tbf i empathize, sweden has remnant gendering and hearing someone use the wrong suffix makes me barely able to parse it as the same word
hell in some cases it literally just ends up being a different word, “the table” is “bordet” but “the tables” is “borden”, while “the chair” is “stolen”
it’ll be interesting to see if this changes in the future, considering we have a significant diaspora of middle-eastern immigrants who just give up and use “-et” for everything.
you’re forgetting to mention the best part about swedish grammatical gender: since it’s all vestigial there are no rules left for which word gets what. the words are not gendered, but the suffixes are.
in languages with grammatical gender, the gender is affixed to the noun, and that affects how the word is used (think der/die/das, or the endings of words in french). in languages without, like english, there’s usually just one way to modify a noun (the table). swedish has somehaw ended up with the worst of both words, where we have multiple ways to modify nouns but no gender affixed to them. or rather, we have two; “common”, and “none”. we used to have a system like in german, but it all sort of collapsed in on itself and nouns basically sorted themselves into the two current categories at random depending on dialects and stuff.
I suspect that’s what happened with Afrikaans. The Dutch colonialists mixed with English and native speakers, leaving a language derived from Dutch but without gendered nouns, a different accent, and many foreign words integrated.
tbf i empathize, sweden has remnant gendering and hearing someone use the wrong suffix makes me barely able to parse it as the same word
hell in some cases it literally just ends up being a different word, “the table” is “bordet” but “the tables” is “borden”, while “the chair” is “stolen”
it’ll be interesting to see if this changes in the future, considering we have a significant diaspora of middle-eastern immigrants who just give up and use “-et” for everything.
you’re forgetting to mention the best part about swedish grammatical gender: since it’s all vestigial there are no rules left for which word gets what. the words are not gendered, but the suffixes are.
hm, isn’t that just how all grammatical gender works?
in languages with grammatical gender, the gender is affixed to the noun, and that affects how the word is used (think der/die/das, or the endings of words in french). in languages without, like english, there’s usually just one way to modify a noun (the table). swedish has somehaw ended up with the worst of both words, where we have multiple ways to modify nouns but no gender affixed to them. or rather, we have two; “common”, and “none”. we used to have a system like in german, but it all sort of collapsed in on itself and nouns basically sorted themselves into the two current categories at random depending on dialects and stuff.
I suspect that’s what happened with Afrikaans. The Dutch colonialists mixed with English and native speakers, leaving a language derived from Dutch but without gendered nouns, a different accent, and many foreign words integrated.