Talk:Grammatical gender in German

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great job! I think the only thing to do it to link this page from some others (otherwise, no one will be able to click to it. maybe German language and Grammatical gender? yEvb0 (talk) 18:51, 27 June 2016 (UTC)

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 27 August 2019 and 10 December 2019. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Abigail Hately.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 21:55, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Feminine (feminin)
Pst, here are some rivers within Germany, which are masculine: der Rhein, der Neckar, der Main, der Inn... — Preceding unsigned comment added by 109.84.3.69 (talk) 02:50, 19 February 2017 (UTC)

Genus vs. Sexus
With all respect, this article repeats the misconception of grammatical genders in German. German grammatical genders do match with natural gender, but Genus and Sexus must be treated differently. The masculine gender is the default gender in German. All words that do not fulfill the criterias of the other two genders are automatically masculine; not male, but masculine! The Neuter is a group/category/list of words that couldn't be the grammatical subject in the Proto-Indo-European language. These words got a special ending so that they could be used as a grammatical subject, this was the birth of the Neuter. The Feminine evolved from the Neuter. Whereas the Neuter were singular abstracts or states of an action (e.g. sprechen = Das Gespräch), the Feminine were abstractions and collectives (e.g. die Sprache (abstraction), die Gespräche (collectives), die Mannschaft (singular collective), die Mannschaften (plural collectives)). Technically the Plural is the feminine gender, the differencies in declension between the feminine Plural and the feminine Singular is necessary to be able to distinguish between the grammatical plural and grammatical singular. Through centuries the German gender system got some inconsistencies, but they are explainable. That said, it is a false claim, that the masculine gender is used for male nouns, the feminine gender for female nouns and the neuter gender for things and non-living things. I think the wording is mostly the problem here, because it is mixing up Genus and Sexus and this should be clearly separated from each other. You also have to include the concept of the generic masculine.

By the way, if you doubt my explanation about the grammatical genders, just do a test. Use neuter nouns as the subject of a sentence in German, you will spot patterns that they act differently than masculine nouns. Apart from everything I wrote, good job. -77.8.147.154 (talk) 10:03, 1 March 2017 (UTC)


 * Thank you for your comment! That was very interesting to learn. It appears that this article was part of an educational assignment, and the student who created this article hasn't edited it for some time. I am not an expert, so I'm afraid I'm not of much use here. If you could add this information to the article with some references, that would be extremely helpful. Me, Myself &#38; I (☮) (talk) 00:06, 2 March 2017 (UTC)


 * Unfortunately my English is not good enough to write a WP article, which means that I am not fully aware of the meanings of words like a native English speaker is. So it would be that I write in a misleading way. A second problem is that this explanation is based on works of Indogermanists (Linguists of the Indoeuropean language/Indogermanic language) and you can't find their work in current grammar books. So most grammar books will contradict such claims. It's a matter of time when grammar books about the gender system in various languages take over this explanation. That said, it is not important for now to include the history of the German genders in this article, because that can be done in the main article about Genus. Here it is important to separate Genus from Sexus. The German genders do not care at all whether the things where the gender is attached to is a living or non-living thing, or short: German genders do not care at all about Animata and Inanimata. The criterias are meaning of the word and construction of the word. If the word describes something that has a natural gender, then the gender matches with the Sexus, but the natural gender only matches with masculine and feminine gender, because non-living is not a natural gender. If the word has affixes (prefixes, suffixes or certain endings), then a certain gender will be attached. For example -e is mostly attached with the feminine, also -a is mostly feminine. "-er, -or" is mostly masculine (English -or words like actor would be masculine in German ;-)) Another example is Ge- which is a special grammatical prefix in German and it creates mostly neuter nouns. I don't know the English translation, but in German the Ge- is used for Perfektivierung. With -schaft, -ung, -heit, -keit etc. you create feminine nouns, because these suffixes do create abstractions.


 * In the article is also the question, if learners should memorize the nouns with the article. It's their only way. Non-natives cannot identify the gender of a noun, because they have to reach a certain understanding of the language to do so. Most Germans would tell that they attach a gender through how a word sounds. The truth is their brain checks the criterias, as already mentioned meaning, affixes, construction, natural gender etc. in miliseconds, but since we don't fully know how the brain works, we cannot give learners checklists how to identify the grammatical gender.


 * Long story short, I would suggest that a clear separation between Sexus and Genus has to be made or an explanation that Sexus and Genus are different concepts in the language. I have a book written in German that explains in the first 128 pages the history of the German genders from the Proto-Indo-European language to modern German and maybe it can be used as a reference. It's called "Denksport Deutsch" from Daniel Scholten. It's not a linguistic book, but a book from an Indogermanist for non-linguists. -93.130.96.93 (talk) 10:03, 4 March 2017 (UTC)