Ask HN: Why can't I call myself “a Japanese”?

Re:Ask HN: Why can't I call myself “a Japanese”? by schoen on Thursday October 07, 2021 @09:18PM (#28794522)

The degree of irregularity is still striking to me, since you can't have "o Portugal" (even though Portugal is grammatically masculine -- "Portugal é lindo", not "Portugal é linda") but you must have "o Brasil", maybe except for headlines but ordinarily even in headlines. Presumably all native Portuguese speakers are more or less equally familiar with the grammatical gender of both Brazil and Portugal.

Meanwhile, the CPLP members are

"a República de Angola, a República Federativa do Brasil, a República de Cabo Verde, a República da Guiné-Bissau, a República da Guiné Equatorial, a República de Moçambique, a República Portuguesa [which is kind of cheating!!], a República Democrática de São Tomé e Príncipe e a República Democrática de Timor-Leste"

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Re:Ask HN: Why can't I call myself “a Japanese”? by lhorie on Thursday October 07, 2021 @10:00PM (#28794854)

Hmm I think this might be yet another case of colloquialisms. You could most definitely say "O Portugal é lindo" or - in full colloquial fashion - "Vamos pro Portugal".

Even for Timor-Leste, one would still use the masculine article when speaking colloquially, e.g. "Onde é o Timor-Leste?"

As for what word is masculine or feminine, yeah, it's pretty arbitrary.

The China headline example actually has another wonky case: coin in portuguese (moeda) is feminine, yet "bitcoin" is masculine. Go figure!

I somehow picked up the gendering of that word somewhere despite not having set foot in Brazil for about a decade and consuming english media pretty much exclusively for the past two decades. My guess is maybe my brother mentioned it in passing. It's weird how sensitive to learning gendering of new words we portuguese speakers are.

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