Talk:Frobenius

Surname gender

@Benwing2: Sorry, I never touch these because in my opinion it is borderline nonsensical to ascribe a gender to surname proper nouns. If I had to guess, I'd say they could all be either male or female, depending on the sex of the referent which is addressed by only the surname. Funnily enough, while we mention a questionable gender for surnames, we don't include their plurals which on the other hand obviously exists: "Die Schmidts sind..."

(Notifying Matthias Buchmeier, -sche, Atitarev, Jberkel, Mahagaja, Fay Freak): For more input. — Fytcha〈 T | L | C 〉 06:52, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

@Fytcha Yeah we should be mentioning the plurals; we do this for Russian surnames, for example. I'll look into fixing this. Benwing2 (talk) 06:57, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

@Fytcha You can find various hits for "des Herrn Kessler" and a couple for "des Herrn Kesslers" on Google, although maybe this is grammatically incorrect? Benwing2 (talk) 07:06, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

I usually mark them as both masculine and feminine, as you can say things like "Meine Mutter ist eine Frobenius". I don't know whether "des Herrn Kesslers" is grammatically incorrect (either proscriptively or descriptively), but certainly you can say "Wir sind in Kesslers Garten". I would even say "Wir sind in Frau Kesslers Garten", but that might be interference from my native language (English) rather than good German. —Mahāgaja · talk 07:37, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

@Fytcha, Benwing2, Mahagaja: Colloquially, I heard Germans use surnames as common nouns with definite articles, e.g. "Ich fahre mit den Müllern" (I'll drive with the Müllers), "frag den Pfenniger" - "ask (the) Pfenniger", "die Braun ist fett" - "Braun (female) is fat". This can be impolite but gives clear gender, plurality and directions (as any word inflection, you can be freer with the word order). "dem Schmidt vertraue ich nicht" - "I don't trust Schmidt (man)". Otherwise I don't see much benefit in providing genders or inflections on German surnames. --Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 08:21, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

@Fytcha, Benwing2, Mahagaja, Atitarev: AdA Alltagssprache about pluralization of surnames, and aught about article + surname, and even better someone on German Wiktionary also wrote a whole help page about how family names are and have been used. Fay Freak (talk) 10:55, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

@Fay Freak, Fytcha, Benwing2, Mahagaja: The info in the links is quite interesting and the German Wiktionary appendix is quite extensive too. --Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 06:47, 9 February 2022 (UTC)