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nothrabannosirtoday at 1:53 AM1 replyview on HN

Because the article for masculine and feminine are the same (“de”) so absolutely nobody knows the gender of anything.

Source: am Dutch. Can’t wait for us to just ditch gendered nouns.


Replies

saghmtoday at 4:34 AM

Dutch is one of the few languages where it's actually pretty plausible for something like this to happen! It blew my mind that sometimes you'll all (or I guess more specifically your government) will make changes to the language to clean up issues, but I guess that's one of the benefits to having a language that's mostly based in one country (and some seemingly political baggage for the few others with any significant number of speakers; my professor said that Flemish is basically also Dutch, but my naive impression is that the half of Belgium who speak it might not be happy with that description).