young lady = (das) Mädchen
turnip = (die) Rübe
(for those wondering)
turnip = (die) Rübe
(for those wondering)
When I learned that “-chen” is a diminutive („Hund” = “dog”, „Hündchen” = “puppy”), I assumed there must be a “Mad*” as a non-diminutive alternative word for women. Turns out, there’s an archaic root in „Magd”, which also became the English “maid”.
Many people confuse the grammatical genus (as used in practice in contemporary German) of German words with the biological concept of sex. This is made even more complicated by SJWs who confuse these two unrelated concepts (genus, sex) with their concept of gender.
So, it is better to imagine the genus of German word as something like the "'color' of a word" ("color" in the sense of the "color charge" of quarks).
this lasted as long as it took for someone to tell him he sounded like a toddler. “do you have any mitten-wittens? my handsie-wandsies are coooooold” was i think what convinced him otherwise.
It's the people who complain about "SJWs" who say sex and gender are the same.
still, the grammatical sense predates the sex sense by a bit, and has always been around to mean “genre”. So you always have to disambiguate usage
And then people usually get very huffy about which non-sentient nouns “share” “their” “gender”.
> And then people usually get very huffy about which non-sentient nouns “share” “their” “gender”.
Seems rare to me.
Ironically, you've just confirmed what GP said by confusing the concept of grammatical gender with the modern social studies concept of gender.
People described by their opponents as SJWs are more likely than, well, pretty much everyone else on the planet to distinguish biological sex, gender identity, socially ascribed gender, and grammatical gender.
The people who use “SJW” as a dismissive epithet, on the other hand, are most likely to fail to distinguish those things.
People described by their opponents as SJWs don't describe themselves as SJWs except ironically occasionally. People who want a neutral or positive tone use other terms like social justice advocates.
If people really confused grammatical gender with "the biological concept of sex", then we'd have a lot more arguments about random nouns needing to have feminine gender instead of masculine (there's this famous joke about "die Salzstreuerin"). But that's not really what happens. Nobody seems to care about the table being masculine.
What the argument is mostly about is that we use words that, by themselves, refer to masculine people and pluralise them to denote a possible mixed-gender group. This has everything to do with semantics (and so with how concrete biological/social gender expression is encoded in the words of a language), and isn't really that much concerned with grammatical gender, which after all disappears anyway as a distinctive feature once you're in the plural.