And the unfortunate "das Mädchen" [0] - the German word for "young woman" is neutral gender (because it's a compound noun and the "-chen" suffix is neutral). I wonder how that affects German society when all young women are objects. Does this de-emphasise their femininity, or increase their "sexual object"-ness?
Or secret option c): it has absolutely no effect on how they treat their women because they aren't actually that dumb.
And German is a whole different class than Latin and Slavic languages - AFAIK there’s now way to “tell” the gender of a word in German. In contrast, in Spanish, Italian (not sure about French) and Slovenian words actually “sound” either feminine or masculine (or neutral, but those are rarer and mostly for inanimate objects), because gender is based on word endings.
Yeah, I gather that Germans intuit the gender of a new word - it just "feels" masculine or feminine (or neutral). Fascinating.
That's incorrect, there are rules. (These rules have a few exceptions.)
m: -en, -er, -ig, -ismus, -ist, -ling, -m, -or
f: -ät, -e, -ei, -enz, -heit, -ie, -ik, -in, -ion, -keit, -schaft, -ung, -ur
n: -chen, -lein, -ment, -nis, -tum, -um
That makes the proposed contrast weaker than you initially thought.
Slovenian: -a feminine, -o, -e neutrum, rest masculine. (Again, some exceptions.)
Italian and Spain is probably even simpler, since there’s no neutrum.
That's mathematically impossible.
> Does this de-emphasise their femininity, or increase their "sexual object"-ness?
My hypothesis is that having it might de-emphasise the link between grammatical gender and gender identity of a person, this link is very strong in the English language because in English the only time you use gendered language you are talking about a person, in those other languages you use gendered words to refer to a pot or a chair :-)