Quote:
Originally Posted by BetterRed
Noun genders in German are more or less arbitrary. In the case of items of clothing it has nothing to do with the sex of the persons who would wear them. Büstenhalter is masculine. Different nouns for the same thing can have different genders.
There are some guidelines here ==>> https://germanwithlaura.com/noun-gender/
German, Austrian and Swiss rivers are feminine whereas the rest are masculine. Not exactly arbitrary, just plain bloody daft  |
And would you believe that all French vaginas are masculine?
English is getting its share of gender problems too. There is a growing resistance to using singular possessive pronouns. This results in many sentences which clearly start 'singular' and then finish plural because the writer is unwilling to say 'his' or 'her' for fear of betraying the gender of the person referred to earlier.
'Their' has now become both a singular and plural possessive form because the only other alternative in English is to write 'his or her' (of course, the writer could always declassify the person by using 'its'). The same trend applies to modern usage of all pronouns in English.
Possessives, in a language where nouns are gendered like French, betray the gender of the noun and not of the owner of the object.
Languages (and people) are daft in many ways.