In linguistics, grammatical genders, sometimes also called noun classes, are classes of nouns reflected in the behavior of associated words; every noun must belong to one of the classes and there should be very few which belong to several classes at once. Linguistics is the scientific study of Language, encompassing a number of sub-fields In Linguistics, the term noun class refers to a system of categorizing Nouns A noun may belong to a given class because of characteristic features of its Referent [1][2]
If a language distinguishes between masculine and feminine gender, for instance, then each noun belongs to one of those two genders; in order to correctly decline any noun and any modifier or other type of word affecting that noun, one must identify whether the noun is feminine or masculine. In Grammar, inflection or inflexion is the way language handles grammatical relations and relational categories such as tense, mood, voice In Grammar, a modifier (or qualifier) is a word or Sentence element that limits or qualifies another word a phrase or a clause The term "grammatical gender" is mostly used for Indo-European languages, many of which follow the pattern just described. Modern English, however, is normally described as lacking grammatical gender. English is a West Germanic language originating in England and is the First language for most people in the United Kingdom, the United States [3]
The linguistic notion of grammatical gender is distinguished from the biological and social notion of natural gender, although they interact closely in many languages. Gender comprises a range of differences between men and women extending from the biological to the social Both grammatical and natural gender can have linguistic effects in a given language.
Although some authors use the term "noun class" as a synonym or an extension of "grammatical gender", for others they are separate concepts. In Linguistics, the term noun class refers to a system of categorizing Nouns A noun may belong to a given class because of characteristic features of its Referent
Overview
Many languages place each noun into one of three gender classes (or simply "genders"):
- Masculine gender: includes most words that refer to males;
- Feminine gender: includes most words that refer to females;
- Neuter gender: includes mostly words that do not refer to males or females
For example, in their nominative singular forms Polish nouns are typically feminine if they have the ending -a, neuter when they end with -o, -e, or -ę, and masculine if they have no gender suffix (null morpheme). The nominative case is a Grammatical case for a Noun, which generally marks the subject of a Verb, as opposed to its object or other Polish ( język polski, polszczyzna) is the Official language of Poland. For other meanings see the disambiguation page Marker In Linguistics, a marker is a free or bound Morpheme that indicates In morpheme-based morphology, a null morpheme is a Morpheme that is realized by a phonologically null Affix (an empty string of phonological Thus, encyklopedia "encyclopaedia" is feminine, krzesło "chair" is neuter, and ręcznik "towel" is masculine. When the adjective duży "big" is combined with these nouns in phrases, it changes form according to their grammatical gender:
| Gender | Noun | Phrase | Meaning |
| Masculine | ręcznik | duży ręcznik | big towel |
| Feminine | encyklopedia | duża encyklopedia | big encyclopaedia |
| Neuter | krzesło | duże krzesło | big chair |
As can be seen, the neuter gender does not include all nouns that correspond to genderless realities. In Grammar, a phrase is a group of Words that functions as a single unit in the Syntax of a sentence. Some of these may be designated by nouns that are grammatically masculine or feminine. Also, some nouns that refer to males or females may have a different grammatical gender. In general, the boundaries of noun classes are rather arbitrary, although there are rules of thumb in many languages. In this context, the terms "masculine", "feminine" and "neuter" should be understood merely as convenient labels. They are suggestive class descriptors, but not every member of a class is well described by its label.
Gender marking is not substantial in modern English. However, distinctions in personal pronouns have been inherited from Old English which can be used to give a flavour of how grammatical gender works.
- John insisted that he would pay for his own dinner.
- Jane insisted that she would pay for her own dinner.
Here, the gender of the subject is marked both on the personal pronouns (he/she) and on the possessive adjectives (his/her). Marking of gender on the possessive form can be considered redundant in these examples, since his own and her own must refer to their respective antecedents, he and she, which are already unambiguously marked for gender. In the study of language, redundancy is considered a vital feature of language In Grammar, an antecedent is generally the Noun or Noun phrase to which an anaphor refers in a Coreference.
A full system of grammatical gender involves two phenomena:
- Inflection: Many words have different forms for different genders, and certain morphological markers are characteristic of each gender. For other meanings see the disambiguation page Marker In Linguistics, a marker is a free or bound Morpheme that indicates
- Agreement: Every noun is associated with one gender class. In a phrase or clause, words that refer to a given noun inflect to match the gender of that noun. In Grammar, inflection or inflexion is the way language handles grammatical relations and relational categories such as tense, mood, voice
Note that some words, called epicene, may have identical forms for different genders. Epicene is an Adjective (sometimes substantive) for loss of Gender distinction often specific loss of Masculinity. For example, in Spanish estudiante "student" and grande "big" can be masculine or feminine.
Spanish is also an example of a language with only two genders, masculine and feminine; it has no neuter noun class. Nouns that designate entities with no natural gender, such as objects or abstractions, are distributed among the masculine and the feminine. In a few other languages, notably Germanic languages like Swedish, the former masculine and feminine genders have become indistinguishable with time, merging into a new class called the common gender, which however remains distinct from the neuter gender. Swedish ( is a North Germanic language spoken by more than nine million people predominantly in Sweden and parts of Finland, especially along the [4]
- Common gender: includes most words that refer to males or females, but is distinct from the neuter gender.
Other languages still, like English, are regarded as not having grammatical gender, since they do not make gender distinctions through inflection, and do not generally require gender agreement between related words. English is a West Germanic language originating in England and is the First language for most people in the United Kingdom, the United States
Some authors have extended the concept of "grammatical gender" to the expression of other types of natural, individual characteristics through inflection, such as animacy. Animacy is a grammatical and/or Semantic category of Nouns based on how Sentient or alive the Referent of the noun is See the section on gender across languages, below.
