Questions tagged [gender]
A system of classes of nouns which trigger specific types of inflections in associated words.
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What do Influences the Gender Assignment of Words: History, Culture, or Originators?
In Portuguese, the word for "circle" is "círculo," which is masculine. However, in French, the term "cercle" (meaning "circle") is feminine. Similarly, in ...
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What's the gender of "nice" in "Mary is a nice person"?
I just read this rule in Greek Essential Grammar:
This passage says that, in the Greek sentence for "Mary is a nice person", the adjective nice is masculine because it must agree with the ...
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Why do I intuitively seem to know the gender of inanimate objects?
Note to the Responder: This curiosity behind this question arose because of my (relative) proficiency in the Hindi language, but the answers need not be necessarily limited to it.
I am a complete noob ...
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Why in the world are French "Paul" and "Paule" distinguished by vowel openness?
Wikipedia lists
Paul [pɔl] ('Paul', masculine), vs. Paule [pol] ('Paule', feminine),
as a minimal pair of the two mid rounded back vowels of French.
What I wonder is, how did it happen that the two ...
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Is there a term for mixed gender in plural pronouns (as opposed to masculine, feminine, or neuter)?
In English, there is only one third person plural pronoun to refer to groups of any gender or genders. Multiple "he"s becomes they, multiple "she"s becomes they, multiple "it&...
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How did the generic masculine emerge?
In an essay for school I recently claimed the generic masculine was caused by sexism, but my teacher complained that I hadn't given a reason for this. Assuming my hypothesis is correct, how did this ...
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How do native speakers control gender distinction?
I get the concept of (Western) grammatical gender and why it is used in the languages I know. However, I do not understand how native speakers casually avoid mistakes in grammatical gender.
For ...
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Common origin of PIE feminine and collective plural and semantic implications
It is generally believed that the neuter nominative-accusative plural and feminine singular in PIE both originate in a common *-h2 suffix which originally marked collective, although recent works tend ...
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If the definiteness of a noun is dependent on the article that introduces it, can the gender of that noun also depend on that article?
If a chair can become the chair, can a noun's gender change depend on the article that introduces it? My understanding is that the classifier concentrates on the similar characteristics of the noun ...
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How to do Practice Problem for Basque
Link to Problem(both Problems and Answers[but no explanations])
https://sites.google.com/site/paninilinguisticsolympiad/Resources/sample-problems-and-solutions
My question is about the problem titled &...
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Is there a term to describe female names derived from a male name?
As an example there is the name Alexandra, a female name derived from the Greek male name Alexandros.
Is there a term used to describe this process? As there are terms to describe to process of ...
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Why do we use the names we do for grammatical genders?
Imagine if every French speaker suddenly agreed that nouns were one of 'animate' and 'inanimate', or 'chocolate' and 'strawberry', or 'A' and 'B' instead of 'masculine' and 'feminine'. The language ...
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Why do women's forms of address and honorifics vary more than men's forms of address and honorifics?
What I mean is in English, the form of address used for men we are not familiar with is "sir", whatever their age (technically, "master" is sometimes used for males under 25 years ...
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Does English have animate/inanimate distinction?
I know we have the "'S" genitive and the "X of Y" but I don't exactly understand the rules of using these even as a native English speaker and I'm unsure if English makes other ...
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Do English words have a sort of de-facto inherrent gender (or gender stereotype) to them?
I apologize in advance if this question goes all over the place, I was just randomly thinking today about gender in the English language.
One thing in English that I find is overlooked is gender in ...
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Western European languages tend to have fewer genders and simpler case systems than Eastern European ones, is this due to contact?
You can draw a relatively consistent line through Europe, to the west of which, Indo-European languages mostly have one or two genders and nouns don't inflect for case, and to the east of which, ...
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Software internationalisation - displaying gendered adjectives
I'm currently working on an internationalisation project for a large web application - initially we're just implementing French but more languages will follow in time. One of the issues we've come ...
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What is the function of a gender distinction in nouns?
In German and some other languages, I understand there are different forms of the definite article 'the' depending on the gender of the noun. Also personal pronouns have different forms depending on ...
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How did Old Norse influence Old English to lose genders and cases?
Wikipedia says that "Norse influence is ... considered to have stimulated and accelerated the morphological simplification found in Middle English, such as the loss of grammatical gender and ...
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Does the Bengali language have grammatical gender that's only optionally reflected in adjectives, or no grammatical gender at all?
