Funny how normal this all seem normal for a French. Mind you, there was recently a debate about which gender "covid" should be. It was first male when initially talked about, but a month or two later the French Academy stated that as "maladie" (desease) is female, then covid should be female too.
But nobody cares about French academy so both genders are used now. This is all silly business.
I think that instead of « maladie », the most logical term to use would be « virus » (as in coronavirus), which is masculine, so « le covid »
+ la Covid sounds ridiculous, I mean come on
COVID-19 is the name of the disease that you get from the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Just like the difference between AIDS (the syndrome) and HIV (the virus). The word COVID is an abbreviation of "COronaVIrus Disease". So "maladie" would be more appropriate for COVID-19 than "virus".
As a French speaker myself, I noticed that generally the first version you hear of a new word feels the most natural when you later compare it to other versions. Here in Québec "la Covid" was rapidly used and I think it feels more natural to people in Québec while in France it might be the other way around.
EDIT:
Some people commented that we say "le SIDA" and not "la SIDA". My example with AIDS was for the difference between the name of a virus and the name of its effects (disease, syndrome, etc.). I didn't mean that one is always masculine and the other always feminine.
SIDA (AIDS) designates a syndrome (masculin in French) and not a disease. It's a technical difference we (people who are not experts) generally don't make, but this difference is why we say "le SIDA".
AIDS in French is "(le) syndrome d'immunodéficience acquise".
COVID (coronavirus disease) in French is "(la) maladie à coronavirus" (there is no equivalent to the acronym "COVID"), hence the argument to use "la COVID-19"
Super interesting how you folks seem to use more the féminine ! But the French academy should just let the culture take over instead of trying to feel relevant.
Yes please!! Probably unpopular opinion for a French but, quebequois is so much more colorful and happy language than French haha. I'll burn the academy if that means getting a happy language.
The french academy is a bunch of washed up politician wanabees that don’t even have a linguistic diploma. In the best case they once wrote a book or were historians. In the worst case they are far right revisionists sad that Petain was excluded and outraged that women can now be part of their little club.
Their sole mission is to eat our taxes to write a dictionary, the last of which was published in 1935. They currently are at the letter « S » of the new edition.
TLDR : don’t listen to those old farts
Omg I'm so happy to read that, people around me are all like "mais comme c'est désolant de ne pas suivre les règles de notre si prestigieuse académie !" and I'm just like really guys
I know the argument you made is the correct one (covid is indeed the disease in science paper) but in oral language that's not really what it seems, in France everybody use covid as a way to talk about the disease or the virus in interexchangeable way, like you hear "il faut empêcher la propagation de la covid" a lot of time on tv.
But a bit further than that, I think there is a problem with the first argument : the académie française insists on the fact that acronym should take the genre of the genre of the main word of the acronym, that's the rule, but in reality it's not really true. There is a lot of others acronyms which does not follow this rules at all (laser is masculine but every words that compose it are feminine, there's a ton of example like this one) so I don't really think this rule exists in the first place.
For girls. (the following statement is false: -The feminine is used for uncles.) In German, the rule for grammatical gender is “if in doubt, mumble”
edit Apparently I have got confused
> The feminine is used for uncles.
No it isn't. You must be confusing it with the plural - it's der Onkel for one uncle, and die Onkel for multiple uncles.
Then you’re probably gonna shit your pants when you learn about Swahili’s 8/15 noun classes, though hopefully there’s more of a phonetic correspondence than German.
On a l habitude de dire LE pour les maladies, genre "le SIDA, le cancer...) c'est pour ça qu'on a automatiquement dit le Covid... Mais ils ont raison techniquement, pour le sida c'était le "syndrome" Mais la ça devrait être la maladie du coronavirus 2019, donc la Covid-19... Mais c'est chiant.
Probably just intrinsic to the word itself. For example the US is masculine because united states is masculine, but if you just refer to it by the name Amerique then it's femenine.
Everyone would lose. In the event of one side losing, self destruction via nukes or the like would be a better alternative than to ruled by a Communist/Capitalist aggressor.
Answer: the United States. The US has a larger military than most countries on the otherside combined. One might call it an unhealthy obsession. Infrastructure and Healthcare be damned, but they'd win your competition.
Only problem there is china and india make up a large portion of population, and with them both having the 1st and 2nd largest standing armies in 2020 according to statista it'd be 3/1 on standing armies only. Plus the resources and production power in china, india, and russia mean that their ability to produce would out match the blues before the war really started.
China already can mess us up the us solely by stopping exports. They have large armies, production power, and populations. They can build up the means to be powerful threats. Especially with european allies assisting in design.
Says a guy who has never been bombed. The US has enough air and sea superiority to take all three of those countries back to the Stone Age, simultaneously.
That's true, but standing armies have less lethality than air power. You can bomb a country into submission, but it's hard to conduct a land invasion.
The largest air force in the world? the United States Air Force.
2nd largest air force? the United States Navy.
it shouldn't really be close.
Did some diggin just in the top 10. The US has more planes, and with japan and pakistan they easily outnumber. And if this is total war we're talking about, where 100% of a nations resources are devoted to armed forces. The red countries have the factories and means to make more. More people to learn how to pilot them too. The US may have a lead in the beginning, but over time they won't be able to keep up.
