On Thursday, 28 April 2016 at 06:43:52 UTC, Iain Buclaw wrote:
On 27 April 2016 at 13:25, Marco Leise via Digitalmars-d
<digitalmars-d@puremagic.com> wrote:
Am Wed, 27 Apr 2016 03:59:04 +0000
schrieb Seb <s...@wilzba.ch>:
nitpick: Wo ist _das_ WC?
In German WC we have definite articles and as a WC can be
used by
both sexes, it is neutral (disclaimer: not a rule).
There are some reasons why some words are feminine, masculine
or neutral, but I never heard of that. (It is short form for
English "watercloset" - which I didn't know before I looked it
up now. :D)
Ha! There is no logical at all behind whether a word is
masculine, feminine or neutral in German.
Except when it corresponds to the natural gender, i.e. der Mann,
die Frau. It's interesting that the word for child is neuter (das
Kind). Looks like children are not yet considered to be of any
sex, which makes a lot of sense.
Anyway, you can often deduce the grammatical gender from the
ending (like in French, Spanish etc). E.g. -keit is feminine,
while nouns ending in -er are masculine
die Eitelkeit (vanity)
der Fahrer (the driver)
Once you understand this, you can focus on words that give you no
clue, like der Tag (day).
But in general there is no obvious logic as to why a word is
masculine or feminine (or neuter). In German the sun is feminine,
while in Latin languages it's masculine (el sol, o sol). In
English it's neuter like most things. A neutered race :)
