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by aasasd 2691 days ago
My objection is not to the formulation of the rule, but to the existence of the rule―because where I'm from, a little girl is still a girl, grammatically too.

(Even though I agree in general that little kids make crappy men and women.)

1 comments

Ah, then maybe to clarify further: This rule applies to virtually every word. A table is "der Tisch" (male), a small table is "das Tischchen" (neutral); a tree is "der Baum" (male), a small tree is "das Bäumchen" (neutral); a break is "die Pause" (female), a small break "das Päuschen" (neutral), etc. In theory you can take every word and diminish it by appending "-chen".

You could still argue, that the "-chen"-rule should be overwritten by an "obvious-grammatical-gender"-rule.

My complaint still stands, but OTOH I just realized I now have a way to turn German into English at least in one aspect.