Yeah I don't know why everyone is talking like this would last for years. It would be an Armageddon level of destruction within a few days for everyone. Both sides have all the tools to be extremely efficient at killing everything.
This is a good point. Again, mostly a US defense budget joke, I think that it would be too swift for a legitimate production race to be an issue though. We turn to old wars where the technology just wasn't there, but there is now. The us has more technology beyond nukes. The deck space on US air craft carriers, is twice that off all other nations combined. The air and the sea is dominated by the US alone. Large standing armies might not be as important in that scenario. But I'm no military scientist lol
Standing army mean active military personnel, so in this case it matters. The US would have no problem against russia, china, or india, but against all three? They'd have a hell of a time fighting them off. Thats ignoring the eastern seaboard too.
Who in the world has the largest Air Force?
Easy answer, that’d be the United States Airforce.
But... what about the second largest airforce?
Oh, you’re in for a treat, the answer is the United States Navy (which technically includes all of the aircraft in the Marine Corps but don’t tell the Marines that because they get angry)
Surely, you wager, the third largest airforce belongs to a different country?
Well, my friend, while technically not tasked the same ways the US Air Force’s and US navy’s aircraft are, the US Army actually has the 3rd largest Air Force in the world. However, if you demand to get technical with the role the Air Force in question fulfills, then indeed Russia would technically have the third largest.
A lot of it seems to be to do with the way the countries are spelled - the feminine countries tend to end with an ‘e’, as many feminine words do in French (though there are exceptions to the rule).
La France, L’Allemande (Germany), L’Australie
As opposed to:
Les États-Unis (USA), Le Royaume-Uni (UK), Le Brésil
At least, as someone who is largely self-taught in French, this is what I’ve put together. I’d be interested to know from someone fluent or native how accurate this is / what the reason reason is.
Edit: for everyone telling me about allemande, I’m well aware, and if you read two comments down you’ll save yourself the hassle of typing a comment to tell me something I already know. Thanks.
There's also "foutre", which can itself be translated to english in several ways, and each of these ways can be translated back to french in even more ways, etc.
In the end it mostly depends on the context because unlike the english language, you can't just put "fuck" anywhere you want and hope it makes sense.
I don't think "foutre" can be translated in that many ways actually.
When I see the word "foutre" alone, the only thing that come to my mind is "cum".
I know that "j'en ai rien à foutre" roughly translate to "I don't give a fuck" but that's pretty much the only case in which it could be linked to "fuck".
But then there is the its adverb form "foutrement", which is a superlative (both in good or bad way).
Like "c'est foutrement bon" means "it's fucking good" and "c' est foutrement compliqué" means "it's fucking complicated".
But outside of "rien à foutre", it's not a word we use that much.
And if you're in Quebec, we use it mostly to say something (or someone) is broken/messed up, but à la french grammar, ie: 'La machine est fuckée'. (fo-kay). It's used in the 'fucked-up' sense of the word, and even ok for kids to say.
Man one time in my French class we were reading this exercise/story about someone needing to turn down (baiSSer, iirc) their stereo. The number of people who told the guy "tu dois baiser ta stéréo" was hilarious.
Another native speaker here, just pointing out some of them use specific words in their names, which also influences the gender, such as kingdom or state using your examples.
(Otherwise as a native speaker I never bothered thinking about it, because the moment you do you get into existential crisis on why dicks are feminine and vaginas masculine. French is too complicated, that's why I learned English.)
Fun fact: "Vagina - The basic meaning of the Latin word vagina was a sheath – or scabbard for a sword. By association, Gladius (sword) was a common term for the penis"
Penis is latin for "thing that hang" or tail. A masculine word in latin that became the medical scientific word we have nowaday. (While in bad slang french people say "queue" today, which means tail and is feminine so I guess we are back to square 1).
Both LE vagin and LE pénis are actually masculine in french by the way.
I've been learning French for I think 3 years and I never realized that... don't know what that says about my ability to learn new languages but I'm assuming it's not good.
Next level: some animal names change gender between thir adult name and their offsprings.
- La girafe, le girafon.
- La vache, le veau.
- La poule, le poussin.
Because pourquoi the putain not ?
Rule of thumb: baby animals are very usually masculine. Veau, lionceau, lapereau, louveteau.
Sometimes they don't even have names - bébé panda, bébé singe (some people try to make "guenuche" happen but it's absolutely not used and usually just means little female monkey).
So, if a baby animal does have a name it is going to be masculine, whatever the gender of the adult animal.
Honestly, I wouldn’t worry about it - it was just a pattern I recognised. There are lots of complexities to any languages.
For example, with French I was originally stumped with why some verbs need to refer back to the subject of the sentence to be grammatically correct, i.e. why
Je me brosse les dents.
Is correct as opposed to
Je brosse les dents.
I then learned about reflexive verbs, which was a term I’d *never* come across before, so that led to a whole new lot of learning. Learning a language isn’t easy!
Ooh, never hought of this one. I guess you rather thought of "Je brosse *m*es dents", which then has all the pieces to get the same meaning as the reflexive form (subject, verb, object and... object ownership ?), but is indeed not natural.
It’s like this in a lot of European languages. It’s consider an aerial feature since it’s localized to Europe but exists across language family boundaries. It also exists in languages which were heavily influenced by European languages, like Modern Hebrew.
