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1. 🇳🇴 Thor — backup account (thorthenorseman@octodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 04-Oct-2018 13:51:56 EDT 🇳🇴 Thor — backup account

   So, apparently, in Italian, guillotines are female. Just watched a game show on RAI1 and the game host kept saying "guillotina" and halving the prize when the contestant got some kind of guess wrong.

   1. Sorokin Alexei (xrevan86@loadaverage.org)'s status on Thursday, 04-Oct-2018 21:55:14 EDT Sorokin Alexei

      in reply to
      @thorthenorseman It is feminine in Russian too, coincidentally.
      1. 🇳🇴 Thor — backup account (thorthenorseman@octodon.social)'s status on Friday, 05-Oct-2018 06:13:26 EDT 🇳🇴 Thor — backup account

         in reply to

         @xrevan86 In the Scandinavian languages, it's masculine, but unlike in the Romance (and possibly Slavic) languages, grammatical genders are only loosely connected to real-life ones. This might be the case for all the Germanic languages. Genders in German often match those in Norwegian, for example. In Swedish and Danish, that's not the case, because the feminine gender has been merged with the masculine one, and the resulting gender is called the "common" gender.

         1. 🇳🇴 Thor — backup account (thorthenorseman@octodon.social)'s status on Friday, 05-Oct-2018 06:17:17 EDT 🇳🇴 Thor — backup account

            in reply to

            @xrevan86 In the high prestige dialects of Norwegian, the same gender merger has happened, but the reason for this is direct intervention: During the Danish rule of Norway, Danish became the official language, and the upper class adopted Danish spoken with a Norwegian accent. Since the feminine gender was missing there, it also disappeared from this prestige dialect, which stuck around after Norway became independent again.

         2. Sorokin Alexei (xrevan86@loadaverage.org)'s status on Friday, 05-Oct-2018 07:26:17 EDT Sorokin Alexei

            in reply to
            @thorthenorseman Not sure what being loosely connected or not to real-life genders means…
            Especially whilst talking about guillotines %).