Grammatical gender (with masculine and/or feminine categories) is commonly found in Afro-Asiatic, Dravidian, Indo-European, Northeast Caucasian, and several Australian aboriginal languages. The Afro-Asiatic languages constitute a Language family with about 375 languages ( SIL estimate and more than 300 million speakers spread throughout North Africa The Dravidian family of languages includes approximately 73 languages (including the four literary languages of Tamil, Telugu, Kannada The Northeast Caucasian languages, also called East Caucasian, Caspian, Nakho-Dagestanian, or Dagestanian, are a family of Languages It is mostly absent in the Altaic, Austronesian, Sino-Tibetan, and Uralic language families. Altaic, according to its proponents is a language family that includes 66 Languages ref> Altaic languages spoken by about 348 million people mostly in and around The Sino-Tibetan languages form a Language family composed of at least the Chinese and the Tibeto-Burman languages, including some 250 languages of The Uralic languages (jʊˈrælɨk constitute a language family of 39 Languages spoken by approximately 20 million people The Niger-Congo languages typically have an extensive system of noun classes, which some authors regard as a type of grammatical gender, but others describe as something completely different. The Niger-Congo languages constitute one of the world's major language families, and Africa 's largest in terms of geographical area number of speakers and number In Linguistics, the term noun class refers to a system of categorizing Nouns A noun may belong to a given class because of characteristic features of its Referent
Gender inflection
In many languages, gender is marked quite profusely, surfacing in different ways.
- "I love you" in Arabic:[5]
- said to a male — uħibbuka (أُحِبُّكََ)
- said to a female — uħibbuki (أُحِبُّكِ)
- "Thank you very much" in Portuguese:
- said by a male — muito obrigado
- said by a female — muito obrigada
The switch from one gender to the other is typically achieved by inflecting appropriate words, the object suffix of the verb uħibbu-ka/ki in the Arabic example (gender is not marked in the first person, in Arabic), and the subject suffix in the past participle (or adjective) obrig-ado/a in the Portuguese example (literally this means "much obliged", with "I am" understood; thus it agrees with the gender of the speaker). Literary Arabic (ar اللغة العربية الفصحى "the Eloquent Arabic language" or Standard Arabic is the literary and standard variety Grammatical person, in Linguistics, is deictic reference to a participant in an event such as the speaker the Addressee, or others Portuguese ( or língua portuguesa) is a Romance language that originated in what is now Galicia (Spain and northern Portugal.
In Spanish, most masculine nouns and modifiers end with the suffix -o or with a consonant, while the suffix -a is characteristic of feminine nouns (though there are exceptions). Thus, niño means “boy”, and niña means “girl”. This paradigm can be exploited for making new words: from the masculine nouns abogado "lawyer", diputado "member of parliament" and doctor "doctor", it was straightforward to make the feminine equivalents abogada, diputada, and doctora.
Sometimes, gender is expressed in more subtle ways. On the whole, gender marking has been lost in Welsh, both on the noun, and, often, on the adjective. Welsh ( cy Cymraeg or cy y Gymraeg, kəmˈrɑːɨɡ and {{IPA|[ə ɡəmˈrɑːɨɡ]}}, is a member of the Brythonic branch of Celtic However, it has the peculiar feature of initial mutation, where the first consonant of a word changes into another in certain syntactical conditions. Consonant mutation is the phenomenon in which a Consonant in a word is changed according to its morphological and/or syntactic environment Gender is one of the factors that can cause mutation, especially the so-called soft mutation. For instance, the word merch, which means girl or daughter, changes into ferch after the definite article. This only occurs with feminine nouns; for example, mab "son" remains unchanged after the definite article. Adjectives are affected by gender in a similar way.
| Gender | Default | After definite article | With adjective | |||
| Masculine | mab | son | y mab | the son | y mab mawr | the big son |
| Feminine | merch | girl | y ferch | the girl | y ferch fawr | the big girl |
Personal names
Personal names are frequently constructed with language-specific affixes that identify the gender of the bearer. A personal name is the Proper name identifying an individual Person. Common feminine suffixes used in English names are -a, of Latin or Romance origin (cf. Latin ( lingua Latīna, laˈtiːna is an Italic language, historically spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. The Romance languages (sometimes referred to as Romanic languages, or Neolatin languages) are a branch of the Indo-European language family comprising all Robert and Roberta) and -e, of French origin (cf. French ( français,) is a Romance language spoken around the world by 118 million people as a native language and by about 180 to 260 million people Justin and Justine). Although gender inflections may be used to construct cognate nouns for people of opposite genders in languages that have grammatical gender, this alone does not constitute grammatical gender. Distinct names for men and women are also common in languages where gender is not grammatical.
Personal pronouns
Personal pronouns often have different forms based on gender. A language has gender-specific pronouns when Personal pronouns have different forms according to the Gender of their Referents The English language Gender-neutral, gender-inclusive or epicene pronouns are Pronouns that neither reveal nor imply the Gender or sex of a person Personal pronouns are Pronouns used as substitutes for proper or common Nouns. Even though it has lost grammatical gender, English still distinguishes between "he" (generally applied to a male person), "she" (female person), and "it" (object, abstraction, or animal). But this also does not guarantee the existence of grammatical gender. There is a spoken form, "they", which although not part of the standard literary language, is cosmopolitan in the English-speaking world and is used when the gender of a person being referred to is not known (e. g. "This person doesn't know where they are going").
Gendered pronouns and their corresponding inflections vary considerably across languages. In languages that never had grammatical gender, there is normally just one word for "he" and "she", like hän in Finnish and ő in Hungarian. Finnish ( or suomen kieli) is the language spoken by the majority of the population in Finland (92% As of 2006) and by ethnic Finns outside Hungarian ( magyar nyelv) is a Uralic language (more specifically a Ugric language) unrelated to most other languages in Europe. These languages have different pronouns and inflections in the third person only to differentiate between people and inanimate objects (and even this distinction is commonly waived in spoken Finnish). Grammatical person, in Linguistics, is deictic reference to a participant in an event such as the speaker the Addressee, or others
Dummy pronouns
In languages with only a masculine and a feminine gender, the default dummy pronoun is usually the masculine third person singular. A dummy pronoun (formally expletive pronoun or pleonastic pronoun) is a type of Pronoun used in non- Pro-drop languages such as English For example, the French sentence for "It's raining" is Il pleut, literally "He rains". There are some exceptions: the corresponding sentence in Welsh is Mae hi'n bwrw glaw, literally "She's raining".
Gender agreement
In the French sentences Il est un grand acteur "He is a great actor" and Elle est une grande actrice "She is a great actress", almost every word changes to match the gender of the subject. The noun acteur inflects by changing the masculine suffix -eur into the feminine suffix -rice, the subject pronoun il "he" changes to elle "she", and the feminine suffix -e is added to the article (un → une) and to the adjective (grand → grande).