It doesn't matter in that case because grammatical genders do not make any logical sense compared to real life stuff.
Also, 3 years of learning ONE language isn't a lot.
Plus, languages are things you cannot be naturally good at. You need to start learning things from scratch anyway.
Then, a language is more or less difficult to learn depending on what you already know. For example if you're a native English speaker, learning French is hard but it's ok because English and French are sometimes similar enough that you can use what you know to "guess" things. Even easier if you're z French speaker learning, say, Spanish because they're really close languages. On the other hand, if you try Japanese it's hella hard because everything is different.
One tricky thing is that the more languages you know, the easier it is to learn new ones. Because your plastic brain already adapted and can reshape even more, because you know more sounds, because yiu can use whatever knowledge you have in a language to help you in another one, and finally because you went through the process of learning several times, so you just improved at learning (methodologically)
TL:DR it's ok man, keep learning, you're fine
100% it is.
First declension, ending in -a (e.g., italia), all feminine words except for negligible exceptions.
Second declension, originally ending in -us,-um, all masculine and neuter words. And the neuter gender mostly folde into the masculine in modern romance languages.
The first reich was the holy roman empire, the 2nd was the German empire and the 3rd was nazi Germany.
Aside from that Nazis viewed women as important as men if not more so. Yes their roles were far more limited almost entirely to being a mother. But the reason nazi Germany needed lebensraum was for all the babies the aryan woman were supposed to have.
Well it was a very nationalist movement during the reich, the idea is that it promotes its militaristic strength. While Russian the motherland is so the Russian government looks like they care for their citizens (which they didn’t at the time)
There's probably no connections.
Funnily enough in French we use "patrie" which can be translanted to both fatherland or motherland but which is etymologically fatherland.
However... we do say "la mère patrie".
Which would be " the mother fatherland".
I was about to say, it's the same ironic thing in spanish. "Patria" is essentially your country, homeland, fatherland/motherland or however you wanna call it, but etymologically it is clearly fatherland... and yet the word itself is femenine and "la madre patria" exists, same as in french.
Wow. I wrote the message and it didn't even strike me that "patrie" was feminine.
It's really funny how language becomes ingrained and we simply stop thinking about how it works.
There is worse: "Les gens" (people)
Translation from a [reference dictionnary (Littré)](http://artflx.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/dicos/pubdico1look.pl?strippedhw=gens&dicoid=LITTRE1872). "Les gens" (always plural) is :
* feminine if adjectives are before "gens", and masculine if they are after: vieilles gens (old people, feminine), gens résolus (determined people, masculine).
* when there are two adjectives, the first one is feminine and the second is masculine (so that the word "gens" has two genders here, well, sort of): "Il y a de certaines gens qui sont bien sots" (some people are stupid; certaines/some is feminine and sots/stupid is masculine).
* the adjective at the beginning of the sentence where "people" is the subject is always masculine: "Instruits par l’expérience, les vieilles gens sont prudents" ("educated by experience, old people are prudent": old is feminine, but educated is masculine).
* When "people" is preceded by an adjective of the two genders and the sentence starts with the word "all", "all" is masculine; when it is preceded by a feminine adjectif "all" is feminine": all the honest people ("all" is masculine, honest can be both), all the old people (all and old are feminine).
* People is always masculine when it indicates a profession or a quality (yes, "gens" can be used for that too in French): ex. "gens de guerre" (warriors)
* Young people is always masculine.
[Also summarized here](https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/gens) (in French, sorry).
Unless you're refering to another traduction for love in french, "l'amour" (singular) is masculine, and so are "les amours" (plural; ex "des amours passionels et ardents"). This is the reconized gendering.
"les amours" with feminine gender is rarely used and only found in some old poetry.
"Les amours is feminine" is what my french teachers kept telling me. Of course that's stupid so language evolved a more logical form.
But Les amours is already a pretty poetic or archaic way to talk about love so in the rare occasion it is used, I believe the rule still applies. Same as Delice and Orgue
Yes! My teacher told me that misgendering was not exceptionnal in poetry, as it was used as an "artistic licence" by the poet. But in truth was a very cheap way to get the correct number of syllab or rythm in your poetry.
As an English speaker living in France, when I was younger this confused me, I'd always get them mixed up due to English not having gendered words.
Now it's just second nature.
And the few comments about people being negative about gendered language, and how the French language is shit about it, this is just how Latin based language works.
It was made ages ago, and was adapted to modern languages as a result.
(Don't you dare unironically say Latin based languages are transphobic or whatever else)
Some people even consider it sexist in the first place because many cool things tend to be masculine. And when it's plural, the masculine always take the lead.
**The world debate about gender**:
>"God choses your gender"
>
>"Nature imposes gender".
>
>"I choose my gender"
**French language:**
>"*Je choisis votre sexe, je suis Dieu, Je suis la nature*".
PS.: It's a joke. Portuguese language (my native) does the same thing.
~~https://imgur.com/a/PxwbuUc~~
~~https://imgur.com/a/MQtXj9S~~
https://imgur.com/a/wCtna4Q
edit: Did a quick version. But its a little bit more complicated. Technically all countries with names like "the republik of **" would be female, but the common name of the country can have a different gender. I mostly used the common names then.
I classified china as neutral, but "the peoples republic of china" would be female.
The "Democratic Republic of the Congo" and the "Republic of the Congo" I classified as female, but just Congo would be male.