I thought Bengali didn't have gender but did a quick Google search to check. I found pages saying that it does have gender and pages saying that it doesn't.
I'm not just talking about chat pages with ...
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Why there is a neuter gender in some Indo-European languages, and others apparently dropped it?
Since this one was shown as "hot network question", this question is a follow-up which I do not identify (yet) as answered e.g., here, raised as an observer (chemist).
As stated by the title,...
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Since when did Indo-European languages start associating noun genders with male/female sexes?
Since what point in time did noun classes in Indo-European languages become associated with the sexes?
I read that greek/latin used words that translate to "kind" to describe the noun ...
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How did the romance languages' feminine/masculine genders develop?
How did French, Spanish, Italian, end up with gendered nouns?
The Wikipedia page Proto-Indo-European nominals says
Originally, there probably were only an animate (masculine/feminine) and an ...
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Is there a technical name for when languages use masculine pronouns to refer to both men and women?
I know a little Arabic, and I also know English. They both have the notion of "gender" built into their syntax. I am Persian and I speak Farsi, which does not have "gender" built ...
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Why didn't speakers "default to real-world gender when making reference to animate objects"?
McWhorter contends that English and Afrikaans are "easier" to learn because they lost gender, a "difficult" feature. Given "the tendency for speakers to default to real-world ...
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Implying Gender In Finnish
I'm not sure if this is the place to ask this as this is more of a "curious" question instead of a research specific question, if that makes sense(which I guess all research starts from ...
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Why do some Indo-European languages have genders and some don't?
In some languages, like German and French, every noun has a gender and each gender has its article. Whereas languages like English and Persian do not have genders. Why is that?
Even though these ...
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Is there a language where there are personal pronouns for the first or second person that have gender?
Is there a language where there are personal pronouns for the first or second person that have gender? Like a feminine "I" or a masculine "you".
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Why does French use diminutive suffixes differently from other Romance languages?
I'm a native French speaker, and I noticed that for a lot of masculine objects, we use the suffix -ette to designate a smaller version of it, which turns it into a feminine word. Here are a few ...
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Are there any languages with gender neutral pronouns for unknown gender?
There are proposals to introduce in several languages gender-neutral pronouns to refer to groups of mixed gender or single individuals of unknown gender.
Are there examples of existing languages that ...
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Is there a generic English term for the relation actor:actress?
I am looking for a generic term describing the relation actor:actress or Paul:Paula, like actress is a ____ of actor. In German, there is the term Movierung for this, and it works in both directions (...
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Why is research on grammatical gender important?
I was wondering why is research on grammatical gender important? Why is exploring this area of linguistics of any interest to linguists? What can it tell us about language (especially with regards to ...
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Do any languages/cultures other than English apply non-grammatical gender to ships?
In the English language (or maybe in English-speaking cultures?) it's common to use feminine pronouns to refer to ships (and occasionally to other types of vehicles).
Are there any other languages/...
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Genderless referral to a person as existent in Thai language
While learning Thai I came across something I never knew from other languages:
The titles Khun (คุณ) and Than (ท่าน) while Than is said in down tone ('):
Thai people would most often refer ...
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How did these feminine mutations originate in Welsh?
It is known that the celtic languages have mutations, for instance:
Welsh:
*transcription depicts North Welsh dialects
• normal form: Cymru [ˈkəmrɨ̞] (Wales);
• soft mutation: Gymru [ˈɡəmrɨ̞] (ex.: ...
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in search of nouns with a mismatch between morphological and semantic gender [duplicate]
I am currently trying to identify nouns whose morphological gender differs from their semantic gender. Here are three examples I could identify so far:
French: Le laideron - masculine morpho-...
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Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and Gender Identity: Empirical Studies?
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis states, briefly put, that linguistic structures affect cognitive processes. I am interested in finding out how much is known about the development of gender identity from ...
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Languages with masculine nouns for various female entities, or feminine nouns for male entities
This is not an area I'm familiar with, so if any of the following description/discussion is misguided, I apologise in advance:
In languages with gendered nouns, the nouns for woman and man are ...
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Are there languages that inflect adverbs for gender
Triggered by this answer, I am curious: Are there languages that inflect adverbs for gender or noun class?
I have consulted the following two questions but the given inflections of adverbs in their ...
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Why has the neuter gender disappeared from almost all the modern Romance languages?
Why has the neuter gender disappeared from almost all the modern Romance 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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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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