The following "highly contrived" Old English sentence serves as an example of gender agreement. [6]
| Old English | Seo brade lind wæs tilu and ic hire lufod. |
| Literal translation | That broad shield was good and I her loved. |
| Modern English | That broad shield was good and I loved it. |
The word hire "her" refers to lind "shield". Since this noun was grammatically feminine, the adjectives brade "broad" and tilu "good", as well as the pronouns seo "the/that" and hire "her", which referred to lind, must also appear in their feminine forms. Old English had three genders, masculine, feminine and neuter, but gender inflections were greatly simplified by sound changes, and then completely lost (as well as number inflections, to a lesser extent). Sound change includes any processes of Language change that affect pronunciation ( phonetic change) or sound system structures ( Phonological change In linguistics grammatical number is a Grammatical category of nouns pronouns and adjective and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions (such as "one"
In modern English, by contrast, the noun "shield" takes the neuter pronoun "it", since it designates a genderless object. In a sense, the neuter gender has grown to encompass most nouns, including many that were masculine or feminine in Old English. If one were to replace the phrase "broad shield" with "brave man" or "kind woman", the only change to the rest of the sentence would be in the pronoun at the end, which would become "him" or "her", respectively.
Grammatical vs. natural gender
The grammatical gender of a word doesn't always coincide with real gender of its referent. An often cited example is the German word Mädchen, which means "girl", but is treated grammatically as neuter. The German language (de ''Deutsch'') is a West Germanic language and one of the world's major languages. This is because it was constructed as the diminutive of Magd (archaic nowadays), and the diminutive suffix -chen conventionally places nouns in the "neuter" noun class. A diminutive is a formation of a Word used to convey a slight degree of the root meaning smallness of the object or quality named encapsulation intimacy or endearment A few more examples:
- German die Frau (feminine) and das Weib (neuter) both mean "the woman".
- Irish cailín "girl" is masculine, while stail "stallion" is feminine. Irish (ga ''Gaeilge'' is a Goidelic language of the Indo-European language family originating in Ireland and historically spoken by the Irish.
Normally, such exceptions are a small minority. However, in some local dialects of German, all nouns for female persons have shifted to the neuter gender (presumably further influenced by the standard word Weib), but the feminine gender remains for some words denoting objects.
Indeterminate gender
In languages with a masculine and feminine gender (and possibly a neuter), the masculine is usually employed by default to refer to persons of unknown gender. This is still done sometimes in English, although an alternative is to use the singular "they". "Singular" they is a popular non-technical expression for uses of the Pronoun they (and its inflected forms when plurality is not Another alternative is to use two nouns, as in the phrase "ladies and gentlemen" (hendiadys).
In the plural, the masculine is often used to refer to a mixed group of people. Thus, in French the feminine pronoun elles always designates an all-female group of people, but the masculine pronoun ils may refer to a group of males, to a mixed group, or to a group of people of unknown genders. In English, this issue does not arise with pronouns, since there is only one plural third person pronoun, "they". However, a group of actors and actresses would still be described as a group of "actors".
In all these cases, one says that the feminine gender is semantically marked, while the masculine gender is unmarked. Markedness is a linguistic concept that developed out of the Prague School (also known as the Prague linguistic circle)
Animals
Often, the masculine/feminine classification is only followed carefully for human beings. For animals, the relation between real and grammatical gender tends to be more arbitrary. In Spanish, for instance, a cheetah is always un guepardo (masculine) and a zebra is always una cebra (feminine), regardless of their biological sex. If it becomes necessary to specify the sex of the animal, an adjective is added, as in un guepardo hembra (a female cheetah), or una cebra macho (a male zebra). Different names for the male and the female of a species are more frequent for common pets or farm animals, eg. English horse and mare, Spanish vaca "cow" and toro "bull".
In English, individual speakers may prefer one gender or another for animals of unknown sex, depending on species — for instance, a tendency to refer more often to dogs as "he" and to cats as "she".
Objects and abstractions
Since all nouns must belong to some noun class, many end up with genders which are purely conventional. A convention is a set of agreed, stipulated or generally accepted Standards norms social norms or criteria, often taking the form of For instance, the Romance languages inherited sol "sun" (which is masculine) and luna "moon" (which is feminine) from Latin but in German and other Germanic languages Sonne "sun" is feminine and Mond "moon" is masculine. The Germanic languages are a group of related languages that constitute a branch of the Indo-European (IE Language family. Two nouns denoting the same concept can also differ in gender in closely related languages, or within a single language. For instance, there are two different words for "car" in German. "Wagen" is masculine, whereas "Auto" is neutral. Meanwhile the word "auto" is masculine in Spanish, but it is feminine in French. In all cases, the meaning is the same.
Several words ending in -aje in Spanish are masculine: viaje (travel), paisaje (landscape), coraje (courage). But their Portuguese translations are feminine: viagem, paisagem, coragem. Reversely, the Spanish word "nariz" (nose) is feminine, whereas the Portuguese word for "nose" is spelt identically, but it is masculine.
Also, in Polish the word księżyc "moon" is masculine, but its Russian counterpart луна is feminine. Russian ( transliteration:,) is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia, the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages The Russian word for Солнце "sun" is neuter. Also, in Russian the word собака "dog" is feminine, but its Ukrainian counterpart (with the same spelling and almost identical pronunciation) is masculine. Ukrainian (in Ukrainian украї́нська мо́ва ukrayins'ka mova,) is a language of the East Slavic subgroup of the Slavic languages.
More examples:
| Language | Word | Meaning | Gender |
| Polish | księżyc | moon | masculine |
| Russian | луна | moon | feminine |
| Russian | картофель | potato | masculine |
| Russian | картошка | spud | feminine[7] |
There is nothing inherent about the moon or a potato which makes them objectively "male" or "female". In these cases, gender is quite independent of meaning, and a property of the nouns themselves, rather than of their referents.
