Actually, there would be a slight difference in pronunciation between the two meanings, but yeah, it’s slight. And curiously enough, it doesn’t get marked ortographically.
Él toca el violín y ella la viOla; he plays violin and she viola
Él toca el violín y ella la VIOla; he plays violin and she rapes her
I’ve got a filipino gf who speaks excellent english but still occasionally confuses her “he” and “she” which is just “shya” in tagalog. When talking about two people of different genders, it gets VERY confusing when that mistake is made, who she is talking about and sometimes I have to tell her to backtrack cus I’ve been assuming she was talking about the man because she says “he” for “she”.
Filipinos also have problems describing where things are, like in/on/around/near because that is all one word in tagalog. My favorite mistake was “Put the bread on the toaster” which sounds hilarious and cute.
In Italian, there is a proverb, “I Fatti Maschii, Parole Femine”. The deeds masculine, the words feminine and the words themselves follow these genders.
D’oh! At least the preceding sentence fragment suggests that I did mean to say the right thing, which is that *der Leiter der Leiter *can mean ‘the leader of the leaders’.
The lack of orthographic distinction for different pronunciations for different meaning is fertile ground for wordplay.
Sign above school doorway: Girl’s Entrance
Graffito over sign: They certainly do!
God knows the richness in Chinese for such play. I’d love to have some explained to me.
Believe it or not, once in awhile native speakers do get the gender wrong. A few months ago I was listening to Deutschlandfunk, which is sort of like the German analog to NPR in the United States. At one point, I heard the newsreader correct himself on the gender of Sport, which of course means the same thing as in English. I was quite surprised by that, and would have bet my life it couldn’t happen until I heard it.
I do agree the rules will help you determine the gender of a noun in the overwhelming majority of cases, but doesn’t anyone ever trip up on the exceptions? For instance, in geography most river names are feminine, but many of those names look more like masculine or neuter nouns, e.g. die Weichsel and die Oder. (“the Vistula” and “the Oder”.)
It certainly can yield humorous results when carelessly translated to English.
:smack:
The way I put it is just a dig at technique. A common enough burn in music school, but the joke that was told to me (I internally PC-ed it) is:
Ella toca el violín, y el la viola.
She plays the violin and he rapes her.
(Only one feminine object, so joke is clear.)
An old joke (that doesn’t quite meet the OP’s requirements, because it is not IN the relevant language but ABOUT it).
A visitor to the Gaeltacht is learning Irish. In a restaurant in the evening, he wants to show off what he has learned that day. Pointing at a fly, he says “an cuileog”. The waiter corrects him, saying “an chuileog, sir, it’s feminine”. The customer exclaims, “well by god, son, haven’t you great eyesight!”