this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2024
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Swedish used to have masculine and feminine gendered nouns historically - and some dialects still do - but they were simplified into two grammatical genders, utrum and neutrum, just as your link says. (There are remnants though, for example "vad är klockan?" "hon är halv fyra"). Masculine and feminine were just squashed into the "utrum" gender, basically, and neutrum is neuter.
thank you for the explanation. that helps to clear things up a bit and it’s also nice to have some context for why things are the way they are in the language. i had always been told that the “ett/en” thing was just an arbitrary quirk of the language, so it’s nice to get a more concrete explanation of it.
the example you gave was also super helpful. i found it confusing that sometimes “hon” meant “it”. i had always been told (in casual conversations) that swedish wasn’t a gendered language, so that whole thing was quite confusing until now.
Then it might also be useful to know that in these cases, it's also correct to say "den är halv tio" which might be a safer route for non-native speakers.
Kudos on you learning swedish though, it's not always easy or completely logical but coming from English a lot of things should come for free.