Question for people who speak gendered languages: how do you know what gender a word is supposed to be...

Question for people who speak gendered languages: how do you know what gender a word is supposed to be? Do you just have to memorize everything or is there logic behind it? For example, I recently learned that the Spanish word for dress is "vestido," which is make despite it being female clothing.

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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender
twitter.com/AnonBabble

because they sound male/female, the gender was not created, it comes naturally

>Do you just have to memorize everything or is there logic behind it?
You can usually determine the gender of a noun by its ending.
Masculine: consonant ending or -й letter.
Feminine: -a (A) / -я (Ya/ja) / -ия (Ee-ya)
Neuter: -e (E) / -o (O) / -иe (Ee-e).
But that nouns ending in the soft sign -ь can be either masculine or feminine and the best way to tell the gender of such nouns is to memorize it.
Table (CтoЛ) - he, coffee (КoфE) - he (an exception), dress (ПлaтьE) - it, paper (БyмaгA) - she, etc.

Fuck logic. Words are "gendered" common or neuter according to no apparent system, anyone who gets it wrong sounds like a retard and native speakers just magically know which one is right, even for new words brought in from a foreign language. And that's not even getting into dialects and special cases where male and/or female gendered words may also be a thing.

How do you remember that the thing in your pic is called "dress" and not "fhysvhuk"?
The answer to my question is the answer to your question.

We know what gender a word is supposed to be because grammar. Like the russian over there said, there are terminations for words that define gender. In portuguese it is basically:
>ends in "a" = female
>ends in "o", "s" (but not being a plural) = male
obviously there are other rules and exceptions, but I´m too lazy to write´em here.

Same in Spanish.
Memorization comes to irregular words, which you likely won't use or be corrected about.

OP here. I meant more about the logic of what determines whether a word will be male or female. I know that word endings tell you which, but I don't get why a dress is male in Spanish or a bridge is female in German.

in Slovak its from cases

>why a dress is male
because the dress identifies as male, is that too hard to understand?

There are so many exceptions that this is basically useless. That are so many words ending with a that are masculine (mapa, prisma, esperma, clima, dia, programa, pijama, most words ending with á) and so many feminine words that end with o (most words that end with ão), some words end with a or o but can work for both genders (poeta, artista), and if the word ends with literally any other letter of the alphabet you cannot use this rule.

So, to answer OP, it's completely arbitrary and we just "know" (you could say memorize, but it's really effortless).

desu I wish more women would wear fhysvhuks, trousers are for men

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender

The plural of "fhysvhuk" is obviously "fhysvhuken"

We need to memorize, but it's easy because everything is conjugated by gender. Verbs, adjectives, numbers (both ordinal and cardinal), and even some ''grammar words'' like prepositions or case suffixes. If you hear a word in a sentence you will already know its gender.

The same way you know about phrasal verbs: by learning and memorize all of them.

I have no interest in the history of Indo-European or Semitic languages, but from what I've absorbed from hearing friends' discussions about it (I'm into linguistics and I have some like-minded friends)...
In the case of the Indo-European language family (English, Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Persian, Lithuanian, etc.), and even more so in the Semitic family (Arabic, Hebrew, Akkadian, etc.), some of these associations of the form of an ending to gender are actually very old, and humanity has no idea how they came about.
Early Proto-Indo-European already had two genders (animate/common and inanimate/neuter), and while the genders corresponded to what you'd expect (living beings vs. inanimate objects) to a good degree, there were quite a number of inanimate objects of animate gender in the language: kʷékʷlos 'wheel', nókʷts 'night', pṓds 'foot', negʷʰrós 'kidney', wréh2ds 'root'.
After this, a long and slightly complicated history with the formation of a distinct feminine gender (making the old animate a masculine) and of constant reassignment of associations of gender to different endings on the basis of analogy follows.
To take the words you explicitly asked about, Spanish vestido comes from the Latin 4th declension vestitus, which was masculine too. This has the Latin ending -tus, which ultimately comes from Proto-Indo-European ending -t-u-s, which had a strong association with the animate gender already. The Latin masculine continues the early Proto-Indo-European animate gender, so here you're asking about an ending-gender association that's at least 5000 years old.
As for the German word for bridge, 'Brücke', it comes from Proto-Germanic *brugjǭ, which was formed off Proto-Indo-European h3bʰruH- 'beam' with the ending -íh2. -íh2 was originally strongly associated with the animate gender in early Proto-Indo-European, but when the distinct feminine gender was formed, the endings ending in -h2 became strongly (POST CONTINUED...)

dress? Vestido = ends in O so its guaranteed to be male
niño = male kid
niña = female kid

...associated with this new feminine gender, mostly on the basis of *gʷéneh2- 'woman'.
(Basically, the word for "woman" affected all similarly ending words into the feminine gender, including h2wĺ̥h1neh2 'wool'.)
Thus German Brücke ended up being feminine. The association of historical -ih2 as a feminine is not as old as -t-ú-s to the animate>masculine, but is also very old too.

Dammit, I should've formatted this more clearly. Eh, I guess I could:

I have no interest in the history of Indo-European or Semitic languages, but from what I've absorbed from hearing friends' discussions about it (I'm into linguistics and I have some like-minded friends)...

In the case of the Indo-European language family (English, Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Persian, Lithuanian, etc.), and even more so in the Semitic family (Arabic, Hebrew, Akkadian, etc.), some of these associations of the form of an ending to gender are actually very old, and humanity has no idea how they came about.

Early Proto-Indo-European already had two genders (animate/common and inanimate/neuter), and while the genders corresponded to what you'd expect (living beings vs. inanimate objects) to a good degree, there were quite a number of inanimate objects of animate gender in the language: kʷékʷlos 'wheel', nókʷts 'night', pṓds 'foot', negʷʰrós 'kidney', wréh2ds 'root'.

After this, a long and slightly complicated history with the formation of a distinct feminine gender (making the old animate a masculine) and of constant reassignment of associations of gender to different endings on the basis of analogy follows.

To take the words you explicitly asked about, Spanish vestido comes from the Latin 4th declension vestitus, which was masculine too.
This has the Latin ending -tus, which ultimately comes from Proto-Indo-European ending -t-u-s, which had a strong association with the animate gender already.
The Latin masculine continues the early Proto-Indo-European animate gender, so here you're asking about an ending-gender association that's at least 5000 years old.

(Last sentence about German Brücke erased.)

> 2017
> his language only has two genders

Female nouns in Arabic end with ة usually, sometimes اء, sometimes ى, but sometimes male nouns end with those too