> Somehow, they tend to all place the noun in the same gender.
That's not generally true, especially for German. I've heard "der Blog, das Blog," "die, das Email" "die, der, das Factory" … etc.
Loan words undergo an integration process, which is more of a sociolinguistic concept, I guess. At the end of the integration process, the word becomes an integral part of the language, with a fixed gender. For example, "Manager" is integrated, and it's clear its' "der Manager," same for Computer.
Some words do seem to evoke a certain gender (I've never heard anything but "der Podcast") but you shouldn't assume your personal preference extends to all (native) speakers ("das Podcast" would easily be possible.)
But how do people assign gender during the integration process? It's a consensus process, but there are several factors: lexical similarity (Computer denotes the same concept as "der Rechner" so it becomes masculine. Same for City/Stadt (feminine)) or lexical analogies (this loan word denotes something we already have a category for) morphological analogies (words in -er are likely to become masculine, as many German masculine words already have that ending, same for nouns ending in a vowel and feminine.) Sometimes it's chaotic, but that's the nature of consensus.
This process is much easier in Slavic languages, where gender assignment follows stricter morphological rules. German, on the other hand is chaotic. Note: German is not chaotic for the reasons given in TFA, because formations with -chen -keit -heit -ung etc. have fixed, regular gender. But words which did not undergo a morphological derivation process, but are instead atomic nouns are very haphazard in their gender assignment.
Some words are also officially recognized with different genders. E.g. it's "der oder das Ketchup". [1] I argued multiple times with my girlfriend that "der Ketchup" doesn't sound right at all, until we looked it up.
My best guess is this comes from different dialects that associate different genders with certain sounds. She comes from Schwaben, while I'm from Franken, which speak very different dialects. I had never heard "der Ketchup" before.
Kitchen terms are generally crazy. Do other languages also have hundreds of different terms for the last piece of a loaf of bread that is too thin for further slicing, but too thick to be considered a slice?
What I've also noticed in myself and other people is that seemingly weird German genders come from not saying the second part of a compound word.
I.e. "das Factory" which does sound somewhat weird (because I would think of "die Fabrik" instead), comes from "das Factory-Pattern" where "Pattern" ("das Muster") was omitted for brevity.
Yeah like in Spanish "la moto", which would make you think that's wrong because moto ends on o and should be masculine. But turns out it is actually a short for "la motocicleta", which ends in an a.
What happens often here is that a word has a clear gender that just feels right to basically all germans. But an alternative gender gets used by a group that does not trust its language feel and instead relies on logic to derive the gender. Blog is a good example: It's obviously "Der Blog", but because some people think "blog is short for weblog, and log is neutral" they use "das Blog", though that just sounds wrong to everyone else.
But you're right: It's a consensus process and with time words can get completely integrated and then tend to have only one gender.
Though Das is usually the go to gender for foreign words that don't feel German enough, when you say them in a German sentence. In my experience that feeling largely depends on your expectation to be understood. I.e. mixing German with tech terms with a tech coworker is far more acceptable than mixing it with a coworker from accounting.
> Funny enough I always use "der Log" and not das.
People are nice to you if they don't correct that :) Das Log is pretty universal a neutrum. "Ich schreib das mal ins Log", if you are used to der Log that must be an individual mistake or a dialect far removed from Hochdeutsch.
I use der Log, as do most of my colleagues. I also say "der Blog." Duden seems to agree with you, but I'm still not convinced. It's probably a regional difference.
> Don't loanwords auf Deutsch tend to end up with "das" as the prefix? Das Restaurant etc.
No. For example "Kiwi" originally comes from Maori language. In German, it is "der Kiwi" (the bird) and "die Kiwi" (the fruit). No neutral genus.
In this case, the genus even has importance what the word means - it is not uncommon in German that using different genera for the same noun is there to distinguish different meanings. On the website https://www.cafe-lingua.de/deutsche-grammatik/nomen-mit-mehr... some further examples for this are listed. So always learn the genus properly.
The moment a word is used as a german word by a german it does not really matter anymore where it's from, the usual mechanisms that specify gender apply. Which are the few fixed rules, then mostly "how do others speak", maybe a bit "how does the word sound". That's how foreign words become german words.
There is no rule that loanwords end up as neutrum: Die Allee, die Paella, der Computer, der Laptop are just a few counter examples.
Good examples for some of the different ways gender can be derived.
Going deeper into blog, people who still remember "weblog" as the full form of "blog" will call it "das Blog" (because "das Log" is a well established German term, gendered from "das Logbuch" perhaps), whereas people who were introduced to "blog" when it already felt like a standalone term will tend to use "der Blog", perhaps for to phonetic similarity to "der Block".
The log (as in chronologically written record) surely derives from the book where the log measurements were recorded, so it's all the same basically. Nauticalese is like a separate language that "infects" coastal languages with common terminology. Of course this would all be much more interesting if Log and Buch did not share gender.
> Not with the gender of the word. The last noun counts.
OK, then I misunderstood - you were talking about this elementary grammatical rule and I was talking about the origin of the word "Logbuch" (the latter is something that even many native German speakers do not know).
Most famous example: Der/die/das Nutella. Some of the ambiguousness with technical terms come from older people I think. I've never heard anyone below 50 saying "das Email", but a lot of elder people saying it that way. Might be regional though.
That's not generally true, especially for German. I've heard "der Blog, das Blog," "die, das Email" "die, der, das Factory" … etc.
Loan words undergo an integration process, which is more of a sociolinguistic concept, I guess. At the end of the integration process, the word becomes an integral part of the language, with a fixed gender. For example, "Manager" is integrated, and it's clear its' "der Manager," same for Computer.
Some words do seem to evoke a certain gender (I've never heard anything but "der Podcast") but you shouldn't assume your personal preference extends to all (native) speakers ("das Podcast" would easily be possible.)
But how do people assign gender during the integration process? It's a consensus process, but there are several factors: lexical similarity (Computer denotes the same concept as "der Rechner" so it becomes masculine. Same for City/Stadt (feminine)) or lexical analogies (this loan word denotes something we already have a category for) morphological analogies (words in -er are likely to become masculine, as many German masculine words already have that ending, same for nouns ending in a vowel and feminine.) Sometimes it's chaotic, but that's the nature of consensus.
This process is much easier in Slavic languages, where gender assignment follows stricter morphological rules. German, on the other hand is chaotic. Note: German is not chaotic for the reasons given in TFA, because formations with -chen -keit -heit -ung etc. have fixed, regular gender. But words which did not undergo a morphological derivation process, but are instead atomic nouns are very haphazard in their gender assignment.