Talk:Ayahuasca

RFC discussion: January 2022

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Ayahuasca

Unsure about the gender in German, no references online probably feminine or neuter or both LinguisticMystic (talk) 11:40, 10 January 2022 (UTC)

The only gender-revealing use in the Wikipedia article is des Ayahuasca, which is ambiguous between masculine and neuter. Doing a Google ngram search for "die Ayahuasca" vs. "das Ayahuasca" isn't helpful because it will include such uses as Menschen, die Ayahuasca benutzen or ein Ritual, für das Ayahuasca verwendet wird with a relative pronoun whose gender doesn't tell us anything about the gender of Ayahuasca. —Mahāgaja · talk 13:54, 10 January 2022 (UTC)

OK, I've found the following sites that use das Ayahuasca unambiguously showing it to be neuter: [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6]. I couldn't find any unambiguous instances of its being used as a masculine or feminine, so I'm marking it as neuter alone in the entry. —Mahāgaja · talk 14:06, 10 January 2022 (UTC)

Thanks, seems like it is considered some sort of a proper noun in German, which it probably should not be. LinguisticMystic (talk) 14:14, 10 January 2022 (UTC)

I wouldn't say it's treated as a proper noun, what gave you that impression? —Mahāgaja · talk 14:21, 10 January 2022 (UTC)

At least in the Wikipedia article they seemed to avoid using it as a noun, or maybe just avoided using the articles, I don't know. LinguisticMystic (talk) 14:39, 10 January 2022 (UTC)

But even proper nouns have articles, so ... LinguisticMystic (talk) 14:41, 10 January 2022 (UTC)

Not relevant to this discussion as the gender has been found out. However, I personally believe that there are some truly genderless German nouns. On the one hand, there's of course the plural-only words (no idea who put masculine in Leute; it would have been my intuition too but there's no manifestation of it), on the other hand, there are some proper nouns (stuff like Instagram comes to mind; then again, you could probably say "das Instagram von heute") but even some regular nouns (Gassi, maybe). — Fytcha〈 T | L | C 〉 14:53, 10 January 2022 (UTC)

This post has "dann gibt es eben heute kein Gassi" and "… ging die Pflegemutter… unlustig und ohne Erwartungen ein grosses Gassi mit ihr", both establishing it as a neuter. —Mahāgaja · talk 16:06, 10 January 2022 (UTC)

I don't think there are any "truly [grammatically] genderless" singular nouns in German (yet — the pan-linguistic move that's produced frœur and hen and latine and so forth may establish some), although there are words so spottily attested that it's not possible to tell their gender at this time (perhaps that's already what you mean). If we run them through a universal comparer (d__ X von...), the grammatical gender becomes identifiable. Regarding pluralia tantum, I recall this being discussed before (either about German or more generally), and the solution is that "plural" is a complete grammatical gender without necessarily having to be specified m-p, f-p, etc. - -sche (discuss) 20:49, 10 January 2022 (UTC)

I think brands and company names can be genderless, such that only constructio ad sensum applies in the personal pronouns and possessive determiners, e.g. Ich werde mit DHL sprechen, um herauszufinden, wohin sie dein Paket verbracht haben. (which is else disallowed in German)

There was this discussion about removing genders from German nouns but they have ignored that zwei was declined for gender up to the classical language, so zween Eltern m. It’s a correct observation though the functional load of the gender distinction in the plural is so low that it is practically well ignorable in lexicographic treatment. Fay Freak (talk) 03:38, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

RFC-resolved. — Fytcha〈 T | L | C 〉 14:21, 17 January 2022 (UTC)