Friday, February 3, 2012

He, she, it... or neutral?

In my Communicating Diversity class today we discussed how in North America we have "he" and "she", and no neutral term. We discussed how our society is constructed in a way that we have specific things we want to fit into certain categories.
When I learned about this I thought about my German side. What I learned about the German language is that they use more than masculine, feminine but also neutral. (They assign this to objects as well). 
Example:
A table (Der Tisch) Male
A car (Das Auto) Neutral
A fork (Die Gable) Female
Words that end in "er" are usually masculine, and words that end in "ung" are feminine. Foreign words are often neutral.
I thought I would share this because it showed me how diverse languages and societies are.

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