Category:Dutch nouns with incomplete gender

Definition from Wiktionary, a free dictionary

(The title of this category is misleading. It should be renamed.)

The Dutch language is sort of a cross-bred between English and German in several ways. One such way is its gender system.

German, at least the educated German used on the radio and taught in schools, has a strict three-gender system for nouns. The gender of nouns can be told by their own forms and those of their accompanying article (if any). (The form further depends on whether the noun is singular or plural and on its case.) It is impossible to use a German noun correctly without knowing whether it is masculine, feminine, or neuter.

English is much simpler. Its nouns have no gender distinctions and no case distinctions. For instance, there is only one definite article, the, used for all nouns, both for singular and plural. At the same time, the singular forms of pronouns do exist in three genders, e.g. the possessive pronoun: his (masculine), her (feminine), and its (impersonal). Masculine and feminine are used when the object being referred to is clearly masculine or feminine; in all other cases, its is used.

Dutch is in the middle. For the majority of speakers, its gender system is like English, with one complication: there are two forms of definite article, het for a large class of nouns when singular, de for all other singular nouns and for plurals. The possessive pronoun behaves much like in English, with masculine and feminine forms, used when the object referred to is clearly masculine or feminine (there is no impersonal form).

At the same time, formal Dutch and the spoken Dutch of a minority of speakers have a three-gender system for nouns. The difference with the two-gender system is in fact extremely small: it is only noticeable in the usage of pronouns and in -mostly idiomatic- expressions involving ter and ten. In the three-gender system, all "de" nouns are inherently either masculine or feminine, and the possessive pronoun (which as explained has masculine and feminine forms) must agree with the noun's own gender. This is, in fact, the only way in which the noun's gender can be observed at all!

(Meanwhile, many dialects of Dutch have a three-gender system and make case distinctions, like German.)

The problem for Wiktionary will be obvious: with the three-gender classification that is used at present, it is not clear, even to most native speakers, how to classify Dutch nouns as masculine or feminine. But if the two-gender distinction is used instead, many speakers would protest, especially in the South.

The Dutch most authoritative dictionary (Van Dale) no longer makes the distinction m/f, but the Taalunie, the intergovernmental body that regulates spelling in its (in)famous Groene Boekje does indicate it. There are certain rules of gender that even two-gender native speakers learn in school and therefore tend to use in formal language. Examples:

• abstracta derived from verbs ending in -ing, -heid, -teit, -atie are always feminine
• verb stems used as nouns are always masculine
• trees are always masculine.
• diminutives are always neuter.

In the Groene Boekje a four way split is used:

1. neuter words are indicated with their article het
2. purely masculine words are indicated with de [m]
3. purely feminine words (on -ing etc.) are indicated with de [v]
4. words that can be treated either as feminine (in the South) or masculine (in the North) are given just de.

The latter group contains most words that were historically feminine. Of course this is a compromise between North and South, but one that works about as well as color-colour does for English.

The Dutch wiktionary indicates these four cases as follows:

1. {{n}} => o
2. {{m}} => m
3. {{f}} => v
4. {{f}}/{{m}} => v/m

A final note: because Dutch as defined under ISO 639-3 as nld includes all Dutch after Middle Dutch (dum) it also includes the Dutch of the 16^th, 17^th and 18^th centuries, when the language was still definitely a three-gender tongue. This is another reason why the information whether a word is/has been feminine should not be omitted in wiktionary.