This is a story about a bug in a natural language. Namely, a bug in the gender system in Dutch.

Dutch is linguistically a German dialect that tends to English.

This shows in its gender system. German has 3 grammatical genders: masculine, feminine, neuter. English has all but lost the distinction between the three. However, the pronoun still has three forms: he, she, it; his, her, its.

In English, she is only used for things that are actually female, with a few exceptions (a ship). In cases where the pronoun refers to something impersonal, it never uses masculine or feminine, but the (originally neutral) "it" / "its".

The Dutch are in limbo, stuck between the German and English system. We still have the distinction between neutral nouns (with article "het", e.g. "het huis" = "the house") and other nouns (with article "de", e.g. "de soep" - "the soup").

This distinction is a problem for all learners of Dutch, because the assignment of gender is quite unpredictable. But that is true for all gender systems; German and French have the same problem. I don't call this a bug.

The real problem arises with pronouns referring back to nouns. The pronoun still has three genders: neutral ("het") to refer to neutral nouns, masculine ("hij") or the feminine ("ze") to refer back to "de"-words like "soep".

The bug is this: many of us native speakers simply don't know the gender of "de"-words, so we are not sure which pronoun to pick. This is especially true in the Netherlands; in Belgium, the distinction between masculine and feminine grammatical gender is still alive.

Perhaps an example will make you see how completely silly this situation is. Consider the sentence

   De soep wordt niet altijd zo heet gegeten als hij wordt opgediend.

Literally, "the soup isn't always eaten as hot as it is served". This is a common proverb in Dutch, but what is more relevant here, it is a very common type of sentence that you may use hundreds of times a day.

Well, I already ran into the gender problem here. Notice that in English we refer back to "the soup" using "it" - the impersonal relative pronoun. In Dutch, I must use either "hij" - if it is masculine - or "ze" - if it is feminine.

But I - a native speaker of Dutch - do not actually know whether "soep" is masculine or feminine. I have to look it up in a dictionary.

In practice, I do what most of the Dutch do: in spoken language, I always use the masculine form, except when the object is personal and clearly feminine; in formal writing, I use schoolbook rules to use the feminine in a very limited range of cases, such as nominalizations formed with the suffix -ing or -ie ("regering" - government, "democratie" - democracy). In informal writing, I often don't know which gender to use, and completely avoid the construction instead.

Others, especially from Flanders, have a better awareness of when to use the feminine. They do not hesitate which pronoun to use, and may find my use of "hij" here incorrect; as I said, I'd have to look it up in a dictionary to find out if this is the case.

I think gender in Dutch is a good example of a system in transition; there really isn't a uniform set of rules for using gender that all native speakers agree with.