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Comment by kleiba | Hacker News Reader

Slightly OT: the German magazine "Der Freitag" (https://www.freitag.de/) seems to play a certain role in the order of events discussed in this hearing. I keep different sources referring to it as "Die Freitag" however. Why is that?

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The newspaper is called "der Freitag," however the German Zeitung (newspaper) is feminine and therefore would suggest "die." So it appears that people do not recognize that "der" is part of the title, and then make the mistake to use the wrong article since deducing the gender from the category newspaper does not work here.

Any linguistic information experts here that can comment as to whether there is some informational advantage to having random nouns assigned “genders” like German, French, etc. do? As in, if we were considering a programming language would all the work involved with matching gendered nouns, adjectives, etc. get us any gains in expressiveness or any other benefit. I love the French language and wouldn’t want it changed, just have always wondered if there’s a “point” to eg a table being feminine.

“Gender” is the exact term for this; no need for the quotation marks. As an English native speaker, when studying romance languages I never found genders to serve any purpose (other than to make the languages harder to learn). But it’s an interesting speculation.

It reduces anaphora ambiguity. Compared with gendered pronouns in English (some languages have gender neutral pronouns).

Bob and Alice went to the beach, but only he got a nasty sunburn.

Bob and Alice went to the beach, but only "it" got a nasty sunburn.

While it could resolve ambiguities when discussing two objects that happen to have different grammatical genders, it seems it would introduce more anaphoric ambiguities when discussing a person and object with the same gender.

For example:

"George a laissé tomber le livre et son dos était cassé."

Which back was broken here, George's or the books?

No genuine ambiguity here, it's the book (and I suspect that's typical). Even if you increased the ratio of theoretically ambiguous sentences, if that comes at a decrease of actual, practical ambiguity (uintended and unnoticed by the speaker) that's a win.

The newspaper is probably also known as just "Freitag" (without "der"). Newspaper in German is female ("die Zeitung"). When saying "the newspaper Freitag" it changes to "die Zeitung Freitag". You can leave out "Zeitung" if the context is known and thus it gets shortened to "die Freitag".

I'm not from a region where this newspaper is common so I'm just guessing here. This is common when talking about newspapers in German.

Disclaimer: not German speaker so please correct me.

The name of the newspaper is "der Freitag" (masculine) but Before it was called just "Freitag". Newspaper itself is feminine (die Zeitung) so I suspect any use as "die Freitag" is a contraction of "die Freitag Zeitung" and coming from German speakers.

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