For example, in German, is it ever funny to switch a der for a die or das, and/or to change word endings for gender agreement? Or is this so trite and cheesy that it never happens after childhood? Or would such constructions just be nonsense to a native speaker?
Also, is it funny (or embarrassing, etc.) when a native speaker accidentally gets the gender of a noun wrong, or he just doesn’t know it because it’s a rare word?
I’d like to hear answers for any language with grammatical gender, of course, not just German.
Spanish yes. There’s also words which change meaning depending on gendered ending and in some cases the jokes are so easy nobody over age 7 bothers with them: pollo is chicken, polla can be either a young hen or, more commonly, a penis (huevos, eggs is slang for testicles; a penis sits on top of two of them like a hen).
Or other words point to more adult slang. Calling a man loca (feminine for loco/crazy, is calling that man gay (homosexual), stereotypically a very… flamboyant gay?
Some words take either gender depending on how it was adopted or situations. La computadora/el computador/the computer are all the same, but some regions use one way, others use the other. La mar/el mar is another one that changes. I’ve personally only have seen the feminine form more commonly in poetry and poetic prose, while the second form is the most commonly used.
It is not embarrassing, but it is a mark of “poor education” when a native speaker gets some words wrong. A classic example in my region is calor. It’s supposed to go with el, but many use la (incorrect form). Yes, it is taught at school that the proper way is el calor and not la calor, but many don’t care. It annoys me when I speak someone and they do that.
I can’t think of any in Norwegian, but that could be because I have a mind like a sieve. I suspect if there are any they are childish/trite. Using the wrong gender for words is often used as a marker to show a character is an immigrant.
German - no. I can’t think of any joke that relies on switching gender, and native speakers do not get genders wrong - there are rules to it, so it’s not that hard. It’s not like you have to remember the gender for every single word in existence. Endings for example almost always give you a clue.
I’m a native English speaker, but I’ve learned French as well. I’m taking a job skills class that’s entirely in French. One of the francophone students in the class said to the teacher that she finds it cute when a non-native French speaker gets a word’s gender wrong.
Not really in German, with one exception: there are some very few homonyms that differ by gender, and you can get a pun out of it if you exert yourself. Puns being one of the more puerile forms of humor, it’s only encountered infrequently in German.
For example: Leiter (n, f) = ladder, Leiter (n, m) = leader, boss, supervisor, instructor
*Lasst uns die Leiter an die Wand stellen *= Let’s lean the ladder against the wall Lasst uns den Leiter an die Wand stellen = Let’s put the boss before a firing squad
Now, French, that’s a totally different animal. Having only studied French for two years, genders are indeed one of the biggest problems for Germans, because not only do you have to distribute your neutral words between male and female, some of the words switch genders! Notably, “der Mond” and “die Sonne” becomes “la lune” and “le soleil”. Those crazy french…
I don’t know if this qualifies as a pun or joke, but when Emmy Noether was in her prime as a mathematician, some called her Der Noether, apparently a reference to her supposed masculine appearance. I suspect it was more a reaction to having a lecturer be a woman in the 1920s, when that was unknown. (There is a story that David Hilbert got her a position insisting that the university was not a public bath.)
Let me mention also that gender is quite fluid. A friend spent her first 12 years in Italy in a small town about 100 miles from Rome. She mentioned that the genders of quite a number of words differed from that of the Roman dialect.
Also let me mention one story a linguist told me. There was a French language feminist magazine published here and an author of one of the articles got criticized for having used too many masculine nouns in her article.
Similarly, the only example of that kind of joke in German I can think of is that Angela Merkel sometimes is referred to as “das Merkel”, an allusion to her allegedly not very feminine features.
Shrug, it’s also often la calor in my area (we know it’s a localism), and if you ask someone from Seville, they’ll tell you that el calóo is nowhere near as hot as la calóooooo.
Re. loca for gays, I’ve heard it used to mean a very flamboyant gay man who can’t resist a temptation. And of course a reina (queen) isn’t the same as a reinona (drag queen).
Huevos = balls has filtered into American English, too. Not everyone will understand it, but many people do. Cojones is more common, and of course is generally used more in the sense of “having courage” rather than referring to anatomy.
Actually, to clear this up, what Norwegian doesn’t have is noun-adjective agreement. However, as with most good card-carrying Indo-European languages (with English as, I believe, the sole exception in Europe), nouns certainly have gender, and can either be male, female or neuter*. I can’t think of any jokes either, though.
(*Although, as a side note, it seems like Norwegian really only wants to have two genders, like Danish and Swedish, not three. As a result, the feminine gender is a bit retarded, as it were. That’s not really funny, though. Also, please don’t quote that out of context.)
Very insteresting!, I’ve always wandered about the origin of “polla” for penis, it’s so simple I’m baffled I didn’t figure it out before. This is not related but, all of the spanish people I’ve met in Chile find it hilarious that one of the 2 main lottery companies in the country is called “La Polla Chilena de Beneficiencia” :D.
Yeah, a loca is in fact a very flamoyant man (not necessarily gay, although that’s usually the case). It’s usually used in demeaning way.
I can only speak about Santiago but, yes, it is a mark of poor education, but as Nava pointed out, it can vary from location (although I’ve never been anywhere where it’s “accepted”, except for very rural places where people are generally poorly educated).
Also, the use of the feminine form is often used to mock people. For example, is someone says something smugly you may answer “ella, la ____” like “I got a perfect score in the test” - “Ella, la matea*”. I’ve been told that this is very Chilean and is not done in other countries, I’ve also been told that the specific tone of voice used with this kind of phrase isn’t used in other places. If you want to know what kind of tone I’m talking about, it’s something like this. Hay Patria Chilenos: Sushi - YouTube