German words are kind of sexy

in the sense that all nouns have a gender. I once got some very wise advice from a German teacher, that I regrettably did not follow.

Mit diesem Beitrag geht es um Deutsch, aber ausnahmsweise war es nicht sinnvoll auf Deutsch zu schreiben.

The advice was, when you learn a new noun, always make sure you learn it in connection with its gender. You see, in German every noun is either masculine, feminine, or neutral.

My problem was, I learned German in an intensive three month summer program as part of my master degree studies. We learned German seven hours a day, five days a week. If you didn't keep up, you would fall hopelessly behind and flunk out. For that reason I stopped worrying about gender in that competitive environment.

That decision had (and continues to have) a constant impact on my life in Germany -- virtually every time I open my mouth to speak I know I will be making mistakes. Thankfully, Germans are very forgiving -- I think they get a secret pleasure from how difficult it is for some of us non-native speakers ;-)

Giving Every Word a Gender is kind of Crazy

Honestly, the whole idea of giving every noun a gender seemed ridiculous and superfluous to me -- and my opinion has not changed in that respect.

There are some rules and helpful tips. For example, water is neutral, as you would expect. Yet most bodies of water are masculine (thank goodness for that consistency): ocean, lake, pond, river, and creek. Although the spring (Quelle) is feminine, so there are exceptions.

Luckily there are some word endings that consistently take a specific gender. For example, here's a German word most English speakers know: Gesundheit (health.) It is feminine because of the ending -heit. Any word that ends in -heit, -keit, or -ung is feminine. But for an English speaker the gender of nouns is a minefield full of potential mistakes.

German would be an excellent candidate for an international language, except for 3 things: der,die, das.

Of course the reality is that any of the major languages would be a good candidate for an international language. Why? Because children have the innate capacity to easily learn any language like a native speaker. In German they have a term "Sprachgefühl" for which we don't have an English equivalent. It is translated as: "intuitive feeling for the idiom of the language." But it is not just the idiom. They have an intuitive feel for the gender of nouns too. I've tested my wife with obscure words from the dictionary with which she was completely unfamiliar, yet she intuitively knew the gender with only a few exceptions. Thus a child prior to puberty has the potential to develop Sprachgefühl for any language.

German is easy to learn (yes there is a but coming)

The good news is that even without Sprachgefühl, German is a fairly easy language to learn as an adult. The bad news, without Sprachgefühl it is extraordinarily difficult, nearly impossible, to speak or write without making mistakes. More on that at another time, let's stick with gender for now.

A few examples of arbitrary genders

To me the gender of nouns often seems quite arbitrary. Let's consider eating utensils. They've got to be neutral right? Okay, a knife, that's pretty masculine, so we could imagine that as masculine. Well friends:

The knife is an "it"
The fork is a "she"
The spoon is a "dude."

Another example of three words based around one concept:
The room (Zimmer)
The lounge room (Stube)
The storage room (Lagerraum.)

The room is an "it"
The lounge room is a "lady"
The storage room is a "dude".

You won't believe this

Here are some examples of words whose genders truly perplexed me.

A bosom must be feminine, right? No! Of course not, it's masculine: der Busen.

A woman is a Frau which is feminine. But in the not too distant past, a wife or an older woman could also be referred to as "das Weib" which is neutral. (It has another modern slang meaning which we will ignore for now.)

Mark Twain

Mark Twain wrote a very funny essay about his quest to learn German, and I remember he mentioned the absurdity of "das Weib." Also he mentioned the fact that "the girl" in German is neutral das Mädchen. In this case, a German speaker might point out that words that end with "-chen" are always neutral. But I would counter, the Bavarian equivalent "Mädel" is also neutral.

Once you add pronouns to the mix it becomes downright absurd. Thus "das Weib" and "das Madchen" aren't "she," they become "es" "it."

In German the possessive pronouns (his or her) are either masculine or feminine. What happens to "es," the neutral form of "he/she/it"? The neutral takes the masculine possessive pronoun -- and then the fun begins :-D

To paraphrase Mark Twain's original idea, a literal translation of German could produce something like this:

Das Weib sagte zu seiner Tochter: "Wir zwei müssen die Kühe versorgen!" Das Mädchen durfte zwar seine Hausaufgabe für die Schule machen, aber danach mußte es, wie seine Mutter, im Stall arbeiten.

The wife said to his daughter: "The two of us have to take care of the cows!" The girl was allowed to do his homework for school, but afterwards it had to, like his mother, work in the barn.

Here's the surprise for English Speakers

English is of course extremely quirky as we all know, but it is also this wonderful amalgamation of languages which have influenced it. Old English was a Germanic language, but the French invasion of England in 1066 had a tremendous impact on English. Now we have a language that is Germanic in origin, but with a French substructure and vocabulary. The Norse also had an influence on English, and from what I understand it was the Norse influence in Northern England that led to them being the first to begin dropping the gender of nouns.

As you probably have heard, German like many other languages has a polite form of you (Sie), and an informal form of you(Du). The polite form (Sie) can be used for one person, or a group of people -- as in English.

English once had this too. We know from Shakespeare and the Bible, "Thou" was used for individuals, and "You" was used for more than one person. According to this source, in the 13th century people began imitating the French use of "Tu" & "Vous".

"You" was gradually considered an equivalent of the polite "Vous" and "Thou" as "Tu." So if you said "Thou" to someone above you socially, or someone on your level with whom you weren't well acquainted, there was the potential for an insult.

It is interesting that eventually this was dropped, but not as you might expect. We began addressing everyone with the polite form "You," which would be the equivalent of Germans using only "Sie" or the French using only "Vous."

English was dramtically streamlined and lots of its Germanic grammatical underpinnings were simplified.

Can you imagine German with only one gender -- "das"?

Can you imagine German without "Du"?

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