When trying to write a program to display durations in German language, I noticed a problem that I did not notice before:
Words for German durations have different genders, and I wonder whether there is a rule to explain that. For example
- Sekunde: female
- Minute: female
- Stunde: female
- Tag: male
- Monat: male
- Jahr: neutral
So for example one can say
Bis zu meinem Urlaub sind es 2 Tage und 7 Stunden
or
In 2 Taqen und 7 Stunden habe ich Urlaub
So for my program the neutral and female variants are nice as the program just has to remove the last character (n) to make singular, but obviously for the male variant it's either the last (e) or the last two characters (en).
Essentially I wonder whether there exist rules to determine the gender of those duration words.