I assume that's more emphatic than "The man is bitten by the dog"?
Less emphatic, I should assume (German also has the passive construction "der Mann wurde von dem Hund gebissen", but I had to look that up; I never really got the hang of passives). It's sort of the equivalent of changing the sentence stress in English: "The dog bites the man [i.e. not the horse as you suggested]"
But none of that explains why languages have genders in the first place, let alone ones that don't necessarily bear any relation to the actual sex of the creature being talked about (I've just learnt that in Old English, 'woman' is a masculine noun, for instance). So far as I know, they just do because they always have done since the beginning; it doesn't really contribute anything to understanding, save in the rare cases where two otherwise identical words are distinguished by different genders, i.e. "der See" (a lake) and "die See" (the ocean) -- if you're English it's safer just to use "das Meer" ;-p
I got up to AS-level German in my spare time, but that was some years ago. My German's at the level where I can make out the structure of a sentence and get the gist of its meaning provided it doesn't depend on any pivotal verbs/nouns that I don't know. I can skim this sort of thing, for example: https://www.bernerzeitung.ch/region/bern/mann-von-hunden-gebissen/story/31765873 (A number of dogs suddenly appeared and bit a 66-year-old-man who was out for a walk. He took himself to hospital. Police are appealing for witnesses.)
no subject
Less emphatic, I should assume (German also has the passive construction "der Mann wurde von dem Hund gebissen", but I had to look that up; I never really got the hang of passives).
It's sort of the equivalent of changing the sentence stress in English: "The dog bites the man [i.e. not the horse as you suggested]"
But none of that explains why languages have genders in the first place, let alone ones that don't necessarily bear any relation to the actual sex of the creature being talked about (I've just learnt that in Old English, 'woman' is a masculine noun, for instance).
So far as I know, they just do because they always have done since the beginning; it doesn't really contribute anything to understanding, save in the rare cases where two otherwise identical words are distinguished by different genders, i.e. "der See" (a lake) and "die See" (the ocean) -- if you're English it's safer just to use "das Meer" ;-p
I got up to AS-level German in my spare time, but that was some years ago. My German's at the level where I can make out the structure of a sentence and get the gist of its meaning provided it doesn't depend on any pivotal verbs/nouns that I don't know. I can skim this sort of thing, for example: https://www.bernerzeitung.ch/region/bern/mann-von-hunden-gebissen/story/31765873
(A number of dogs suddenly appeared and bit a 66-year-old-man who was out for a walk. He took himself to hospital. Police are appealing for witnesses.)
And I've done quite a bit of translation from German, aided by copious dictionary usage, a skilful grasp of of the English language and a good idea of the subject matter; I can produce a good-quality translation without having a particularly fluent command of the original language.
( https://www.fanfiction.net/s/11303290/23/Imprisoned-by-Fear versus
https://www.fanfiction.net/s/11171047/15/Gefangene-der-Angst )