this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2024
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[–] barsoap@lemm.ee 6 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

German also has adjective ordering, in fact I never learned English adjective ordering because the two are close enough.

Also it's called noun classes. "noun gender" is Indo-European-centric, it just happens to be the case that all languages of that family have three noun classes, and each of them put the words for "man", "woman", and "thing" in distinct ones. Otherwise noun classes have, linguistically speaking, absolutely nothing to do with gender. A woman is referred to as "she" not because she's female but because "woman" is in the same noun class as "ship", and men and women are in different classes because the function of classes is about short, unambiguous references and "She caressed him" would be rather ambiguous if it was "it caressed it". Also it's "who caressed whom", not "who caressed who", different topic but you can tell by the "him" instead of "he".