Ein Brief

[pne]

I came home to find a letter from pthalogreen waiting for me. Thank you!

Quite a bit of reminiscing and some questions that I'll probably have to think about for quite a while before I know how to answer them.

(And incidentally: it's "die CD", though don't ask me why. Perhaps because it's "die Platte" for a grammophone record and "die Scheibe" for a general disk. Hm, Duden claims it's short for "CD-Platte", which is obviously feminine, but I'm not sure whether most Germans would think of that derivation off-hand.)

Comments

[elgrande.livejournal.com]

May I take some wild guesses, too? :P
I would insert one step in your line of argumentation:
I think relatively often abbreviations have the same gender as the long form: The long form would certainly be "die Compact Disc" (or however you spell it in German), so perhaps it has something to do with "Disc".
Then again "Disc" is perhaps femine because the corresponding German words are, too.

Re:

[eilanhp.livejournal.com]

Diskette is feminine, that might be why.

[jordik.livejournal.com]

Weird. Sounds like a 'das' word to me. Most of the time my 'feelings' for words' genders check out.

[pthalo]

eeee yay! I'm glad you got it. :D and die CD die CD die CD will remember (i pronounced CD tsay-day) I probably used der in the letter? I'm trying to remember. I tend to think of words ending in j sounds to be masculine. this has nothing to do with german, and perhaps every bit to do with most-slovene-words-ending-in-consonants-are-masculine but yes. :)

and, for the record, if I ever have to be in Germany for a while, i will be buying everything in sets of two or more, so that I can use die. :D

[pne.livejournal.com]

i pronounced CD tsay-day

*nods* though not with English diphthongs /Ej/ but with a pure /e/ vowel. I imagine that Hungarian "cédé" would sound the same.

I probably used der in the letter?

You used "das".

and, for the record, if I ever have to be in Germany for a while, i will be buying everything in sets of two or more, so that I can use die. :D

Heh :) I find it interesting that German and French only have one article for the plural, unlike, say, Greek or Spanish.

[timwi.livejournal.com]

I'm usually reluctant to accepting theories on the lines of "this is <gender> because this-and-that other word also happens to be <gender>", especially with words borrowed from genderless languages like English. As an example, I often hear that keyboard is "obviously" neuter because board translates to das Brett. However, had it been feminine, I'm sure people would say it's "obviously" because of die Tastatur. It seems like retroactively fitting the etymology to the existing established gender.

What further substantiates this theory is how the word E-Mail has acquired two different genders — feminine and neuter — in different parts of Germany. Yet the most obvious gender — masculine, because of der Brief — has not caught on.

I'm open to the opinion that abbreviations may well be a different story. It is plausible that CD may be feminine because of die Disk[ette]. However, I don't find it any more far-fetched that it may be feminine because it sounds similar to die Idee, or just that 'ne CD is easier to say than 'nen CD.