Comment by Jun8 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Jun8 | Hacker News Reader

Here's an interesting question: How do the French decide on gender (and hence the article to use) of imported English words (same question can be asked for many of the European languages that have grammatical gender, e.g. German)? This Guardian note provides some answers (http://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,5753,-125...), in French imported words are mostly masculine.

Some examples I pulled from this (http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/archive/index.php/t-3917...) thread for the gender of Internet in various languages:

  * Spanish: Generally assumed to be masculine but the Real Academia Espanola page lists it as "amb", i.e. undecided gender (http://buscon.rae.es/drae/?type=3&val=internet&val_aux=&origen=REDRAE)
  * Russian: Интернет - masculine
  * Welsh: rhwngrwyd - feminine (but that's because "net" (rhwyd) is feminine, itself borrowed from Latin neuter rete, retis "net.")
  * Czech: masculine
  * Hebrew: masculine, although the more commonly used "net" (reshet) is feminine.

It's commonly taught that grammatical gender in languages (at least in IE languages) is semantically meaningless, i.e. they are just arbitrary classifications. this may not be totally true. If you have 10 minutes this article (PDF file: http://lera.ucsd.edu/papers/gender.pdf) by Lera Boroditsky has an in-depth discussion on this topic.

French and German native speakers: Can you provide examples of English borrowed words that have feminine gender?

There are actually grammar rules behind the genders… but they aren't always clear as the words have changed in the past 3000+ years, but not their gender. E.g., in German it's (very) roughly masculine for concrete objects, neutral for actions and results of actions (which can be concrete objects!), and feminine for abstract concepts, and collections of other objects.

This isn't always clear: spoon is masculine, knife neutral (the indogermanic word apparently denoted the result of sharpening something) and fork (a collection of… pointy bits?) feminine, e.g.

And with borrowed words, the gender not always universally agreed on. A processor is masculine, but a CPU or GPU is feminine (probably because unit is, too). Is an e-mail feminine (it's a highly abstract concept), or neutral (the result of writing)? Both genders are used – hash tags, however, are masculine. Letters (as in physical mail) are masculine, but mail (the concept, as in Royal Mail) is feminine… and a Letter (as in print letters) are feminine, because it's taken from French/Latin, and loan words of gendered languages usually keep their gender, even if the rules are incompatible.

Spontaneously I can't think of many "English borrowed words" that are feminine, as most words that could be loaned are already shared from French and/or Latin, which influenced German centuries earlier.

If you're curious about Greek: loanwords are mostly gendered as neuter, and because their endings usually don't match Greek noun endings, are treated as opaque/invariable units that don't participate in the usual system of noun cases (meaning genitive, nominative, etc. cases are all identical and not declined). Examples: ασανσέρ (asansér, elevator, from French ascenseur), ουίσκι (ouíski, whiskey). This is especially true for recent loanwords.

Older loanwords were sometimes 'Hellenized' into a Greek ending and gender. Example: Turkish cep became Greek τσέπη (tsépi, pocket, feminine), French canapé became Greek καναπές (kanapés, couch, masculine), and Turkish pabuç became Greek παπούτσι (papoútsi, shoe, neuter). These are then declined according to the noun class they were assimilated into.

Another category are words whose ending is translated to the semantically equivalent Greek ending, for example any -ism (capitalism, communism, feminism) will become an -ισμός, which is masculine.

I can comment on Italian (native speaker) and there are a few borrowed words that are feminine likely because the word they refer to is feminine, the ones I can think of are:

- e-mail / electronic mail / posta elettronica -> feminine (as posta/mail is feminine)

- Internet / rete -> feminine (as rete, [fishing] net, is feminine)

- shell -> feminine (this one I have no idea why, but it is feminine)

- library / libreria -> feminine (as libreria, as a books-library, is feminine)

- directory / cartella -> feminine (as cartella, folder, is feminine)

when I went to university back in the 90s there was definitely a push by some professors to use Italian terms for everything, which in some cases didn't work that well; one of my teachers insisted that we use 'fila' (which is feminine btw) for 'file', note that in Italian 'fila' is the translation of 'file' as in 'single file' which to me sounded quite grating.

Most people I know use the English form for the terms above, but you do see the Italian translation for them in advertising and other more 'official' forums often.

The german language has something called the "generic masculinum," meaning that all "workers" are male (unless you use the female version explicitly.) Some people have taken issue with that recently, i.e., they want to replace it with a generic femininum. I think it's somewhat naive to attempt to change languages like that, but hey, feel free to give it a shot.

I'm not sure what the rule for foreign words is (we have many of them, latin, greek, french, etc.), but their gender seems to be inferred from the base word (that's not a word, is it?). E.g., "internet" (and "network" respectively) is neutrum because the german word for "network" is as well. Same for "printer."

"Email" and "connection" are femininum because the german words for "mail" and "connection" are as well. I suspect that words like "email" might actually not be female, but plural (both share the same pronoun) because the german word for "mail" is one of these words that don't have a singular form (think "fish").

Oddly enough, the word "post" (in the sense of a forum post), even though it is literally the same word we have for "mail" (which is still femininum, "die Post"), is (generic?) masculinum. I guess that's what happens when multiple languages inherit a word from a language, change it over time, and then share the new words later.

Buttons are obviously male (you already know why).

Some words fall back to the generic masculinum however, even though they do have neutral german equivalents (e.g., "account"). I wish I could tell you why.

Anyway, languages are hard. Let's talk about computers instead.

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Btw: I hate the fact that my french neighbours have a weird nationalistic attitude when it comes to their language. French isn't exactly the greatest language on this planet. (Germans get to choose between french and latin as a third language.)

Grammatical gender in German isn't really arbitrary; it is usually determined by the word's suffix (though there are plenty of exceptions). For example, computer is grammatically male in German, like most words ending in -er.

Things can get complicated if a loanword does not have a suffix that exists in German (or is reasonably close to an existing suffix). In this case, you may get regional variations (that can be pretty random) or the grammatical gender of the German translation of the loanword may be adopted instead.

Examples of feminine loanwords: E-Mail (because the word "Post" in German is feminine), URL (because words ending in -el tend to be feminine).

> E-Mail (because the word "Post" in German is feminine)

Tell that to the Schluchtenscheißer, they insist it's neutral.

As I said, there can be regional variations, but most people classify E-Mail as feminine, not neuter [1].

[1] http://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/E_Mail

In German: E-Mail, URL, CD-ROM, and Jeans are usually feminine, for example.

Basically, whenever a noun (or the core of a compound noun) has a direct (or close) translation to a frequently used noun in German, then it's quite common for its gender to "bleed" over into the English loanword.

So in the examples above, Mail → Post, URL → Verbindung, CD-ROM → Platte, Jeans → Hose, etc.

There are regional variances: In Québec, we say "une job", but in France they use "un job", but it's "un suprise party" here, versus "une surprise party" in France.

Sometimes, when the translation is obvious, we'll use the gender of the original word, e.g. "une backdoor" (porte dérobée).

in France I think we choose the gender of the french word when possible, otherwise it seems to default to masculine?

un job -> because of "un emploi, un boulot, un travail"

une [surprise] party -> because of "une fête"

un hashtag -> masculine because we don't see an "e" at the end??

(French here). The only one I can think of is that a lot of people are saying "La WiFi" (feminine) instead of "Le WiFi" (masculine). For some brands, it can also be quite random since all the game consoles I can think of are using the feminine gender.

La box (as in settop box), la playstation, la RAM...

Seems like they take on the gender of the transliterated word.

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