The answer is less interesting than the fury. Covid is an acronym derived from the first two letters of corona and virus and acronyms are feminine. Why? The Academy says so; you wouldn't want genderless nouns floating around without their... er, appendages. For what it's worth I looked up NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) which the French, in their perverse way, refer to as OTAN (surely a Nordic god) and that too is feminine.
Such matters probably depend on a word's roots and that's dreadfully boring. Only people at a loose end get excited about it.
Except when it isn't boring. Aeons ago I reflected that the French word for death (morte) is feminine. Forget roots because most people can't handle the phonetic alphabet. This is creepy, unchivalrous and irrational. More men than women have been responsible for deaths and men should take the blame. All agreed say Aye. Aye.
But don't blame just the French. The Germans find it necessary to have a third gender: not just der and die but also das. Covering those who are in between. So why is a young girl (ie, maiden) called das Mädchen? Because the -chen indicates a diminutive. Yeah. I wince because I can't be bothered to confirm this and Sabine delights in picking out my linguistic errors. Yet is haughtily silent when I return the favour.
Perhaps it is all boring anyway.
I cannot understand the need for masculine/feminine nouns, or the concern of the inflected languages for 3 cases (masculine, feminine, neuter) Latin even has a fourth!. No wonder English is so popular to foreigners for a second language. No gender nouns, no inflections.
ReplyDeleteWhen I learnt German at school we all were under the burden of learning 12 different versions of "the", depending on the grammar of the rest of the sentence and that version would then need to alter many of the following word endings - why not simply use "der" as the definite article for every thing and stop using different endings of words for nominative, accusative, genitive and dative?
This is why I revelled in learning Mandarin Chinese.So logical, no genders, no verb declensions, words could be put into a sentence in a choice or orders. Only drawback was the need to learn the characters for the words. I set my self the task of learning those at the rate of 20 per week, but after 18 months still only had enough in memory to read a basic Chinese newspaper - about 1,000. To read the classics one needs vast multiples of that!
At least Pin-Yin (phonetic words replace characters) is increasingly taking off amongst young Chinese. "Hao jio bu jian"= "long time no see". But you still need to apply the four correct sounds to the words (falling high to low, rising low to high, dipping, high level) or they could mean something else!
Avus: In fact there are advantages in having gendered nouns: they occur in connection with the use of pronouns and the fact that adjectives have different endings according to noun gender. It would take me a thousand words to explain the benefits and I don't intend to try. And I must confess I only discovered these benefits fairly recently, and then only from reading French novels.
ReplyDeleteBut your attitude to foreign languages is characteristically anglo-centric. You assume that lack of genders makes English easy to learn. In that small sense you may be right but English is full of irregularities to the point where it appears to be entirely rule-less. Another misconception is that many foreigners learn English and therefore it must be easy. In fact they learn English because they are forced to do. No Swede, for instance, can expect to encounter Swedish-speakers outside Sweden. And foreigners on the whole don't learn English so that they can speak to Brits, but because they want - more often need - to speak to Americans. A typical example: learning to use computers without knowing a certain amount of English can be a nightmare. And I heard this from the mouth of the head of Microsoft France who was a Frenchman.
So yes, there are three definite article in German and they do not follow a logical set of rules. Should they?
ReplyDeleteA long long time ago, der and die were meant for male and female animate stuff and das for the inanimate rest. But that went out of the window and was properly never followed because at the time, there was no Germany and people spoke in many different languages, incl. dialects, or accents (note: a dialect is a proper language as opposed to an accent but you knew that didn't you). The German grammar gurus at the time were mostly church people and we all knwo what their intentions were.
Anyway, we are riddled with anomalies with grammatical gender and some poor unfortunate language students despair over it. My own daughter struggled with it for a brief moment until she figured out that by turning any word into a diminutive, you can safely use the neutral article das and get away with it, esp. if you happen to be young and blond and cunning. She is dead clever.
Of course, no other language anywhere in the world has grammatical anomalies. Correct me if I am wrong.
(Irregular verbs anybody?)
There's just one of the German gender irregularities I dislike, which is der Mond for la luna.
I have studied it, there is history, but still.
Sabine: I can't say Mutter (and especially the abbreviation Mutti) turns me on as a word. Impossible to say it without suggesting one's lips are becoming inhinged.
ReplyDeleteerm...I'm about to pick out a linguistic error. The French word for death is 'mort'(la mort).'Morte' means she's dead (elle est morte) and the 'she'could be anything assigned as feminine, such as 'nature morte'(still-life).
ReplyDeleteNatalie: I was well aware that the French noun for "death" is feminine. That was the whole point of the paragraph. I was also aware of the difference between a noun and an adjective. But on occasions like these (ie, when one is laying down the law) it is as well to check with the dictionary and this proved fatal. I have photographed the entry in the dictionary; I hope you can discern the typography because this is crucial. The first words read thus:
ReplyDeletemort, morte a, n
In dictionaries the single letters in italics represent the nature of the word or words defined: in this case "adjective, noun." A few seconds' reflection would have told me that the two words in bold face were the masculine and feminine variants of the adjective. But then what did n stand for? Ironically I knew that mort - without the final e - stood for death, yet I allowed the dictionary to persuade me otherwise.
My fault. In fact a double fault. The dictionary I consulted is a French-French paperback I bought secondhand for €1 in the street-market in Bedarieux which, nevertheless, contains 40,000 words. In the past it has proved lightweight and reliable. Ironically, if I'd exerted myself rather more I could have reached for my Collins-Robert (it weighs about 2 kg) - my bible - and I would have been left in no doubt about the spelling.
I'd like to think that this error of mine was atypical but that would be special pleading. Errors are errors. Physician heal thyself.
My Mom said that English was a difficult language to learn. That seemed odd to me when I knew Welsh was such a complex language with several dialects... I only learned the naughty words. *LOL*
ReplyDeleteBohemian: Your Mum is right. We should both be glad we weren't born in, say, Rumania and had to learn English from the outside in. Did you know the English language has 171,476 words (plus 47,156 that are obsolete) whereas the French limp along with a mere 100,000 words.
ReplyDeleteAs to the Welsh they keep on having to invent words to keep up and their inventions aren't all that hot. English came up with "television", the Welsh matched this with "telewele". Doesn't sound entirely serious, does it? But then most TV isn't serious really. Wish I hadn't got into this.