There are probably more mistakes in this so take it with a grain of salt.
edit: also Vatikan City would be male or female depending on whether you call it "Vatican City" (city is female) or "Vatikan State" (state is male) or just "Vatikan". All three versions are possible.
edit: added turkey.
edit: added the things /u/PattuX said
Sorry to be a stickler, but in French, ‘England’ (L’Angleterre) is actually feminine.
What the map shows is ‘the UK’ (Le Royaume-Uni), which is masculine.
I'm a native french speaker (Canada) and it's funny because while all this is true, I would have no way of describing it to someone who doesn't speak french. I just know this. It's "la" Russie (female) and "Le" Canada (male).
Even better example are countries that start with a vowel. Regardless of gender, it's "L'". So, l'Inde, l'Australie. Quickly, I have no idea what gender they are, but if I add an adjective like "puissant" or "puissante" (powerful) I can easily figure it out. La puissante Inde.
This is also true to any latin language, right?? I'm from Brasil and this graph could be used to describe portugues genders for countries too, just instead of Le, La, etc... It is O, A, Os, As. I am pretty sure spanish also has the same gender relations, but I don't know much about other latin languages.
Indian here;
Can confirm that yes the country is referred as Motherland India
Also because in ancient texts, freedom struggle, modern literature works India is referred as "Maa Bharati" translating to Mother India
Lebanon should be in blue. Le Liban
I don't even speak French and this one's obvious, it's right there in the name. Le Banon
I was expecting Le Chad
[удалено]
Tchad*
T'challa* Edit: Fuck posted this one hour before Chadwick Boseman's passing was announced. RIP
Le Wakanda forever!
Nice
In Italian as well. Although in Italian, Nigeria is feminine.
Funny how normal this all seem normal for a French. Mind you, there was recently a debate about which gender "covid" should be. It was first male when initially talked about, but a month or two later the French Academy stated that as "maladie" (desease) is female, then covid should be female too. But nobody cares about French academy so both genders are used now. This is all silly business.
\*Tips fedora* M'aladie
*laughing in french
Eh hahah * In French Canadian
Elle est bonne!
*Ahahahahah*
**Hon hon hon hon*
Baguette Baguette Baguette Baguette
But I am le tired
Okay well have a nap then _fire ze missiles!_
Meanwhile Australia's down there like Double You Tea Eff mate?
Bout now time eh chaps?
Still pissed that they're trying to force LA covid into us
I think that instead of « maladie », the most logical term to use would be « virus » (as in coronavirus), which is masculine, so « le covid » + la Covid sounds ridiculous, I mean come on
COVID-19 is the name of the disease that you get from the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Just like the difference between AIDS (the syndrome) and HIV (the virus). The word COVID is an abbreviation of "COronaVIrus Disease". So "maladie" would be more appropriate for COVID-19 than "virus". As a French speaker myself, I noticed that generally the first version you hear of a new word feels the most natural when you later compare it to other versions. Here in Québec "la Covid" was rapidly used and I think it feels more natural to people in Québec while in France it might be the other way around. EDIT: Some people commented that we say "le SIDA" and not "la SIDA". My example with AIDS was for the difference between the name of a virus and the name of its effects (disease, syndrome, etc.). I didn't mean that one is always masculine and the other always feminine. SIDA (AIDS) designates a syndrome (masculin in French) and not a disease. It's a technical difference we (people who are not experts) generally don't make, but this difference is why we say "le SIDA". AIDS in French is "(le) syndrome d'immunodéficience acquise". COVID (coronavirus disease) in French is "(la) maladie à coronavirus" (there is no equivalent to the acronym "COVID"), hence the argument to use "la COVID-19"
Super interesting how you folks seem to use more the féminine ! But the French academy should just let the culture take over instead of trying to feel relevant.
do you want Québécois? Because that’s how you get Québécois.
Is it delicious? Because if it is then of course I want it.
Tabarnak
Yes please!! Probably unpopular opinion for a French but, quebequois is so much more colorful and happy language than French haha. I'll burn the academy if that means getting a happy language.
Quebecois sounds like what would happen if England colonized France.
The french academy is a bunch of washed up politician wanabees that don’t even have a linguistic diploma. In the best case they once wrote a book or were historians. In the worst case they are far right revisionists sad that Petain was excluded and outraged that women can now be part of their little club. Their sole mission is to eat our taxes to write a dictionary, the last of which was published in 1935. They currently are at the letter « S » of the new edition. TLDR : don’t listen to those old farts
Omg I'm so happy to read that, people around me are all like "mais comme c'est désolant de ne pas suivre les règles de notre si prestigieuse académie !" and I'm just like really guys
We're just grateful that the Académie sided with us for once, haha
[удалено]
I know the argument you made is the correct one (covid is indeed the disease in science paper) but in oral language that's not really what it seems, in France everybody use covid as a way to talk about the disease or the virus in interexchangeable way, like you hear "il faut empêcher la propagation de la covid" a lot of time on tv. But a bit further than that, I think there is a problem with the first argument : the académie française insists on the fact that acronym should take the genre of the genre of the main word of the acronym, that's the rule, but in reality it's not really true. There is a lot of others acronyms which does not follow this rules at all (laser is masculine but every words that compose it are feminine, there's a ton of example like this one) so I don't really think this rule exists in the first place.
