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Re:France Gives in to the Hashtag by creshal on Wednesday April 01, 2015 @11:58AM (#9304572)
There are actually grammar rules behind the genders… but they aren't always clear as the words have changed in the past 3000+ years, but not their gender. E.g., in German it's (very) roughly masculine for concrete objects, neutral for actions and results of actions (which can be concrete objects!), and feminine for abstract concepts, and collections of other objects.

This isn't always clear: spoon is masculine, knife neutral (the indogermanic word apparently denoted the result of sharpening something) and fork (a collection of… pointy bits?) feminine, e.g.

And with borrowed words, the gender not always universally agreed on. A processor is masculine, but a CPU or GPU is feminine (probably because unit is, too). Is an e-mail feminine (it's a highly abstract concept), or neutral (the result of writing)? Both genders are used – hash tags, however, are masculine. Letters (as in physical mail) are masculine, but mail (the concept, as in Royal Mail) is feminine… and a Letter (as in print letters) are feminine, because it's taken from French/Latin, and loan words of gendered languages usually keep their gender, even if the rules are incompatible.

Spontaneously I can't think of many "English borrowed words" that are feminine, as most words that could be loaned are already shared from French and/or Latin, which influenced German centuries earlier.

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