Thread:User talk:CodeCat/Special:Contributions/DrJos/reply

Thank you for checking. I've patrolled all their edits now. There were some mistakes, some which you already fixed. We need to watch out for people who mark words as f/m gender. As far as I can tell, that's just an artificial construct invented by standards bodies and dictionaries to somehow account for the fact that the two genders are no longer distinguished by a large proportion of Dutch speakers (mostly those in the north). They reason "These people are using the masculine pronouns with a noun, therefore it must be masculine too!" What has really happened is that these Dutch speakers distinguish only common and neuter gender, and that the pronoun for common-gender words without any natural gender is the masculine one, while the feminine pronoun is used only for things with natural feminine gender (like in English). Grammars and standards bodies try to prescribe usage of the feminine gender, but that doesn't reflect actual practice except when people try to follow the prescription, most people don't even know the "standard". Using a feminine pronoun to refer to something with no natural gender often sounds stilted in everyday spoken Dutch in areas where the gender distinction has been lost, and hypercorrection is common in an attempt to sound "educated".