Sometimes the gender switches: Russian тополь (poplar) is now masculine, but less than 200 years ago (in writings of Lermontov) it was feminine. Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov (Михаи́л Ю́рьевич Ле́рмонтов) ( –) a Russian Romantic Writer and Poet, sometimes The modern loanword виски (from whisky/whiskey) was originally feminine (in a translation of Jack London stories, 1915), then masculine (in a song of Alexander Vertinsky, 1920s or 1930s), and today it has become neuter (the masculine variant is typically considered archaic, and the feminine one is completely forgotten). Jack London (January 12 1876 &ndash November 22 1916 was an American author who wrote The Call of the Wild, White Fang, and The Aleksandr Nikolayevich Vertinsky ( Russian: Александр Вертинский, 21 March, 1889 in Kiev — 21 May
Gender assignment
There are three main ways by which natural languages categorize nouns into genders: according to logical or symbolic similarities in their meaning (semantic criterion), by grouping them with other nouns that have similar form (morphology), or through an arbitrary convention (possibly rooted in the language's history). Usually, a combination of the three types of criteria is used, though one is more prevalent.
Semantics
In Alamblak, a Sepik Hill language spoken in Papua New Guinea, the masculine gender includes males and things which are tall or long and slender, or narrow such as fish, crocodile, long snakes, arrows, spears and tall slender trees, and the feminine gender includes females and things which are short, squat or wide, such as turtles, frogs, houses, fighting shields, and trees that are typically more round and squat than others. Papua New Guinea (or ˈpæpjuːə in Tok Pisin: Papua Niugini) officially the Independent State of Papua New Guinea, is a country in Oceania A more or less discernible correlation between noun gender and the shape of the respective object is found in some languages even in the Indo-European family.
Sometimes, semantics prevails over the formal assignment of grammatical gender (agreement in sensu). In Latin, for example, nauta "sailor" is masculine, and nurus "daughter-in-law" is feminine, even though the endings -a and -us are normally associated with the feminine and the masculine, respectively. In Polish, the nouns mężczyzna "man" and książę "prince" are masculine, even though words with the ending -a are normally feminine and words that end with -ę are usually neuter. See also Synesis. Synesis (from Greek) means unification meeting sense conscience insight realization mind reason
Morphology
In Spanish, grammatical gender is determined by noun morphology. Morphology is the field of Linguistics that studies the internal structure of words Since nouns that refer to male persons usually end in -o or a consonant and nouns that refer to female persons usually end in -a, most other nouns that end in -o or a consonant are also treated as masculine, and most nouns that end in -a are treated as feminine, whatever their meaning. (Nouns that end in some other vowel are assigned a gender either according to etymology, by analogy, or by some other convention. Etymology is the study of the History of Words &mdash when they entered a language from what source and how their form and meaning have changed over time ) Morphology may in fact override meaning, in some cases. The noun miembro "member" is always masculine, even when it refers to a woman, but persona "person" is always feminine, even when it refers to a man.
In German also, diminutives with the endings -chen and -lein (cognates of English -kin and -ling meaning little, young) are always neuter, which is why Mädchen "girl" and Fräulein "young woman" are neuter. Another ending, the nominalizing suffix -ling, can be used to make countable nouns from uncountable nouns (Teig "dough" → Teigling "piece of dough"), or personal nouns from abstract nouns (Lehre "teaching", Strafe "punishment" → Lehrling "apprentice", Sträfling "convict") or adjectives (feige "cowardly" → Feigling "coward"), always producing masculine nouns. In Linguistics, a count noun (also countable noun) is a noun which can be modified by a Numeral and occur in both singular and Plural In Linguistics, a mass noun (also uncountable noun or non-count noun) is a common Noun that presents entities as an unbounded mass
In Irish, nouns ending in -óir/-eoir and -ín are always masculine; those ending -óg/-eog or -lann are always feminine. Irish (ga ''Gaeilge'' is a Goidelic language of the Indo-European language family originating in Ireland and historically spoken by the Irish.
On the other hand, the correlation between grammatical gender and morphology is usually not perfect: problema "problem" is masculine in Spanish (this is for etymological reasons, as it was derived from a Greek noun of the neuter gender), and radio "radio station" is feminine (because it is a shortening of estación de radio, a phrase whose head is the feminine noun estación). In linguistics the head is the word that determines the syntactic type of the Phrase of which it is a member or analogously the stem that determines the
Convention
In some languages, gender markers have been so eroded by time that they are no longer recognizable, even to native speakers. Most German nouns give no morphological or semantic clue as to their gender. It must simply be memorized. The conventional aspect of grammatical gender is also clear when one considers that there is nothing objective about a table which makes it feminine as French table, masculine as German Tisch, or neuter as Norwegian bord. A convention is a set of agreed, stipulated or generally accepted Standards norms social norms or criteria, often taking the form of Norwegian ( norsk) is a North Germanic Language spoken primarily in Norway, where it is an official language The learner of such languages should regard gender as an integral part of each noun. A frequent recommendation is to memorize a modifier along with the noun as a unit, usually a definite article, i. e. memorizing la table — where la is the French feminine singular definite article — der Tisch - where der is the German masculine singular nominative definite article — and bordet — where the suffix -et indicates the definite neuter singular in Norwegian.
Whether a distant ancestor of French, German, Norwegian, and English had a semantic value for genders is of course a different matter. Some authors have speculated that archaic Proto-Indo-European had two noun classes with the semantic values of animate and inanimate.
Gender in English
While grammatical gender was a fully productive inflectional category in Old English, Modern English has a much less pervasive gender system, primarily based on natural gender. Gender in the English language has been the focus of two distinct debates [3]
There are a few traces of gender marking in Modern English:
- Some loanwords inflect according to gender, such as actor/actress, where the suffix -or denotes the masculine, and the suffix -ress denotes the feminine. A loanword (or loan word) is a word directly taken into one Language from another with little or no translation
- The third person singular pronouns (and their possessive forms) are gender specific: "he/his" (masculine gender, overall used for males), "she/her(s)" (feminine gender, for females), "it/its" (neuter gender, mainly for objects and abstractions), "one/one's" (common gender, for anyone or anything), and "who/whose" (subordinate/vocative gender, for someone in question).
- A glint of gender endings live on in the cultural memory of novel terms such as fella from "fellow" or blonde from "blond".
