[diN0bot]

This I wonder about: do feminine and masculine (and nueter) pronouns indicate gender when used for non-people beings, or must they match the word of those things?

    Ich hab' eine Hase, die wir Hans nennen.

The pronoun is feminine to match the word Hase, even though the hare is male as indicated by his name.

    Oder würde man "Der [die Hase] heißt Hans" sagen?

[wazoox]

In french, the article or pronoun must match the word gender too, it's always "une tortue", even if it's "une tortue male". There are often two different words for male and female animals, though: "un lièvre" (male hare), "une hase" (female hare).

[adrianN]

Hase, being masculine, is a bad example here.

But cat, Katze (feminine), and dog, Hund (masculine), work. There are versions of these words for the opposite sex, Kater and Hündin, but there are used rarely. So 'Ich habe eine Katze, Felix' and 'Ich habe einen Hund, Bella' would be perfectly acceptable even though the gender of the noun doesn't match the sex of the animal.

[masklinn]

> This I wonder about: do feminine and masculine (and nueter) pronouns indicate gender when used for non-people beings, or must they match the word of those things?

In french at least, words themselves have gender irrespective of the subject's gender. And pronouns usually match the word's gender. So a tortoise is feminine even if it's a male, so's a sparrow, a mole, a goat or a stork. Then, there may be subsets of the original word for each of the genders (or further differentiations by age). "Goat" in general is feminine but buck ("bouc") is masculine for instance.