrum. Dead objects could be referred to as either he or she:

- earth, sun and time are feminine words and can to this day still be referred to as 'she'

- heaven, road and stone were referred to as 'he', although this has disappeared from modern Swedish.

View on HN

Icelandic retains the full 3-gender system to this day, and it’s generally incorrect to refer to gendered inanimate objects as “it”, rather than “he” or “she”.

Same with German, which has a neutrum genus but sometimes even uses it for people (the child, das Kind, the girl, das Mädchen, the victim, das Opfer, ...) The number of inanimate objects that are not gendered must be pretty small. The sun is female (die Sonne), a street is female (die Straße), cars and houses are neutrum (das Haus, das Auto)

Butter is a fun one. You get different answers depending on who you ask.

Ketchup is much more controversial though (das Ketchup? Der Ketchup? Wars have been fought about less controversial things.)

Some swedes (myself being one of them) speaks a dialect where the gramatical genus is (partially) retained. Clocks, for example, are still female.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com