But these are insignificant features compared to a typical language with grammatical gender:
- English has no live productive gender markers. In Linguistics, productivity is the degree to which Native speakers use a particular grammatical process especially in Word formation. For other meanings see the disambiguation page Marker In Linguistics, a marker is a free or bound Morpheme that indicates An example is the suffix -ette (of French provenance) in rockette, from rocket, or trollette, from troll, but it is seldom used, and mostly with disparaging or humorous intent.
- The English nouns that inflect for gender are a very small minority, typically loanwords from non-Germanic languages (the suffix -ress in the word "actress", for instance, derives from Latin -rix via French -rice). A loanword (or loan word) is a word directly taken into one Language from another with little or no translation The Germanic languages are a group of related languages that constitute a branch of the Indo-European (IE Language family. Latin ( lingua Latīna, laˈtiːna is an Italic language, historically spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. French ( français,) is a Romance language spoken around the world by 118 million people as a native language and by about 180 to 260 million people In languages with grammatical gender, there are typically thousands of words which inflect for gender.
- The third-person singular forms of the personal pronouns are the only modifiers that inflect according to gender. The personal pronouns of English can have various forms according to gender, number, person, and case. In Grammar, a modifier (or qualifier) is a word or Sentence element that limits or qualifies another word a phrase or a clause
It is also noteworthy that, with few exceptions, the gender of an English pronoun coincides with the real gender of its referent, rather than with the grammatical gender of its antecedent, frequently different from the former in languages with true grammatical gender. In Grammar, an antecedent is generally the Noun or Noun phrase to which an anaphor refers in a Coreference. The choice between "he", "she" and "it" invariably comes down to whether they designate a human male, a human female, or something else.
Some exceptions:
- Animals, which can go either way, being referred to according to their sex, or as "it".
- The pronoun "she" is sometimes used to refer to things which contain people such as countries, ships, and cars, or to refer to machines. This, however, is considered a stylistically marked, optional figure of speech. A figure of speech, sometimes This usage is furthermore in decline and advised against by most journalistic style guides such as the Chicago Manual of Style. A language has gender-specific pronouns when Personal pronouns have different forms according to the Gender of their Referents The English language The Chicago Manual of Style (abbreviated in writing as CMS or CMOS or verbally as Chicago) is a Style guide for American English [8]
Gender across language families
Indo-European
Many Indo-European languages, though not English, provide archetypical examples of grammatical gender.
Many linguists think the earliest stages of Proto-Indo-European had two genders, animate and inanimate, as did Hittite, but the inanimate gender later split into neuter and feminine, originating the classical three-way classification into masculine, feminine, and neuter which most of its descendants inherited. Hittite or Nesili is the Extinct language once spoken by the Hittites, a people who created an empire centered on ancient Hattusas (modern [9][10] Many Indo-European languages kept these three genders. Such is the case with most Slavic languages, classical Latin, Sanskrit, Greek, and German, for instance. The Slavic languages (also called Slavonic languages) a group of closely related Languages of the Slavic peoples and a subgroup of Indo-European languages Sanskrit (sa संस्कृता वाक् saṃskṛtā vāk, for short sa संस्कृतम् saṃskṛtam) is a historical Greek (el ελληνική γλώσσα or simply el ελληνικά — "Hellenic" is an Indo-European language, spoken today by 15-22 million people mainly The German language (de ''Deutsch'') is a West Germanic language and one of the world's major languages. Other Indo-European languages reduced the number of genders to two, either by losing the neuter (like most Romance languages and the Celtic languages), or by having the feminine and the masculine merge with one another into a common gender (as has happened, or is in the process of happening, to several Germanic languages). The Celtic languages are descended from Proto-Celtic, or "Common Celtic" a branch of the greater Indo-European Language family. Some, like English and Afrikaans, have all but lost grammatical gender. Afrikaans is an Indo-European language, derived from 17th century Dutch and classified as Low Franconian Germanic, mainly spoken in On the other hand, a few Slavic languages have arguably added new genders to the classical three. The Slavic languages (also called Slavonic languages) a group of closely related Languages of the Slavic peoples and a subgroup of Indo-European languages In those ancient and modern Indo-European languages that preserve a system of noun declension (including Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Slavic, and some Germanic languages), there is a high but not absolute correlation between grammatical gender and declensional class. Many linguists also believe this to be true of the middle and late stages of Proto-Indo-European.
Exceptionally for a Romance language, Romanian has preserved the three genders of Latin, although the neuter has been reduced to a combination of the other two, in the sense that neuter nouns have masculine endings in the singular, but feminine endings in the plural. Romanian or Daco-Romanian ( dated: Rumanian or Roumanian; self designation limba română, ˈlimba roˈmɨnə is a Romance As a consequence, adjectives, pronouns, and pronominal adjectives only have two forms, both in the singular and in the plural. The same happens in Italian, to a lesser extent. Italian ( or lingua italiana) is a Romance language spoken by about 63 million people as a First language, primarily in Italy.
Italian third-person singular pronouns have also a "neuter" form to refer to inanimate subjects (egli and ella vs. esso and essa). In fact, even in those languages where the original three genders have been mostly lost or reduced, there is sometimes a trace of them in a few words.
- English, personal pronouns: he, she, it
- Spanish, definite articles (words meaning "the"): el, la, lo
- Spanish, demonstratives (words meaning "this, this one"): este, esta, esto
- Portuguese, indefinite pronouns (words meaning "all of him/her/it"): todo, toda, tudo
The Spanish neuter definite article lo, for example, is used with nouns that denote abstractions, eg. Personal pronouns are Pronouns used as substitutes for proper or common Nouns. Demonstratives are deictic words (they depend on an external frame of reference that indicate which entities a speaker refers to and distinguishes those entities from others An indefinite pronoun is a Pronoun that refers to one or more unspecified beings objects or places lo único "the only thing"; lo mismo "the same thing". In Portuguese, a distinction is made between está todo molhado "he's all wet", está toda molhada "she's all wet", and está tudo molhado "it's all wet" (used for unspecified objects). In terms of agreement, however, these "neuter" words count as masculine: both Spanish lo mismo and Portuguese tudo take masculine adjectives. English modifiers do not generally inflect with gender.
