One of the quirks of English is that it does not have gendered nouns.
Are there other languages in the Indo-European family that have also lost this feature?
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Sign up to join this communityOne of the quirks of English is that it does not have gendered nouns.
Are there other languages in the Indo-European family that have also lost this feature?
Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender#Indo-European:
Finally, some languages, such as English and Afrikaans, have nearly completely lost grammatical gender (retaining only some traces, such as the English pronouns he, she and it), and Bengali, Persian, Armenian, Assamese, Ossetic, Odia, Khowar, and Kalasha have lost it entirely.
That corresponds to my understanding. It is a spectrum. English does have some traces of gender, many of the most closely related Germanic languages and dialects have collapsed gender (common and neuter). But Persian, Ossetic and Armenian really have no grammatical gender even in pronouns.
On the other hand, there is not always a clear line between gender and noun classes or even declension patterns. If modern linguistics were a legacy of Bantu prescriptivists not European ones, we would be calling the same thing something else.
Then the question becomes if one of those obscure IE languages without grammatical gender has developed other flavours of noun classes.
A lot of this depends on how you define gender. English does have “gendered nouns” in the sense that the use of the pronouns “he, she, it” depends on the “gender” of its antecedent. Thus, “boy” is a masculine noun in the sense that it requires the (historically) masculine pronoun “he”. The difference between modern English and the gender system in most Indo-European languages (including Old English) is that English has replaced “conventional” gender by “natural” gender, reinterpreting all inanimate nouns as neuter.
This is different from the situation in Persian etc., where the personal pronouns are invariable for gender.