Odd linguistic question? A woman translated to German is die Frau, using the female "the", and both boy and man are translated to der Junge and der Mann respectively, with the male "the", but girl is translated to das Mädchen, using the nuter "the" Why is the female "the" not used, or boy also translated to a nuter "the", like how the word children is, das Kind. Language is confusing, gender even moreso
Not at all odd, I think this comes up a lot.
Grammatical gender and societal gender (people’s gender) are NOT actually as related as you might think. The grammatical gender is a specification of a ‘noun class’ system many languages use for conjugation - and only a quarter of them actually deal with ‘gender’.
i e. The language doesn’t ACTUALLY care about the gender of the noun. It only cares about what the language has evolved to accept as the current agreed upon conjugation.
You THINK they are intrinsically related because you are used to associating ‘feminine’ nouns with ‘feminine’ things. Indo-European languages lean heavily into the male/female grammatical gender dichotomy (and some languages include a neuter).
BUT - not all the world’s grammatical genders are based on this system. Some grammatical genders use an animate/inanimate distinction. MOST grammatical genders in gendered languages end up arbitrarily assigning genders to inanimate objects that lack all sex characteristics. Many languages can’t agree whether a table is ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ or ‘neuter’. Russian has two words for potato, derived from the same root - and one of them is ‘feminine’ and another is ‘masculine’: картофель [kartofel’] (m) and картошка [kartoshka] (f) (Sorry, can’t be fucked to do IPA rn).
Grammatical genders ARE obviously tied to gender in a cultural way - even now we assign gender characteristics to inanimate objects, and we do this even in English, where there is NO grammatical gender (ships are ‘she’, etc). HOWEVER, the fact of the matter is - grammatical gender is, at its base, just a noun class system that’s wearing some pumps and a bowtie, and it is in no way obligated to follow any amount of social conduct - it’s doing whatever it wants and whatever its native speakers decide is the most convenient at the moment. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
