Questions tagged [gender]
A system of classes of nouns which trigger specific types of inflections in associated words.
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Why has the neuter gender disappeared from almost all the modern Roman languages?
Why has the neuter gender disappeared from almost all the modern Roman languages? It was completely common in Latin.
And when exactly did this happen? Did it happen in Latin itself, or only after ...
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Can the need for ambiguity lead to merge of grammatical person, or other semantic merge?
My mother tongue doesn't distinguish 3.SG.F and 3.SG.M in speech. In some cases I feel the redundancy of it and the need for ambiguity of the grammatical person when I speak a language which ...
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Correlation between pronunciation of given names and gender
In a number of major Western European languages, there are some fairly straighforward correlations between the pronunciation of given names and the biological gender these names are assigned to. E.g. ...
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In romance languages, are there examples of male names that derive from female names?
In french, there are many female given names that are derived from male given names. Those names are often obtained by adding "ine", "ette", "e" or "a" at the end of the male name. Examples include
...
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Is Italian the only modern language that uses the feminine 3rd person singular pronoun for formal speech?
Is Italian the only modern language that uses the feminine 3rd person singular pronoun (Lei) for formal speech, regardless of the gender of the 2nd person singular addressee?
cf. T–V_distinction#...
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Common gender in Swedish and gender equality
I study Swedish and I have a question. I know ancient grammatical masculine and femenine gender fused into one ("common gender") at some point in time, but I was wondering...
They say that the ...
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1answer
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Are there any natural languages that actually have gender neutral 3rd person pronouns? [duplicate]
You see this a lot in the auxlang movement that having gendered pronouns is sexist.
But making conlangs of my own, I find its absence to be often annoying. No one seems to realize how useful it is to ...
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Feminine and neuter plural
The Indo-European feminine declension looks like the neuter plural. The usual explanation seems to be that feminine evolved out of an earlier inanimate collective but the semantics doesn't seem to be ...
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Why did English “man” and Latin “homo” take both the senses “gender-neutral human” and “male adult”?
Why did English "man" and Latin "homo" take both the sense "gender-neutral human" and "male adult"?
According to etymonline.com, English "man", and incidentally Latin "homo" (which originally meant "...
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Do speakers of languages that use gendered nouns automatically use the same gendered pronouns when referring to an animal as Mr. or Mrs.?
I know this is sort of a silly question, but the other day when walking in the park, I saw a squirrel and said, "Hello, Mr. Squirrel". I know for me, my choice of Mr. over Mrs. was random, or at least ...
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Is English the only Indo-European language without gendered nouns?
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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Do english-speaking people feel grammatical gender of words like “California” or “America” being feminine and “New York” being masculine?
Do english-speaking people feel grammatical gender of words like "California" or "America" being feminine and "New York" being masculine?
Many of geographical names are obviously came from languages ...
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How do I report the distribution of a variant among genders?
Just a quick question as I'm slightly confused
If I want to report the use of e.g. [t] among males and females, in a graph, would the percentages be worked out as follows:
males/ all tokens ...
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Does plural count as a grammatical gender?
Depending on the language, gender inflection can arise from natural gender, or even perhaps as a way of simplifying an extremely complex inflection system, but regardless, grammatical gender is a just ...
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Why are definite articles generally used for learning gendered languages?
I'll take spanish for my example, but it's also true for French an Italian.
In order to remember the gender of nouns, they are almost always found with an article. It's often a definite article. I've ...
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How to convert masculine Old Norse dwarf names to feminine markers?
I'm wondering how to convert the Old Norse names from the "Catalog of Dwarfs" in the Völuspá into their feminine version? So that they look phonetically female.
For example:
Fíli > Fíla
Kíli > Kíla
...
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As of July 2016, is there any new improved research on predicting French grammatical gender?
Please advise me if there are better research methods; I only searched for Related Articles on Google Scholar to the only 2 recent papers that I know:
Cited Articles of French gender assignment ...
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Are there any good individualistic measures of linguistic conservatism?
I am currently examining how differing levels of genderisation across languages (French, Finnish, and Norwegian) affects self-perception and the social perception of others through the utilisation of ...
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Why do most languages have multiple genders? Also, how do languages determine what gender to give things?
In many languages (unlike English) if translated literally, you would have people saying "the masculine case X," "the feminine case that," or "the neuter case this other." To make things even more ...
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1answer
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Languages with only a gender-neutral word for aunt/uncle
English has the words brother and sister, but then we also have the word sibling as a gender-neutral version. We have the words aunt and uncle as well, but no gender-neutral version. What languages ...
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Who was the first to call noun classes “genders”?
I'm not asking about the origin of grammatical gender. I am asking where is the earliest example of the term "gender" used to describe classes of nouns. I'm wondering who first decided to name ...
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How and when do French children learn to select between masculine and feminine forms of words when referring to themselves?
I am interested in what knowledge we have regarding the process by which a young child acquiring French as a first language learns to choose correctly between the masculine and feminine forms of ...
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Does Swedish always had common and neuter genders?
Exactly as stated in the title. I wonder if it always been that way or it is some modern concept to enforce gender equality?
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Is there any language in which the gender of the subject/object is marked in every verb conjugation?
Besides Spanish where you have comerla (feminine, eat her) or comerlo (masculine, eat him), but only works for certain verb conjugations.
Any other language where the gender of objects/subjects is ...
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What's a good source to say if a word is masculine or feminine in Sanskrit?