In Venetian, only the demonstratives have a neuter form referring to abstactions, so a distinction is made between varda questo "look at this thing" (neuter), varda 'sto qua "look at this one" (masculine eg. man, book, mobile) and varda 'sta qua "look at this one (feminine eg. woman, pen, hand); along the same line a distinction is made between l'è queło / queła "it's that thing/fact" (neuter), l'è qûeło là "it's that one" (masc. ) and l'è qûeła là "it's that one" (fem. ) where the "û" sound can be dropped only in the masculine and in the feminine which however take "là".
See Loss of the neuter gender in Romance languages, and Gender in Dutch grammar, for further information. Vulgar Latin (in Latin sermo vulgaris, "folk speech" is a Blanket term covering the popular Dialects and Sociolects of the Latin In the Dutch language, nouns have one of three Grammatical genders masculine feminine or neuter
Other types of gender classifications
Some languages have gender-like noun classifications unrelated to gender identity. Particularly common are languages with animate and inanimate categories. The term "grammatical genders" is also used by extension in this case, although many authors prefer "noun classes" when none of the inflections in a language relate to sexuality. Note however that the word "gender" derives from Latin genus (also the root of genre) originally meant "kind", so it does not necessarily have a sexual meaning. A genus (plural genera from Γένος Latin genus "descent family type gender" is a low-level Taxonomic For further information, see Animacy. Animacy is a grammatical and/or Semantic category of Nouns based on how Sentient or alive the Referent of the noun is
Some Slavic languages, including Russian and Czech, make grammatical distinctions between animate and inanimate nouns (in Czech only in the masculine gender; in Russian only in masculine singular, but in the plural in all genders). Czech (ˈʧɛk čeština ˈʧɛʃcɪna in Czech is a West Slavic language with about 12 million native speakers it is the majority language in the Another example is Polish, which can be said to distinguish five genders: personal masculine (referring to male humans), animate non-personal masculine, inanimate masculine, feminine, and neuter.
| masculine | translation | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| animate | inanimate | |||
| personal | impersonal | |||
| Polish | To jest dobry nauczyciel. |
To jest dobry pies. |
To jest dobry ser. |
It's a good teacher / a good dog / good cheese. |
| Widzę dobrego nauczyciela. |
Widzę dobrego psa. |
Widzę dobry ser. |
I see a good teacher / a good dog / good cheese. |
|
| Widzę dobrych nauczycieli. |
Widzę dobre psy. |
Widzę dobre sery. |
I see good teachers / good dogs / good cheeses. |
|
| Slovene | To je dober učitelj / dober pes. |
To je dober sir. |
It's a good teacher / a good dog / good cheese. |
|
| Vidim dobrega učitelja / dobrega psa. |
Vidim dober sir. |
I see a good teacher / a good dog / good cheese. |
||
See Polish language: Grammar, for further information. Polish ( język polski, polszczyzna) is the Official language of Poland.
Australian Aboriginal languages
The Dyirbal language is well known for its system of four noun classes, which tend to be divided along the following semantic lines:
- I — animate objects, men
- II — women, water, fire, violence
- III — edible fruit and vegetables
- IV — miscellaneous (includes things not classifiable in the first three)
The class usually labeled "feminine", for instance, includes the word for fire and nouns relating to fire, as well as all dangerous creatures and phenomena. Dyirbal (also Djirubal) is an Australian Aboriginal language spoken in northeast Queensland by about 5 speakers of the Dyirbal tribe Water is a common Chemical substance that is essential for the survival of all known forms of Life. Fire is the heat and light energy released during a Chemical reaction, in particular a combustion reaction. Violence is the exertion of force so as to injure or abuse The word is used broadly to describe the destructive action of natural phenomena like Storms and Earthquakes The term fruit has different meanings dependent on context and the term is not synonymous in Food preparation and Biology. The term " vegetable " generally means the edible parts of Plants The definition of the word is traditional rather than Scientific, however This inspired the title of the George Lakoff book Women, Fire and Dangerous Things (ISBN 0-226-46804-6). "Lakoff" and "Professor Lakoff" redirect here
The Ngangikurrunggurr language has noun classes reserved for canines, and hunting weapons, and the Anindilyakwa language has a noun class for things that reflect light. The Ngangikurrunggurr is a tribe of people famous for their weaving who live in a small community called Peppimenarti Northern Territory, Australia. Enindhilyagwa (several other names see below is an Australian Language isolate spoken by the Warnindhilyagwa people on Groote Eylandt in the Gulf The Diyari language distinguishes only between female and other objects. Diyari or Dieri is an extinct Australian Aboriginal language of South Australia spoken by the Diyari tribe Perhaps the most noun classes in any Australian language are found in Yanyuwa, which has 16 noun classes. The Yanyuwa (also Yanyula, Anyula) language is spoken by the Yanyuwa people around the settlement of Borroloola (Yanyuwa burrulula
Caucasian languages
Some members of the Northwest Caucasian family, and almost all of the Northeast Caucasian languages, manifest noun class. The Northwest Caucasian languages, also called Pontic, Circassian, or Abkhaz-Adyghe, are a group of languages spoken in the Caucasus region The Northeast Caucasian languages, also called East Caucasian, Caspian, Nakho-Dagestanian, or Dagestanian, are a family of Languages In the Northeast Caucasian family, only Lezgian, Udi, and Aghul do not have noun classes. Lezgian, also called Lezgi, is a language spoken by the Lezgins who live in southern Dagestan (a republic of Russia) and northern Azerbaijan The Udi language, spoken by the Udi people, is a member of the Northeast Caucasian language family. Aghul, also called Agul, is a language spoken by the Aguls who live in southern Dagestan (a republic of Russia) and Azerbaijan Some languages have only two classes, while the Bats language has eight. Bats (also Batsi, Batsbi, Batsb, Batsaw, Tsova-Tush) is the Language of the Bats people, a Caucasian The most widespread system, however, has four classes, for male, female, animate beings and certain objects, and finally a class for the remaining nouns. The Andi language has a noun class reserved for insects.
