And in French everything has a gender: a table? Definitely a she. A coat hanger? Looks like a he to me. A car? Look at those curves, she it is. That truck though, totally masculine. But the trailer behind it, still a she.
i want to wedgie the people who decided to call it “gender” in grammar, people don’t associate tables with femininity or whatever, it’s just an arbitrary grouping that has no inherent meaning, the only reason we force associations with social gender is because inevitably the words “man” and “woman” belong to one of the groupings.
Like in swedish you can say “timma” or “timme” (hour), but no one’s going to think you’re somehow implying that the unit of time itself is somehow gendered.
The funny thing with gendered languages is that synonyms can have different genders. So “el pollo” and “la gallina” both mean “chicken”, but their grammatical gender differs.
yeah really interesting in this case both come from Latin, and both made their way in the modern languages, one in its masculine form the other in its feminine form.
- Pullus (adj.) very small (animal), a young rooster, “pulla” for the female chicken. French : la poule
- Gallus (name) rooster, “gallina” for the female chicken. French : le gallinacé (a chicken specimen, member of the species Gallus domestica)