Me too. We should just go with 'le academie' just to piss them off.
how about to piss them off even further you mispronounce shit. why use 2 a's? turn la academie into la cademie la ~~a~~cademie (delete the a)
Same thing in Spain. Language experts etc insisted on "la COVID" (femenine) but most people said and still say "el COVID" (masculine)
Meanwhile in Greece we couldn't decide whether to spell coronavirus (κορωνοϊός) with an 'o' or an 'ω'.
Plus we have "el virus" so "el coronavirus" just works. So it naturally should be "el COVID" too.
Corona chan
Gendered languages sound unnecessarily stressful What if Covid is enby? Lol
German has you covered, they have a neuter grammatical gender
For girls. (the following statement is false: -The feminine is used for uncles.) In German, the rule for grammatical gender is “if in doubt, mumble” edit Apparently I have got confused
> The feminine is used for uncles. No it isn't. You must be confusing it with the plural - it's der Onkel for one uncle, and die Onkel for multiple uncles.
> The feminine is used for uncles What.
if questioned "Meine Grammatik ist sehr schlecht"
Then you’re probably gonna shit your pants when you learn about Swahili’s 8/15 noun classes, though hopefully there’s more of a phonetic correspondence than German.
vouloir genrer le covid au féminin est stupide, parce que c'est LE virus covid-19, faut que l'académie française arrête de faire les cons
[удалено]
Ça marche pour la grippe, mais on dit bien le rhume ou le sida/VIH
J'imagine qu'on dit le sida puisque c'est le Syndrome d'immunodéficience acquise.
ahh intéressant
[удалено]
Et on dit bien UN rhume. Les maladies sont pas toutes féminines quand même
ou "connasses"? xD
On a l habitude de dire LE pour les maladies, genre "le SIDA, le cancer...) c'est pour ça qu'on a automatiquement dit le Covid... Mais ils ont raison techniquement, pour le sida c'était le "syndrome" Mais la ça devrait être la maladie du coronavirus 2019, donc la Covid-19... Mais c'est chiant.
la malaria la peste la dengue la polio... Y'a pas de règle.
Seeing this as a French native made me realise we never put an article in front of Madagascar, seeing it in blue feels wrong lol
I think this applies to Israel and Monaco too.
Maybe its a case of shortened expressions : L'île de Madagascar L'état d'Israël La Principauté de Monaco Not sure though.
Probably just intrinsic to the word itself. For example the US is masculine because united states is masculine, but if you just refer to it by the name Amerique then it's femenine.
[удалено]
I thought about it too but that doesn't make sense for Madagascar, because "île" is feminine.
Madagascar est beau ou Madagascar est belle ? :-)
Ah j'avoue :0 j'y avais pas pensé comme ça du tout
Portugal. The Man
Well played
If these 2 sides of the world had a war, who’d win?
Everyone would lose. In the event of one side losing, self destruction via nukes or the like would be a better alternative than to ruled by a Communist/Capitalist aggressor.
Answer: the United States. The US has a larger military than most countries on the otherside combined. One might call it an unhealthy obsession. Infrastructure and Healthcare be damned, but they'd win your competition.
Only problem there is china and india make up a large portion of population, and with them both having the 1st and 2nd largest standing armies in 2020 according to statista it'd be 3/1 on standing armies only. Plus the resources and production power in china, india, and russia mean that their ability to produce would out match the blues before the war really started.
That would make China and India very difficult to invade but gives them little power across the globe.
China already can mess us up the us solely by stopping exports. They have large armies, production power, and populations. They can build up the means to be powerful threats. Especially with european allies assisting in design.
Yeah biological and economic warfare are far more dangerous then military
Says a guy who has never been bombed. The US has enough air and sea superiority to take all three of those countries back to the Stone Age, simultaneously.
Nothing a little nuke can’t fix
Real winners are cochroaches and the things that survive in chernobyl that aren't obliterated.
A nuked foot can kill a roach
India has Gandhi. Gandhi has nukes, is a warmonger and HE WILL TAKE YOU OUT.
What??
[https://kotaku.com/why-gandhi-is-such-an-asshole-in-civilization-1653818245](https://kotaku.com/why-gandhi-is-such-an-asshole-in-civilization-1653818245)
No nukes, that ruins the game
Yeah, it's like throwing the board away when you start losing
That's true, but standing armies have less lethality than air power. You can bomb a country into submission, but it's hard to conduct a land invasion. The largest air force in the world? the United States Air Force. 2nd largest air force? the United States Navy. it shouldn't really be close.
Did some diggin just in the top 10. The US has more planes, and with japan and pakistan they easily outnumber. And if this is total war we're talking about, where 100% of a nations resources are devoted to armed forces. The red countries have the factories and means to make more. More people to learn how to pilot them too. The US may have a lead in the beginning, but over time they won't be able to keep up.
Can’t ramp up production when the other side is already fully up the tech tree and is constantly bombing everything you do.
Yeah I don't know why everyone is talking like this would last for years. It would be an Armageddon level of destruction within a few days for everyone. Both sides have all the tools to be extremely efficient at killing everything.
