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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • English weirdly use feminine for ships, so think of it like that. But no it doesn’t achieve much.

    I don’t think it change the way we think about objects much, but probably unconsciously yes. For example, France itself is feminine and seeing some caricature personifying as a dude always feels weird.

    Usage dictates the gender. And some recent words are more or less controversial: gameboy, wifi, COVID, Nutella…

    When I think about the gender of a word I will usually derive it from a broader category. But that’s not always obvious, for example Gameboy is a game console (feminine) but the words game and boy are masculine. COVID is a disease (feminine) but also a virus (masculine). And in the meme a washing machine is a machine (feminine).

    You can’t not use gender since french doesn’t have neutral pronouns. But I don’t think it’s frowned upon for a non native speaker to make this kind of mistakes.