I’m so confused. As a northerner from England with an IQ equal to the ply of toilet paper I use, does every object in French have a feminine or masculine alignment? Or is this some kind of joke privvy to those who don’t have a concerning interest in sheep?
Yep. Most Latin languages have gendered nouns. Italian, Spanish, German etc. All have masculine/feminine objects.
Eg. In Italian a fork is feminine (la forchetta) but a spoon is masculine (il cucchiaio). A table in your living room is a boy (il tavolo) but a table that you’re eating lunch on is a girl (la tavola).
It’s bizarre.
German isn’t a Latin language, it’s in the Germanic branch, along with English, Dutch and others. French, Italian and Spanish are Romance or Latin languages.
True! It’s not just a Latin thing and Slavic languages have it too. I wonder where it came from originally. Probably one of those Proto Indo European things. Though it’s in some Indigenous Australian languages too (though not all) so might be even older?
A lot of languages including Germanic and Romance languages have “gendered” nouns, which is a weird term for “these are some arbitrary categories we put nouns into”. While that idea of noun classes is often called “gender” and they are also named “gender-y” things like masculine and feminine, the idea doesn’t have a lot to do with gender as in identity.
Compare English irregular verbs - how come you don’t say “swimmed”? You “just don’t”, that particular verb is in a different class. Same thing applies to nouns in certain languages, and affects (among other things) how they’re conjugated.