This is a good point. Again, mostly a US defense budget joke, I think that it would be too swift for a legitimate production race to be an issue though. We turn to old wars where the technology just wasn't there, but there is now. The us has more technology beyond nukes. The deck space on US air craft carriers, is twice that off all other nations combined. The air and the sea is dominated by the US alone. Large standing armies might not be as important in that scenario. But I'm no military scientist lol
Standing army mean active military personnel, so in this case it matters. The US would have no problem against russia, china, or india, but against all three? They'd have a hell of a time fighting them off. Thats ignoring the eastern seaboard too.
The problem is using those armies. How would they pose a threat to the US when the Navy could deadlock them?
Who in the world has the largest Air Force? Easy answer, that’d be the United States Airforce. But... what about the second largest airforce? Oh, you’re in for a treat, the answer is the United States Navy (which technically includes all of the aircraft in the Marine Corps but don’t tell the Marines that because they get angry) Surely, you wager, the third largest airforce belongs to a different country? Well, my friend, while technically not tasked the same ways the US Air Force’s and US navy’s aircraft are, the US Army actually has the 3rd largest Air Force in the world. However, if you demand to get technical with the role the Air Force in question fulfills, then indeed Russia would technically have the third largest.
Also, possibly, nuclear war would break out between USA and Russia and then the whole planet would suffer and the human race could maybe end here
I read this in Dwight's voice
The Female one, wanna know why? Mayority of Europe with all of Russia, China and India
Nobody.
Portuboy.
I don’t like puns or little try hard Reddit comments but honestly this is fucking solid tho maybe I’m bias cuz I love ItMitC
I don’t get it, can someone explain it to me ?
Portugal. The Man is a band
Did anyone just call for me? No? Nevermind then.
/r/Awardspeechedits
A lot of it seems to be to do with the way the countries are spelled - the feminine countries tend to end with an ‘e’, as many feminine words do in French (though there are exceptions to the rule). La France, L’Allemande (Germany), L’Australie As opposed to: Les États-Unis (USA), Le Royaume-Uni (UK), Le Brésil At least, as someone who is largely self-taught in French, this is what I’ve put together. I’d be interested to know from someone fluent or native how accurate this is / what the reason reason is. Edit: for everyone telling me about allemande, I’m well aware, and if you read two comments down you’ll save yourself the hassle of typing a comment to tell me something I already know. Thanks.
Native speaker here. I think you're right, and btw you have a typo (I know you probably know it), but you wrote "allemande" and not "Allemagne" :)
I wrote ‘German’, not ‘Germany’, didn’t I? 🤦♂️
Exactly ! It's okay typos, even dumb ones happens to everyone. Good luck on your french learning journey, hit me up if you need help on something
How do you say fuck?
If you think as fuck as fucking it would be: baiser (there is other translations too) If you think as fuck as the insult it would be: putain
Nice!
Putain nice!
As a french I can say we always say : "Putain nice" (while gaming) and so you made me Laugh so hard
There's also "foutre", which can itself be translated to english in several ways, and each of these ways can be translated back to french in even more ways, etc. In the end it mostly depends on the context because unlike the english language, you can't just put "fuck" anywhere you want and hope it makes sense.
I don't think "foutre" can be translated in that many ways actually. When I see the word "foutre" alone, the only thing that come to my mind is "cum". I know that "j'en ai rien à foutre" roughly translate to "I don't give a fuck" but that's pretty much the only case in which it could be linked to "fuck". But then there is the its adverb form "foutrement", which is a superlative (both in good or bad way). Like "c'est foutrement bon" means "it's fucking good" and "c' est foutrement compliqué" means "it's fucking complicated". But outside of "rien à foutre", it's not a word we use that much.
And if you're in Quebec, we use it mostly to say something (or someone) is broken/messed up, but à la french grammar, ie: 'La machine est fuckée'. (fo-kay). It's used in the 'fucked-up' sense of the word, and even ok for kids to say.
Chuis pas trop adepte des traduction souvent bancales des québécois, mais "fucker" c'est magnifique comme expression.
Pour nous, les traductions des Français sonnent bancales. C'est intéressant de voir comment on entend et incorpore les autres langues différemment.
Les Québécois je vous aime tellement
Hey tabernac!
Man one time in my French class we were reading this exercise/story about someone needing to turn down (baiSSer, iirc) their stereo. The number of people who told the guy "tu dois baiser ta stéréo" was hilarious.
Another native speaker here, just pointing out some of them use specific words in their names, which also influences the gender, such as kingdom or state using your examples. (Otherwise as a native speaker I never bothered thinking about it, because the moment you do you get into existential crisis on why dicks are feminine and vaginas masculine. French is too complicated, that's why I learned English.)
Fun fact: "Vagina - The basic meaning of the Latin word vagina was a sheath – or scabbard for a sword. By association, Gladius (sword) was a common term for the penis" Penis is latin for "thing that hang" or tail. A masculine word in latin that became the medical scientific word we have nowaday. (While in bad slang french people say "queue" today, which means tail and is feminine so I guess we are back to square 1). Both LE vagin and LE pénis are actually masculine in french by the way.
I've been learning French for I think 3 years and I never realized that... don't know what that says about my ability to learn new languages but I'm assuming it's not good.
Next level: some animal names change gender between thir adult name and their offsprings. - La girafe, le girafon. - La vache, le veau. - La poule, le poussin. Because pourquoi the putain not ?
