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- Why is Mädchen gender neutral…
Why is Mädchen gender neutral in German when it refers to girls?
Can someone tell me?
15 Comments
Because it's a diminutive and ends in -chen. Words with those characteristics are always neutral.
Yes, as a German Mädchen (now woman) I agree with you. There is not the same principle used to speak about boys and girls. But it is so formal, that it does not make me feel to be underestimated in this mentioned case (der Junge / das Mädchen). In the last decades in Germany is an awareness for the way to use language increasing, thank God. In former times, perhaps until 1960 and later on, it was normal to call a not married woman "Fräulein" and "Frau" after her wedding. For men nothing changed. The aggrevation is the term "Fräuleinchen", which you still could hear nowadays (rarely!). That is a salutation some grownups still use, when they want to express that something about the girl or its behavior is not right - in their view. : ) Additionally - if that would be a comfort ; ) - there exists in the German language a similar degoratory term for a teenage boy or young man: "Das /ein Jüngelchen". It means, a young man does not look like or behave like a man but like a child in a negative way; the one who uses the term doesn´t take him serious.
So: Mädchen is an "emotionally" normal word; Fräuleinchen and Jüngelchen are discounting terms.
I hope that was somehow interesting for you and / or a bit amusing. Many greetings to you all Hildegard
With the suffix -lein, -chen, neuter nouns are formed. With the suffix -ei, -schaft, -keit, -ung, -heit female nouns are formed. With -ling, -eur male nouns are formed. The plural is always "DIE". das Fräulein, das Mädchen....die Liebelei, die Freundschaft, die Einigkeit, die Lesung, die Krankheit.....der Sonderling, der Transporteur. Plural: die Fräulein, die Mädchen, die Freundschaften, die Sonderlinge, die Transporteure etc. XXXX Enjoy learning German
If you look at the usage of genders in German then you will understand that the real question is "why on Earth do they call the declanation classes of nouns as masculine/feminine/neuter at all?"
There is no reason to think that a table ("der Tisch") is something masculine and a lamp ("die Lampe") is something feminine. It is just a bad historical selection of names for the three existing classes of nouns existing in the German language.
Each language has its peculiarities, in English I have the problem with the different "Perfects" Simple present perfect, present perfect progressive and past perfect progressive. In Spanish are the article differnt to German. la luna - der Mond = only "the" moon; el sol - die Sonne - the sun. That makes it so exciting to learn a language. There are some differences between German/German and Austrian/German: Schlagsahne - Schlagobers, Tomaten - Paradeiser, Kartoffel - Erdapfel, Ohrfeigen - Watschen etc.
das mädchen is the belittlement of die Maid which would actually be correct word for girl but for some reason it is hardly used maybe because the same word in english would have a different meaning people stoped using it then the engish laguage started to be used more often iin german speaking areas... it would be the same with der Junge das jüngchen