On Language

Now that we're living in Holland I'm reacquainting myself with Dutch, which I learned by immersion more years ago than I'll admit.  I long go lost fluency from disuse, but all these years later I am a much more sophisticated language end-user, so I'm noticing things I wasn't aware of before. In this episode of "language strikes you funny," specifically "the Dutch language strikes you funny," we will be discussing gendered nouns and their associated gendered articles and pronouns. Those of you who think this level of attention to language is geeky and tedious have permission to run screaming from this little piece of cyber space right now, so as not to spoil the fun for the rest of us.

Alrighty then, for the lonely language geek still with me (you know who you are): unlike English, many languages have two or three genders for nouns. In French and Spanish all nouns are either masculine or feminine, and if preceded by the word "the," the "the" has to be in the appropriate masculine or feminine form (e.g., le garcon and la fille). Also, if you want to use a pronoun in place of the noun, you have to use the language's word for "he" or "she" rather than the impoverished one-size-fits all "it" we use in English. Same thing in German, except German, just to make things more difficult for everybody else, uses three genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter (der mann, die frau, das kind).

Yes, you say, this stuff is truly fascinating and all, but what does it have to do with Dutch? Dutch is closely related to German, so you might expect it to have three genders. It is even more closely related to English, as it happens, so now that you know this nifty fact you might expect Dutch to have only neuter nouns. Well, I hate to shatter your entirely rational expectations, but Dutch has only two genders. AHA!, you exclaim, so it's got that masculine-feminine duality thing going on; it's a romance language wanna-be! WRONG AGAIN!! No, Dutch has the following two genders: masculine and neuter.

Doesn't that just make you wonder? I mean, how do you come up with the idea that there are only two categories of things in the world: "Male" and "Everything Else"? What does that say about you as a language, a culture, a people? And to make matters worse, for someone trying to learn the language, it's anybody's guess what's masculine, what's neuter, and why. Not surprisingly, the word for "man" is masculine: "de man." Surprisingly, the word for "woman" is masculine: "de vrouw." If someone asks me where my jacket is in Dutch, I have to say (in Dutch) "He is hanging in the closet." Of course, since I generally have no idea whether my jacket, or any other item of clothing, is hanging in the closet or is masculine or neuter (a masculine bra hanging in the closet, now that would be funny!) I've been trying to think of a way around this little linguistic problem. I considered dropping pronouns altogether, but that won't work, because if you say "the jacket" you have to know whether to use "de" or "het," and if you say "my jacket" you have to know whether to use "mijn" or "mijne."

From now on, I'm sticking with verbs.