Abstract
Despite Mark Twain’s impression of the German gender system, there are far more regularities than he was aware of. In this chapter, the main features of the gender systems of German and English will be presented under different aspects; a comparison of the two systems will be made in order to underline clearly the areas of similarity and difference. This chapter thus serves as part of the background to the work on acquisition of gender.
A person who has not studied German can form no idea of what a perplexing language it is.… Every noun has a gender, and there is no sense or system in the distribution; so the gender of each must be learned separately and by heart. There is no other way. To do this, one has to have a memory like a memorandum book. In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has. Think what overwrought reverence that shows for the turnip, and what callous disrespect for the girl.
Mark Twain, The Awful German Language (1879)
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© 1986 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Mills, A.E. (1986). A Comparison of the Gender Systems in English and German. In: The Acquisition of Gender. Springer Series in Language and Communication, vol 20. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-71362-0_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-71362-0_3
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-71364-4
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