I trying to write a few verses and knowing the gender might change the meaning. A good source to Sanskrit grammar would also be accepted!
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Why do languages have gendered nouns?
Why do languages have gendered nouns? What are the problems that are solved by having gendered nouns?
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How stable are grammatical genders?
In languages which have gender-like classifications for nouns, like French and Russian, how often do nouns change gender over time? Have any studies been done to get statistics on how many words have ...
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What resources explain the oppositions in Grammatical Gender between French and Spanish noun cognates?
Abbreviate Grammatical Gender to GG.
This question concerns binary contrarieties and oppositions (Are these the correct terms?) in GG between French and Spanish noun cognates.
Are there any books or ...
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Is there a language in which feminine is the unmarked gender?
In English and every language I speak or know well, masculine gender is unmarked, and feminine is marked, for any human referent. Is there any known language where this is the other way around? (Take ...
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2answers
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Origins of gender distinction in verbs in Slavic
This is a thing that I have been thinking about for a while. I know that PIE did not have gender distinction in verb forms, and its presence in modern Slavic languages must be an innovation.
If I am ...
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Why in most (all?) languages don't adjectives have gender independently of the nouns they modify?
In many languages where nouns have gender, adjectives agree in gender with the nouns they modify. But it would be possible to imagine a language where each adjective had its own gender, which it kept ...
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Has grammatical gender ever been observed to emerge in a language that previously had none?
Does a language exist whose older forms are known to have lacked the category of grammatical gender, and which proceeded to evolve one (perhaps from a non-gender-based system of noun classes)? Are "...
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Is there a name for a word which can take both genders?
For languages with two genders, is there a name for a noun (or pronoun, adjective, etc) which can be of either gender?
This seems to be quite common for names of professions, for instance, in Latin ...
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1answer
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Do Persian Adjectives have Masc. Fem. and Neuter forms
For adjectives in Farsi (Persian), do they have Masculine, Feminine, and Neuter.
For Example:
The adjective خوب (Khoob, meaning good), does it have different forms, like in French or Russian?
...
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How does the reaction against gender-specific pronouns relate to a languages' use of gender?
This is a question out of gross ignorance, so I may be way off the mark here. If that's the case, the answer should be easy to provide in the negative.
My background
I'm an American, I spent the ...
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1answer
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Possessive determiner depending on grammatical gender of owner
Consider possessive determiners when the owner is a third person.
In many languages, the determiner depends on the natural gender of the speaker (English: he-she-it) or, in languages with grammatical ...
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Which languages have three noun classes corresponding to men, women and a third gender?
Which languages have three noun classes corresponding to men, women and a third gender? Where can I find lists like this?
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Gender-specific pronouns in languages without grammatical gender?
There are various discussions, also on SE network, about the usage of "gender-neutral" language, where most controversies arise around using the pronoun "he" to address any user.
Such problems are ...
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Is there a language without gender in third person pronouns?
English (as most Indo-European languages) has a gender-neutral third person pronoun, it, but it is typically not used for people; if one wants to be gender neutral, one is often stuck using he or she.
...
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Gender/tone sandhi in [classical] Tibetan grammar?
Tibetan alphabet is a kind of abugida where glyphs may combine into new different forms, taking different positions in their combinations according to their types (see H.B. Hannah, pp. 16- 45).
Each ...
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Looking for books etc on gender animacy in Oromo
I request you if you are willing and able to help me on my linguistics thesis with the title of The morphosyntax of gender animacy and clitics in Oromo.
Oromo is one of the Cushitic branch languages ...
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Importance of Genders in English Nouns
I am looking at teaching a computer about grammar which could turn into teaching it sentence analysis and eventually how to formulate a response.
This is the baby steps. I am defining a noun. So far ...
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How does language produce identities?
I've come to understand that language plays a central role in producing political identities such as "black", "white"; "man", "woman", "genderqueer"; "heterosexual", "queer". How exactly does language ...
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In languages with grammatical gender, how do they determine the gender when a new word has been created?
In languages with grammatical gender that has (almost) no morphological relation between the words and the genders(e.g. French), how do they determine the gender of a new word that has been introduced/...
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Are there any languages or cultures that have genderless given names?
In the U.S. where I live it is possible to be right almost all of the time when guessing the sex of a person from his or her given name: Ronald, George (Sand and Elliot notwithstanding), William, ...
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Proper names: does grammatical gender imply natural gender?
Questions about grammatical gender abound on this forum and on other linguistics forums. It's well known that in general, grammatical gender need not coincide with natural gender.
However, I am ...
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What are the contrasts between classifiers in isolating languages and genders in highly inflected ones?
Both isolating languages and inflected languages can have ways of marking noun classes like masculine nouns, nouns that stand for flat things, etc. Some isolating languages, like Chinese, have ...
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Gender of mixed groups defaulting to masculine – how common?
French has that rule that whenever a masculine entity is part of a group, the whole NP will default to masculine as far as agreement goes. My native language, German, also defaults gender to masculine,...
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Gender-based name endings: Are they common?
For instance, if an English name ends in -a, it's likely female. But English has no grammatical gender, and there is no general requirement that nouns in -a refer to women. It seems like in English ...
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What is the origin of feminine ending *-ia in PIE?
I have seen two versions:
a) *-ia ending actually derived from the collective number form, which also ends in *-ia. So the collective number first started to represent abstract things (compare Latin ...
