"NY" wrote in message
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"micky" wrote in message
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In alt.home.repair, on Tue, 25 Aug 2020 22:46:21 +0100, "Commander
Kinsey" wrote:

That was the second event in France for me. I asked for one pancake. Un
crepe. Apparently it's une crepe. Like a pancake can have a gender. =

Of course. Haven't you seen a boy crepe meet a girl crepe?

The seller actually looked very confused, then raised his eyebrows and =
held up one finger and said "une?"

I've always wondered why many languages (Latin, Greek, French, German are
the ones I know about) have the concept of gender for inanimate objects
(as opposed to for male/female people/animals). English chose to dispense
with gender (if it ever had it), and it's one less thing to learn.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gramma...r#Useful_roles
doesn't really come up with much of a reason for the use of
gender in language, just a few situations where is does make
what is intended less ambiguous. Seems like a very poor
justification for make the language much harder to use.

Looks like its just another example of that other
quirk of language like say that ships are female
and not male etc for no good reason at all.

Where I used to work, we had quite a few French people who were on work
exchange schemes. I asked one of them whether French people sometimes made
mistakes with gender, and how other people regarded mistakes like that. He
said it sounded slightly uneducated, but it was regarded as a very minor
mistake, like dropping an H in English.

And obvious spelling errors like draw instead of drawer
when referring to drawers in a chest of drawers etc.

Apart from a very small number of words which were identical (or sounded
identical) but one was male and one was female (*), it didn't affect
intelligibility at all.

Not intelligibility, but can remove ambiguity, rarely.

He said the thing which really *did* sound "theek as peegsheet" (his
phrase) was Belgians and Swiss who used their own words for "seventy",
"eighty" and "ninety" - septante, huitante, nonante instead of the
cack-handed French soixante-dix, quatre-vignts, quatre-vignts-dix. French
people apparently regard septante, huitante, nonante as "baby words".

But that is really just bigotry.

(*) For example:

Le mer = sea
La mère = mother