Among Northwest Caucasian languages, Abkhaz shows a masculine-feminine-neuter distinction. Abkhaz is a Northwest Caucasian language spoken mainly in Abkhazia and Turkey by the Abkhaz people. Ubykh shows some inflections along the same lines, but only in some instances, and in some of these instances inflection for noun class is not even obligatory. Ubykh or Ubyx is a Language of the Northwestern Caucasian group, spoken by the Ubykh people up until the early 1990s
In all Caucasian languages that manifest class, it is not marked on the noun itself but on the dependent verbs, adjectives, pronouns and prepositions.
Niger-Congo languages
The Zande language distinguishes four noun classes:
| Criterion | Example | Gloss |
| male human | kumba | man |
| female human | dia | wife |
| animate | nya | beast |
| other | bambu | house |
There are about 80 inanimate nouns which are in the animate class, including nouns denoting heavenly objects (moon, rainbow), metal objects (hammer, ring), edible plants (sweet potato, pea), and non-metallic objects (whistle, ball). Zande is an Ubangian language spoken by the Azande, primarily in the northeast of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and southwestern Sudan Many of the exceptions have a round shape, and some can be explained by the role they play in Zande mythology.
Auxiliary and constructed languages
Many constructed languages have natural gender systems similar to that of English. A constructed or artificial language known colloquially or informally as a conlang is a Language whose Phonology, Grammar Animate nouns can have distinct forms reflecting natural gender, and personal pronouns are selected according to natural gender. There is no gender agreement on modifiers. The first three languages below fall into this category.
- Esperanto features the female suffix -in. is by far the most widely spoken constructed International auxiliary language in the world While it differentiates a small number of male and female nouns such as patro (father) and patrino (mother), most nouns are gender-neutral and the use of it is not necessary. For instance, hundo means either a male or female dog, virhundo means a male dog, and hundino means a female dog. The personal pronouns li (he) and ŝi (she) and their possessive forms lia (his) and ŝia (her) are used for male and female antecedents, while ĝi (it) and its possessive form ĝia (its) are used to refer to a non-personal antecedent, or as an epicene pronoun. Esperanto is a constructed auxiliary language. A highly regular grammar makes Esperanto much easier to learn than most other languages of the world though
- Ido has the masculine infix -ul and the feminine infix -in for animate beings. Ido (ˈiːdoʊ is a Constructed language created with the goal of becoming a universal second language for speakers of different linguistic backgrounds as a language easier Both are optional and are used only if it is necessary to avoid ambiguity. Thus: kato "a cat", katulo "a male cat", katino "a female cat". There are third person singular and plural pronouns for all three genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter, but also gender-free pronouns.
- Interlingua has no grammatical gender. Interlingua is an International auxiliary language (IAL developed between 1937 and 1951 by the International Auxiliary Language Association (IALA It indicates only natural gender, as in matre "mother" and patre "father". Interlingua speakers may use feminine endings. For example, -a may be used in place of -o in catto, producing catta "female cat". Professora may be used to denote a professor who is female, and actrice may be used to mean "actress". As in Ido, inflections marking gender are optional, although some gender-specific nouns such as femina, "woman", happen to end in -a or -o. Interlingua has feminine pronouns, and its general pronoun forms are also used as masculine pronouns. See also Interlingua This article is an informal outline of the grammar of Interlingua, an International auxiliary language first publicized
- The fictional Klingon language has three classes: capable of speaking, body part and other. The Klingon language ( tlhIngan Hol in Klingon is the Constructed language spoken by Klingons in the fictional Star Trek universe
See also Gender-neutrality in languages with grammatical gender: International auxiliary languages, and Gender-neutral pronoun: Constructed languages. Gender neutrality in languages with Grammatical gender implies promoting language usage which is balanced in its treatment of the genders Gender-neutral, gender-inclusive or epicene pronouns are Pronouns that neither reveal nor imply the Gender or sex of a person
Male and female speech
Some natural languages have intricate systems of gender-specific vocabulary, which are not the same as grammatical gender. The vocabulary of a person is defined either as the set of all Words that are understood by that person or the set of all words likely to be used by that person when constructing
- The oldest recorded language is Sumerian. Sumerian ( " native tongue " was the language of ancient Sumer, spoken in Southern Mesopotamia since at least the 4th millennium BC The Sumerians lived in what is now southern Iraq about 5,000 years ago. Sumerian women had a special language called Emesal, distinct from the main language, Emegir, which was spoken by both genders. The women's language had a distinct vocabulary, found in the records of religious rituals to be performed by women, also in the speech of goddesses in mythological texts. [11]
- For a significant period of time in the history of the ancient languages of India, after the formal language Sanskrit diverged from the popular Prakrit languages, some Sanskrit plays recorded the speech of women in Prakrit, distinct from the Sanskrit of male speakers. Sanskrit (sa संस्कृता वाक् saṃskṛtā vāk, for short sa संस्कृतम् saṃskṛtam) is a historical Prakrit (also transliterated as Pracrit) ( Sanskrit: prākṛta प्राकृत (from pra-kṛti प्रकृति according to one This convention was also used for illiterate and low-caste male speakers. [12]
- More recently, Thai shows evidence of similar features, where women have vocabulary items used in common speech, but typically distinct ones to be used among themselves. Thai (th ภาษาไทย, transcription: phasa thai, transliteration:; pʰāːsǎːtʰāj is the national and [13]
- Garifuna has a vocabulary split between terms used only by men and terms used only by women. Garifuna is an Arawakan language spoken in Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Belize by the Garifuna people. This does not however affect the entire vocabulary but when it does, the terms used by men generally come from Carib and those used by women come from Arawak. The Cariban languages are an indigenous Language family of South America. The Arawakan languages (also Arahuacan, Arawakanas, Arahuacano, Maipurean, Maipuran, Maipureano, Maipúrean
- The indigenous Australian language Yanyula has separate dialects for men and women. [14]
- In Japanese also, certain synonyms are used by men and women with different frequency, or conveying different connotations. is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities This article deals with the general meaning of the term "synonym" However, there is no systematic inflectional relation between male and female words, nor any form of agreement, and their literal meaning does not change with gender. In Grammar, inflection or inflexion is the way language handles grammatical relations and relational categories such as tense, mood, voice In Languages agreement is a form of cross-reference between different parts of a sentence or phrase See Gender differences in spoken Japanese for further information. The Japanese language is unusual among major Languages in the high degree to which the speech of women seen collectively differs from that of men
List of languages by type of grammatical genders
- Revisions and sourced additions are welcome.
