Because the article for masculine and feminine are the same (“de”) so absolutely nobody knows the gender of anything.
Source: am Dutch. Can’t wait for us to just ditch gendered nouns.
Because the article for masculine and feminine are the same (“de”) so absolutely nobody knows the gender of anything.
Source: am Dutch. Can’t wait for us to just ditch gendered nouns.
Dutch is one of the few languages where it's actually pretty plausible for something like this to happen! It blew my mind that sometimes you'll all (or I guess more specifically your government) will make changes to the language to clean up issues, but I guess that's one of the benefits to having a language that's mostly based in one country (and some seemingly political baggage for the few others with any significant number of speakers; my professor said that Flemish is basically also Dutch, but my naive impression is that the half of Belgium who speak it might not be happy with that description).