Recent searches
Search options
HackW/E@LinuxHotel @amapanda@en.osm.townGermans like to borrow English words a lot. Apparently, to find the grammatical gender of the word, you translate the English word into German, and use that! 
So it's „die Community“, or within OpenStreetMap „der Node“ (from „der Punkt“ or „der Knoten“)
When you ask German speakers about the grammatical gender, they'll tell you that they “just know” from the feel of the word, which grammtical gender it is. 
@amapanda So it depends on which translation you’re thinking of.
Probably it also depends on dialects, since Germans don’t always agree on the grammatical gender, i.e. in the Allemannic south (including Switzerland) it’s “der Butter” und “das Tunnel“.
@amapanda There are three well-known words in French which change grammatical gender in the plural. I used to know them, but now can only remember that they were used to name three barges moored on the Seine during one of the Great Exhibitions.
**edit** https://www.reddit.com/r/French/comments/hh5qah/fun_fact_some_words_change_gender/
@amapanda Same in Italian.
@amapanda hrm, me personally, as a native speaker, I'd much rather say "die Node" (although I'm maybe in the minority there)
And I can think of other cases where it doesn't match ("der Song", "das Lied") or where there just isn't really a german word to match with ("der Download", ???)
so, it's not a hard and fast rule, but it does seem to work in the majority of cases
@amapanda my guess is: the more there's a phonetically close direct translation, the more the rule applies
@JostMigenda @amapanda that's so interesting! I did a quick search earlier to confirm I'm not the only person going for "die Node" and qualitatively saw a similar split! wonder whether there's any truth to that
@floy @JostMigenda I had to check the OSM wiki, and it told me it's „der Node“...
That's probably because in a network a node is a machine
And machines are feminine
In a graph nodes are dots or circles
And those are masculine
@calispera @JostMigenda @floy the German word „See“ has 2 meanings with different genders, I wonder if „Node“ is another example of that...
@amapanda yeah, it’s at least big part of it. And then you end up with things that don’t have an agreed upon grammatical gender, like „der/das Blog“ or „das/die Nutella“ (for newly created words that aren’t just taken from other languages).