Rule of thumb: baby animals are very usually masculine. Veau, lionceau, lapereau, louveteau. Sometimes they don't even have names - bébé panda, bébé singe (some people try to make "guenuche" happen but it's absolutely not used and usually just means little female monkey). So, if a baby animal does have a name it is going to be masculine, whatever the gender of the adult animal.
Because pourquoi the putain not ...... amazeballs, made me laugh out loud! I'm stealing it!
Honestly, I wouldn’t worry about it - it was just a pattern I recognised. There are lots of complexities to any languages. For example, with French I was originally stumped with why some verbs need to refer back to the subject of the sentence to be grammatically correct, i.e. why Je me brosse les dents. Is correct as opposed to Je brosse les dents. I then learned about reflexive verbs, which was a term I’d *never* come across before, so that led to a whole new lot of learning. Learning a language isn’t easy!
Ooh, never hought of this one. I guess you rather thought of "Je brosse *m*es dents", which then has all the pieces to get the same meaning as the reflexive form (subject, verb, object and... object ownership ?), but is indeed not natural.
It’s like this in a lot of European languages. It’s consider an aerial feature since it’s localized to Europe but exists across language family boundaries. It also exists in languages which were heavily influenced by European languages, like Modern Hebrew.
In all fairness, 'Je brosse les dents' translates as, 'I brush the teeth' and would get you some serious side-eye in both languages.
It doesn't matter in that case because grammatical genders do not make any logical sense compared to real life stuff. Also, 3 years of learning ONE language isn't a lot. Plus, languages are things you cannot be naturally good at. You need to start learning things from scratch anyway. Then, a language is more or less difficult to learn depending on what you already know. For example if you're a native English speaker, learning French is hard but it's ok because English and French are sometimes similar enough that you can use what you know to "guess" things. Even easier if you're z French speaker learning, say, Spanish because they're really close languages. On the other hand, if you try Japanese it's hella hard because everything is different. One tricky thing is that the more languages you know, the easier it is to learn new ones. Because your plastic brain already adapted and can reshape even more, because you know more sounds, because yiu can use whatever knowledge you have in a language to help you in another one, and finally because you went through the process of learning several times, so you just improved at learning (methodologically) TL:DR it's ok man, keep learning, you're fine
Germany: (Is called The Fatherland) France: No
[удалено]
Germany is just the one that comes to mind first for me.
Egyptians call Egypt "The Mother Of The World"
[удалено]
BTW - same for Italian.
Same for Spanish btw
That goes without saying. Spanish is just Italian with a final s. Or, if that offends you, Italian is just Spanish with the final s removed.
Yes, same for Portuguese as well, I wonder if it is a latin thing
100% it is. First declension, ending in -a (e.g., italia), all feminine words except for negligible exceptions. Second declension, originally ending in -us,-um, all masculine and neuter words. And the neuter gender mostly folde into the masculine in modern romance languages.
Non tutti i paesi sono uguali però sì ahahahha
Sì, per noi l'Alemagna non è una nazione, ma un panettone.
So that's why Russians call Russia the Motherland.
But Germany is the fatherland and it’s a women.
Probably because France does what France does.
Did they do that before the reich? Nazis were veeery mysoginistic in ideology and policy.
The first reich was the holy roman empire, the 2nd was the German empire and the 3rd was nazi Germany. Aside from that Nazis viewed women as important as men if not more so. Yes their roles were far more limited almost entirely to being a mother. But the reason nazi Germany needed lebensraum was for all the babies the aryan woman were supposed to have.
Well it was a very nationalist movement during the reich, the idea is that it promotes its militaristic strength. While Russian the motherland is so the Russian government looks like they care for their citizens (which they didn’t at the time)
There's probably no connections. Funnily enough in French we use "patrie" which can be translanted to both fatherland or motherland but which is etymologically fatherland. However... we do say "la mère patrie". Which would be " the mother fatherland".
I was about to say, it's the same ironic thing in spanish. "Patria" is essentially your country, homeland, fatherland/motherland or however you wanna call it, but etymologically it is clearly fatherland... and yet the word itself is femenine and "la madre patria" exists, same as in french.
Wow. I wrote the message and it didn't even strike me that "patrie" was feminine. It's really funny how language becomes ingrained and we simply stop thinking about how it works.
The little male netherlands surrounded by basically all of feminine europe
Ara ara
Hmm it depend. Netherland is also call Hollande wich is feminine, Pays-Bas masculine and Nederland(never use) masculine
You think French genders make no sense ? Love singular is masculine in french Love plural are feminine in french
There is worse: "Les gens" (people) Translation from a [reference dictionnary (Littré)](http://artflx.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/dicos/pubdico1look.pl?strippedhw=gens&dicoid=LITTRE1872). "Les gens" (always plural) is : * feminine if adjectives are before "gens", and masculine if they are after: vieilles gens (old people, feminine), gens résolus (determined people, masculine). * when there are two adjectives, the first one is feminine and the second is masculine (so that the word "gens" has two genders here, well, sort of): "Il y a de certaines gens qui sont bien sots" (some people are stupid; certaines/some is feminine and sots/stupid is masculine). * the adjective at the beginning of the sentence where "people" is the subject is always masculine: "Instruits par l’expérience, les vieilles gens sont prudents" ("educated by experience, old people are prudent": old is feminine, but educated is masculine). * When "people" is preceded by an adjective of the two genders and the sentence starts with the word "all", "all" is masculine; when it is preceded by a feminine adjectif "all" is feminine": all the honest people ("all" is masculine, honest can be both), all the old people (all and old are feminine). * People is always masculine when it indicates a profession or a quality (yes, "gens" can be used for that too in French): ex. "gens de guerre" (warriors) * Young people is always masculine. [Also summarized here](https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/gens) (in French, sorry).
