L'Chateau

[TheImpOfThePerverse2026]

Please can someone confirm this is wrong! There's a wedding company with this name in my town and I'm getting really angry about it 🤬

The Germans have a few interesting uses of English that bear no relation to how a native English speaker might assume their meaning.

An Oldtimer is a veteran car, rather than an elderly person; and a Dressman is a male model, rather than a man who wears traditionally female clothes!

I've also heard French people with a very good (but obviously not native) command of English, refer to inanimate neutral objects as 'he' or 'she'. Not even the kind of thing that you may 'assign' a sex to, such as a teddy bear; but something like a coat, ticket or bag!

Round by us, we have both La Fabrico (fancy interiors shop) and La Mar (bar/pub).

Both make my inner Spanish student seethe quietly 😑

Hmm, French for sea is la mer...

And Google suggests that in Spanish it can be la mar in a poetic context... I had never heard that before

Oh, you NEED to write on that sign "The McGrissys' what?" 🤣

No excuse. It's not exactly hard to remember that nouns have no gender in English, ffs.

Really? I always think you can cut a bit of slack to people speaking their second language - especially when they're doing so because the person they're speaking to doesn't speak their (or indeed often any other) language.

I've even known Welsh speakers on occasion get momentarily confused or maybe forget a common English word when speaking to monoglots - because although they are obviously completely fluent in both, English is their second language and they think in Welsh.

I despise it when Brits in a foreign country mock or giggle at the very tiny mistakes that e.g. a Spaniard (in their own country) makes when speaking to them in English, when they (the Brits) haven't made the slightest effort to learn even a few words of Spanish... particularly so when they aren't even just on holiday but have moved to live in Spain (or whichever country).

Not in this case, because the rule could not be any simpler. There is ONE word for nouns and pronouns and possessives that do not refer to living things: "It". In contrast, when English speakers are learning French, they have to remember whether each noun is masculine or feminine, and in German, whether each one is masculine, feminine, or neuter. How amazingly simple would it be if it was different, and a teacher said "All German nouns take 'der'. Foreign speakers of English literally have to remember ONE word. One! That's why I said "No excuse." And they never have to remember the gender of nouns, because our nouns are genderless!

Many people (not me) refer to cars and ships as 'she' though maybe that's something from the past. I know people who give their cars female names.

When you're not used to using an equivalent of "it" it does take a bit of thinking. I've heard Brits do the opposite in french, saying c'est when in context it should have been il est or elle est, because they're not used to thinking of a gender and stick in a random (almost) equivalent gender neutral word.

@CrazyMidget , I cut people some slack if English isn't their first language.
For some it is their fourth language and the other languages might be very different from English.

I know someone who is fluent in Arabic, Berber, French, German and English. Does it really matter if they get a few things not quite right?

People who have English as their first language can make a complete hash of it, hence this topic board!

I agree @MagpiePi . Those who have been formally taught English as a second language don't tend to make the mistakes those who've picked it up as their mother tongue do.

But people are not computers - language is a living, dynamic part of human communication; and we humans are very far from infallible.

How often do people momentarily forget the name of a loved one? If your DM has just been talking on the phone to her DSis and then she needs to call out to you... and you often end up with her calling you by your aunt's name rather than your own, even though she chose your name!!

If people expect 100% perfection in the language that somebody with a different native tongue speaks to them, I suppose their obvious solution is for them to speak (perfectly) to that person in their own language. If they can't speak the other person's language, and are relying on the other person to speak to them in their own second, third, fourth language... they're hardly in any kind of position to complain about the odd minor error that they make, are they?!

Some nouns have gender in English: woman, girl, mother, daughter, boy, man, father, son. In other words, nouns to which we associate a gender. There are others that fall between two stools, so to speak: ship, which we can refer to as she or it but never he. Animal genders, like bitch, stallion, mare, cow, bull etc which we can also refer to by one gender, or it, but not the other gender.

Language is interesting in that it reflects, to a degree, the character and culture of the native speakers (as a class)

You seem unduly agitated over this rather academic topic. Do you not think that differences are interesting and to be cherished? Or would you rather everyone spoke the same language to make life easier?

I don’t think that a word for eg a female animal necessarily means that word is female gender.
We don’t change our adjectives to agree with nouns in English like they do in languages that have gendered nouns.

See my pp ("I dated someone who described himself as petite. Instant ick.")

A colleague described himself as 'The best looking blonde in the office'. He wasn't the best looking blond either.

Yes. We have specific nouns to describe humans and many animals of one or the other sex.

We don't change our adjectives to make them agree with their nouns (mostly - there are exceptions, but they're imported words generally), but there are gendered nouns for which we use gendered pronouns. So we wouldn't describe a woman/girl/daughter/mother as 'it'; these nouns have a definite gender. We could describe a ship or a cow as 'she' or as 'it', but not as 'he', for example; these nouns have a preferred but not compulsory gender, as well as an excluded gender.

When you think about it, we have plenty of gendered nouns which seem generally to refer to humans and the partially gendered nouns refer generally to animals