Remember how I went on and on the other day about my brave new architecture? Turns out there were some unanticipated flaws in that scheme that have forced another sea change.
My journey with learning Norsk hit an unexpected landmine today, all because of our new curtains.
Having learned a decent amount of French in school, I’m passingly familiar with the notion of gendered nouns. So the masculine, feminine, and neuter categories in Norwegian weren’t a problem. And learning that many people collapse the feminine and masculine into a single common gender came as a welcome simplification. But then we bought the damned curtains.
Why is that a problem? Well, I’m sure experienced speakers of other gendered languages already know about this, but what Scandinavian genius decided that it would be cool for some words to be gender fluid? I spent 20 minutes trying to get ChatGPT to give me a straight answer about the proper declensions of “gardin”, and it tried, but the more times we circled the subject the more confused we both got.
I apologize for the confusion. In Norwegian: “gardin” is actually a common gender noun.
Ex: Indefinite singular: et gardin (a curtain) Definite singular: gardinen (the curtain)
What?! (The language savvy among you might notice that “et gardin” is neuter while “gardinen” is masculine.)
Anyway, it was only after an increasingly bizarre series of exchanges like this that I finally went to a different source and discovered that, gardin is an example of a relatively rare norsk word that can be ANY GENDER IT WANTS TO BE.
Sigh. Welcome to human language - the essential technology that is proud of its ability to make no sense at all.