Masculine and feminine
Common and neuter
Animate and inanimate
|
Masculine, feminine, and neuter
More than three grammatical genders
No grammatical gendersSee Noun class: languages without noun classes or grammatical genders. In Linguistics, the term noun class refers to a system of categorizing Nouns A noun may belong to a given class because of characteristic features of its Referent |
See also
Further examples of the presence and absence of grammatical gender
- Gender-neutrality in languages with grammatical gender
- Gender-neutrality in languages without grammatical gender
- Gender-neutral pronoun
Related topics
Similar linguistic notions
Gender-inclusive language
- Generic antecedents
- Gender-neutral language in English
- Gender-specific job title
- Gender-specific pronoun
Notes
- ^ Hockett, Charles F. Gender neutrality in languages with Grammatical gender implies promoting language usage which is balanced in its treatment of the genders Gender neutrality in Genderless languages is typically achieved by using gender-inclusive words ("human being" "person" "businessperson" Gender-neutral, gender-inclusive or epicene pronouns are Pronouns that neither reveal nor imply the Gender or sex of a person In Languages agreement is a form of cross-reference between different parts of a sentence or phrase Animacy is a grammatical and/or Semantic category of Nouns based on how Sentient or alive the Referent of the noun is In Linguistics, declension (or declination) is the occurrence of Inflection in Nouns Pronouns and Adjectives indicating Gender comprises a range of differences between men and women extending from the biological to the social In Grammar, inflection or inflexion is the way language handles grammatical relations and relational categories such as tense, mood, voice Morphology is the field of Linguistics that studies the internal structure of words In Linguistics, conjugation is the creation of derived forms of a Verb, Noun or Adjective from its Principal parts by Inflection In linguistics grammatical number is a Grammatical category of nouns pronouns and adjective and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions (such as "one" Grammatical person, in Linguistics, is deictic reference to a participant in an event such as the speaker the Addressee, or others In Linguistics, the term noun class refers to a system of categorizing Nouns A noun may belong to a given class because of characteristic features of its Referent Generic antecedents are representatives of classes indicated by a Reference in ordinary Language (most often a Pronoun) where Gender is typically Gender neutrality in English language (and in many other languages is a feature in its written and spoken versions in the late twentieth century for some people A gender-specific job title is a name of a job that also specifies or implies the gender of the person performing that job such as stewardess. A language has gender-specific pronouns when Personal pronouns have different forms according to the Gender of their Referents The English language (1958) A Course in Modern Linguistics, Macmillan, p. 231.
- ^ SIL: Glossary of Linguistic Terms: What is grammatical gender?
- ^ a b English Language. Encarta Encyclopedia. Microsoft (1993–2007). Retrieved on 2007-05-09. Year 2007 ( MMVII) was a Common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar in the 21st century. Events 1457 BC - Battle of Megiddo (15th century BC between Thutmose III and a large Canaanite coalition under the King of “The distinctions of grammatical gender in English were replaced by those of natural gender. ”
- ^ van Berkum, J. J. A. (1996) The psycholinguistics of grammatical gender: Studies in language comprehension and production. Doctoral Dissertation, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. Nijmegen, Netherlands: Nijmegen University Press (ISBN 90-373-0321-8), Chapter 2, "The linguistics of gender" (PDF).
- ^ Translations of "I love you" in many languages, at Omniglot.
- ^ The Unscholarly Scholarship of Anthony Buzzard. Retrieved on 2007-12-13. Year 2007 ( MMVII) was a Common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar in the 21st century. Events 1294 - Saint Celestine V abdicates the papacy after only five months Celestine hoped to return to his previous life
- ^ Grammatical gender in the Russian language
- ^ The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition, p. 356. 2003. ISBN 0-226-10403-6.
- ^ How did genders and cases develop in Indo-European?
- ^ The Original Nominal System of Proto-Indoeuropean - Case and Gender
- ^ Examples of Sumerian texts are available at the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature.
- ^ National Encyclopedia of Bangladesh.
- ^ Amazing Thailand: Thai Language.
- ^ Jean F Kirton. 'Yanyuwa, a dying language'. In Michael J Ray (ed. ), Aboriginal language use in the Northern Territory: 5 reports. Work Papers of the Summer Institute of Linguistics. Darwin: Summer Institute of Linguistics, 1988, p. 1-18.
Bibliography
- Craig, Colette G. (1986). Noun classes and categorization: Proceedings of a symposium on categorization and noun classification, Eugene, Oregon, October 1983. Amsterdam: J. Benjamins.
- Corbett, Greville G. (1991) Gender, Cambridge University Press —A comprehensive study; looks at 200 languages.
- Corbett, Geville (1994) "Gender and gender systems". En R. Asher (ed. ) The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, Oxford: Pergamon Press, pp. 1347--1353.
- Greenberg, J. H. (1978) "How does a language acquire gender markers?". En J. H. Greenberg et al. (eds. ) Universals of Human Language, Vol. 4, pp. 47--82.
- Hockett, Charles F. (1958) A Course in Modern Linguistics, Macmillan.
- Ibrahim, M. (1973) Grammatical gender. Its origin and development. La Haya: Mouton.
- Iturrioz, J. L. (1986) "Structure, meaning and function: a functional analysis of gender and other classificatory techniques". Función 1. 1-3.
- Pinker, Steven (1994) The Language Instinct, William Morrow and Company. Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18 1954 is a prominent Canadian - American experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, and author The Language Instinct is a book by Steven Pinker, published in 1994.
External links
- An overview of the grammar of Old English
- Susanne Wagner (2004-07-22). "MMIV" redirects here For the Modest Mouse album see " Baron von Bullshit Rides Again " Events 1099 - First Crusade: Godfrey of Bouillon is elected the first Defender of the Holy Sepulchre of The Kingdom of "Gender in English pronouns: Myth and reality" (PDF). . Albert Ludwigs University of Freiburg
- "The morphology of gender in Hebrew and Arabic numerals", by Uri Horesh (PDF)
Dapyx Software network: MP3 Explorer | Ebook Manager | Zenithic