oh yes. there’s a whole bunch of them. we used to have this really weird thing where we gendered nouns based on whether they described “dead” things, and what counted as dead was a bit nebulous… so humans, clocks, most trees, and things like cities and harbors are feminine, while things like communion and the moon are masculine, and doors and rocks are non-gendered, in a category called “reale”. then masculine and feminine just… merged into “utrum”, and some stuff switched to reale, and some switched to utrum.
which means clocks are non-binary, i think.
while the swedish wikipedia article listing feminine nouns is one of the worst written i’ve ever seen (it reads like the original swedish lord of the rings translation), it does have a list of general rules and a “”“complete”“” (apparently) alphabetical list of all feminine words that don’t follow any sort of rule… which is most of them.
the article on utrum is shorter, and has like five actually interesting examples.
Wow thanks for writing that up. I’ve skimmed the first article. But, does anyone actually still use ”hon” for these formerly feminine nouns? Or is that mostly helpful when reading older texts? The article is not very clear on that (what I’ve seen of it anyway).
oh yes. there’s a whole bunch of them. we used to have this really weird thing where we gendered nouns based on whether they described “dead” things, and what counted as dead was a bit nebulous… so humans, clocks, most trees, and things like cities and harbors are feminine, while things like communion and the moon are masculine, and doors and rocks are non-gendered, in a category called “reale”. then masculine and feminine just… merged into “utrum”, and some stuff switched to reale, and some switched to utrum.
which means clocks are non-binary, i think.
while the swedish wikipedia article listing feminine nouns is one of the worst written i’ve ever seen (it reads like the original swedish lord of the rings translation), it does have a list of general rules and a “”“complete”“” (apparently) alphabetical list of all feminine words that don’t follow any sort of rule… which is most of them.
the article on utrum is shorter, and has like five actually interesting examples.
Wow thanks for writing that up. I’ve skimmed the first article. But, does anyone actually still use ”hon” for these formerly feminine nouns? Or is that mostly helpful when reading older texts? The article is not very clear on that (what I’ve seen of it anyway).
it doesn’t show up in daily use, no.