> Every noun has a gender, and there is no sense or system in distribution; so the gender of each must be learned separately and by heart. There is no other way. To do this one has to have a memory like a memorandum-book.
And yet, every German speaker seems to be able to remember this, without evidence of them being better at memorization than others?
As usual, it's easy to forget how hard things are for others when you're the expert. I'm sure Twain never thought about how ridiculously hard many English words are to spell, and how people learning English as a second language struggle quite a lot with it.
But the thing is, with practice, we do learn these things. With practice speaking German, you'll learn and remember the gender of each noun, it simply becomes part of the noun itself. And with practice writing English, you'll learn the spelling - illogical as it is, it simply becomes part of the word itself.
But looking at my language, I'm not so sure how much of this is pure memory. Swedish, like all Scandinavian languages, has four genders for nouns, but only one of them stick out and modify words and sentences. Being a native speaker, I of course know the gender for each noun, and you could argue that I have memorized this. But I can also properly gender new words. I can gender words I've never heard before. I can construct new words, and gender them correctly as well, and have other Swedish speakers independently agree with me on what the gender of this new word is. So clearly there are rules, it's not the case that someone else decided the genders, and then everyone else had to memorize what this person arbitrarily chose.
And I'm pretty sure German actually works the same way.
> I'm sure Twain never thought about how ridiculously hard many English words are to spell
I'm sure Twain was well aware of it, and wrote the article on the awful German language tongue in cheek for amusement, rather than as an actual complaint.
In fact, English does something very similar. There's a bookshelf, but never a furniture - you can say a piece of furniture if you want to be fancy. There's a cow, and cows, but never a cattle, or even cattles. (What do you mean they are uncountable. They are freaking cows.) Then there are crazy stuff like a pair of scissors. (I mean, has anyone seen a scissor?) Somehow native English speakers memorize all of this.
At least genders are conceptually easy: given a word, you have one gender. (Though I'm sure there are complications.)
You can very often guess the gender of a word in german using some heuristics. For instance, anything ending in -heit is feminine, and -chen neutral.
I wrote an elaborate analysis os these heuristics (if someone is into this kind of thing) https://mejuto.co/statistical-grammar-guessing-a-german-noun...
But you should take into account that some rules are more general expressions of others. For example, in your penultimate "(recommended)" table, there is no point in having both "-hen" and "-chen" for neutral, as the latter is a specialization of the former. Same for "-ung" and "-rung"/"-tung" in feminine.
"I am indeed the truest
friend of the German language - and
not only now, but from long since - yes,
before twenty years already. And never
have I the desire had the noble language
to hurt; to the contrary, only
wished she to improve - I would
her only reform. [...] After all these
reforms established be will, will
the German language the noblest and the
prettiest on the world be."
It would be very strange if he learned this language for his whole life and would despise it. But Mark Twain wouldn't be himself if he couldn't mock a thing he loved.
> And yet, every German speaker seems to be able to remember this, without evidence of them being better at memorization than others?
actually we don't the system is so stupid that we try to remove the gender altogether or try to make stupid words like "der Student"/"die Studentin" because Mark Twain tought it is only a linguistic gender, but unfortunatly a lot of people do not think that our gender is only linguistic, that's why we try to re-gender a lot of words. sometimes by splitting it into two, sometimes by using special characters. Our language reforms do not make it easier, they make it worse.
to make it easy, for us we learn "der tisch" and not just "tisch" so the noun is learned aswell.
> As usual, it's easy to forget how hard things are for others when you're the expert. I'm sure Twain never thought about how ridiculously hard many English words are to spell, and how people learning English as a second language struggle quite a lot with it.
Exactly. You most often cannot guess the gender of a noun in quite a lot of languages (German, Spanish, French, etc), but most of the time you also cannot guess how an English word is pronounced without having heard it before (and made the connection with the spelling, which is sometimes very tricky).
It's not so clear and cut. For example, "acción" and any other noun that express the result of a verb ends in -ón, but they are female words. There are also plenty of male words that end in -a, and female words that end in -o: https://www.practicaespanol.com/mas-de-40-palabras-que-acaba...
> But I can also properly gender new words. I can gender words I've never heard before. I can construct new words, and gender them correctly as well
It's generally the case in French too, but there are cases for which people don't agree. A recent example is a nation-wide disagreement on whether to say "le" or "la" Covid.
Could you tell something or give a link about that Swedish fourth gender? You made me interested when you wrote about it but I can't find anything about it on the Internet.
Correct, there is only en-ord and ett-ord and it has been so for centuries.
There are 3 personal pronouns (One of them less than 20 years old for politically correct language to describe either woman or man.) But grammatically all 3 cause declensions like en-ord, so they don't form a different grammatical gender.
> As a solution some feminists in Sweden have proposed to add a third class of gender-neutral pronouns for people.
Uh, no, we borrowed it straight up from our neighbours in Finland, because Finnish doesn't have gendered third-person pronouns!
As an added bonus, "hen" slots in perfectly among the other two pronouns (han/hon), it follows broad vowel rules for gender, and it's perfectly understandable even if you've never seen the word used before.
All four genders are listed on that page: masculine, feminine, common, neuter. The first three are grammatically identical, but the fourth one sticks out.
In English, the indefinite article is either a/an, depending on the vowel sound of the noun. In Swedish it's either en/ett, depending on the gender. Examples:
en mus - a mouse
ett hus - a house
But the grammatical gender carries and modifies more things like the definite article (den/det) and every adjective.
And yet, every German speaker seems to be able to remember this, without evidence of them being better at memorization than others?
As usual, it's easy to forget how hard things are for others when you're the expert. I'm sure Twain never thought about how ridiculously hard many English words are to spell, and how people learning English as a second language struggle quite a lot with it.
But the thing is, with practice, we do learn these things. With practice speaking German, you'll learn and remember the gender of each noun, it simply becomes part of the noun itself. And with practice writing English, you'll learn the spelling - illogical as it is, it simply becomes part of the word itself.
But looking at my language, I'm not so sure how much of this is pure memory. Swedish, like all Scandinavian languages, has four genders for nouns, but only one of them stick out and modify words and sentences. Being a native speaker, I of course know the gender for each noun, and you could argue that I have memorized this. But I can also properly gender new words. I can gender words I've never heard before. I can construct new words, and gender them correctly as well, and have other Swedish speakers independently agree with me on what the gender of this new word is. So clearly there are rules, it's not the case that someone else decided the genders, and then everyone else had to memorize what this person arbitrarily chose.
And I'm pretty sure German actually works the same way.