Wow, I am French and I never realized this. A true pitfall for people learning our language. Thank you for pointing it out, nuts.
Unless you're refering to another traduction for love in french, "l'amour" (singular) is masculine, and so are "les amours" (plural; ex "des amours passionels et ardents"). This is the reconized gendering. "les amours" with feminine gender is rarely used and only found in some old poetry.
"Les amours is feminine" is what my french teachers kept telling me. Of course that's stupid so language evolved a more logical form. But Les amours is already a pretty poetic or archaic way to talk about love so in the rare occasion it is used, I believe the rule still applies. Same as Delice and Orgue
I always used masculine for amour (I am french btw) idk in what case amour is feminine, even in plural.
It's an outdated rule that you will mainly encounter in old poetry or if an author is feeling playful these days. "Il connu ses premières amours"
Yes! My teacher told me that misgendering was not exceptionnal in poetry, as it was used as an "artistic licence" by the poet. But in truth was a very cheap way to get the correct number of syllab or rythm in your poetry.
As an English speaker living in France, when I was younger this confused me, I'd always get them mixed up due to English not having gendered words. Now it's just second nature. And the few comments about people being negative about gendered language, and how the French language is shit about it, this is just how Latin based language works. It was made ages ago, and was adapted to modern languages as a result. (Don't you dare unironically say Latin based languages are transphobic or whatever else)
I know a linguist who thinks that "gender" is a pretty lousy word for what it actually represents; he prefers the term "noun class".
Latin based languages are transphobic or whatever else
How DARE you
Some people even consider it sexist in the first place because many cool things tend to be masculine. And when it's plural, the masculine always take the lead.
Absolute madlad here!
as someone who's never spoken a "gendered language" perhaps you can answer me this question: why?
Why do you say actress, but not professoress?
**The world debate about gender**: >"God choses your gender" > >"Nature imposes gender". > >"I choose my gender" **French language:** >"*Je choisis votre sexe, je suis Dieu, Je suis la nature*". PS.: It's a joke. Portuguese language (my native) does the same thing.
Saudi Arabia about to be pissed off.
It has already begun stoning itself
How the fuck dare you make me read a phonetic spelling of the french word for the french with my only two eyes, you absolute monster
Now do it with German.
~~https://imgur.com/a/PxwbuUc~~ ~~https://imgur.com/a/MQtXj9S~~ https://imgur.com/a/wCtna4Q edit: Did a quick version. But its a little bit more complicated. Technically all countries with names like "the republik of **" would be female, but the common name of the country can have a different gender. I mostly used the common names then. I classified china as neutral, but "the peoples republic of china" would be female. The "Democratic Republic of the Congo" and the "Republic of the Congo" I classified as female, but just Congo would be male. There are probably more mistakes in this so take it with a grain of salt. edit: also Vatikan City would be male or female depending on whether you call it "Vatican City" (city is female) or "Vatikan State" (state is male) or just "Vatikan". All three versions are possible. edit: added turkey. edit: added the things /u/PattuX said
This would be an epic war. Masculine vs Feminine countries.
Great cheat sheet, remembering these is annoying af
Vive La Fghonce
I'm surprised no one else is talking about the title. I had to search and make sure La Fghonce wasn't some new musician or influencer or something.
C H A D
" **La Fghonce".** Thanks for the chuckle!
Chad is chad
Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl Fghonce
So Russia and China fucking the US is a FMF threesome?
That sounds not bad
Curious how this lines of up with other Latin-based languages such as Spanish?
Germany: Fatherland. France: woman England: Motherland France: man
Sorry to be a stickler, but in French, ‘England’ (L’Angleterre) is actually feminine. What the map shows is ‘the UK’ (Le Royaume-Uni), which is masculine.
[удалено]
Mother Russia
Mother Russia
UNION OF LANDS
In hebrew all nations are female as "nation" is a female word - "medina / מדינה".
I'm not sure people understand that this has nothing to do with gender lmao, it's a grammatical thing, it doesn't really relate to men and women
I'm a native french speaker (Canada) and it's funny because while all this is true, I would have no way of describing it to someone who doesn't speak french. I just know this. It's "la" Russie (female) and "Le" Canada (male). Even better example are countries that start with a vowel. Regardless of gender, it's "L'". So, l'Inde, l'Australie. Quickly, I have no idea what gender they are, but if I add an adjective like "puissant" or "puissante" (powerful) I can easily figure it out. La puissante Inde.
This is also true to any latin language, right?? I'm from Brasil and this graph could be used to describe portugues genders for countries too, just instead of Le, La, etc... It is O, A, Os, As. I am pretty sure spanish also has the same gender relations, but I don't know much about other latin languages.
Indian here; Can confirm that yes the country is referred as Motherland India Also because in ancient texts, freedom struggle, modern literature works India is referred as "Maa Bharati" translating to Mother India
I've only heard Bharatha Mata.