Why is the Swedish language so bizarre when it comes to nouns classes/genders? From what I have noticed, there is literally no way to tell the gender of a noun neither from Its spelling, nor meaning. There seems to be no identifiable pattern to tell whether you should use en or use ett and the only way is to memorise when to use what for which word. A learner may assume that words for people and animals must be common (utrum) and that for inanimate objects must be neuter (neutrum). Of course the second case is absolutely untrue, but for the first case, it seems so convenient for all living things to be utrum. But then "the man" is "mannen" while "the child" is "barnet". I suppose I could think of this such that since the origin of the utrum gender is by merging masculine and feminine while neutrum remained for neutral words, since a child can be both male and female it has remained as neutrum while man was originally masculine, it became utrum. But then this doesn't work for words for animals that can be both male or female. What animal names are utrum and what are neutrum is also hard to determine. "The cat" is "katten" while "the bee" is "biet". Is this because insects are thought of as less animate than vertebrates like cats, dogs, birds etc? Also false. "The fly" is "flugan". For names of inanimate objects and abstract nouns, there seems literally no identifiable way whatsoever to guess the gender, not even from spelling. In most other languages like French, Hindi etc you can tell the gender usually from the spelling itself. Is there any other language with no way to determine noun gender like Swedish? I suppose Norwegian and Danish are like this too? What about Icelandic?
>>77234576
Bump.
It is the same in danish, although the bee is "bien" in danish.
There is no logic in this.
I think you can't tell the gender of a noun in german either.
>>77235440
Is it true that ore means ear when it is neuter but it is a unit of currency when common? How many other examples exist like this?
never bothered memorizing them so i use them randomly or what might sound better. and if a swede tries to correct me i just ignore him because i wont condone to such useless grammatical drivel as gendered nouns
Because applying genders to inanimate objects is pointless.
Isn't this the case in all germanic languages? Eventually when you get a feel for the language you'll be able to guess
>>77235543
True.
Can't think of many examples. Lærer and lager are pronounced almost the same (lager is with a glottal stop), but they have different genders.
En lærer, et lager.
>>77235610
Is it? What about Dutch and German? It may be difficult to guess the gender but I don't think it's completely random, patterns do exist, no?
I speak Swedish well enough to get by when I visit sweden and I honestly forgot the words have genders.
>>77235513
That's correct. Some words don't have a set gender, people just can't converge on one.