Questions tagged [gender]
A system of classes of nouns which trigger specific types of inflections in associated words.
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Any old noun class system without chaotic formal/ semantic assignment
When noun class/gender system gets old, the semantic/formal assignment rules of the noun class become more opaque/unreliable because of loanwords and erosion of (derivational) suffixes and etc.
eg. in ...
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Do all languages distinguish between persons and non-persons?
I am teaching the concept of "person" and "personhood" to my Grade 12 philosophy class, and we have a video to watch in which the philosopher observes that English pronouns ...
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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 Indo-European languages deal with the grammatical gender of personal names?
How do Indo-European languages deal with the grammatical gender of personal names?
The reason I'm asking this question is because there's a female character named Rio Morales from the Spider-Verse ...
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Do any languages assign gender to inanimate objects based on material properties like flexibility instead of shape?
In the Palikur language of Brazil, inanimate objects that are solid and strong all have feminine gender, while objects that are soft, fragile or flexible have neuter gender. (There are no inanimate ...
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Which "big" language has a drastically different women's and men's speech? Does matriarchy slow down language change?
relations of sex and dialect to reduction
Women's speech
Some linguists have suggested that women use more standard speech forms than men because they are more status-conscious than men. Women's ...
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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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16 Genders of the Kivunjo Language?
Some of the Bantu languages have many grammatical genders. One of these, Kivunjo, is said to have 16. Would anyone let me know all of the 16 genders?
Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct quotes ...
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What is the origin of non-natural grammatical genders in Indo-European languages?
Non-natural grammatical genders in Indo-European languages:
What is their origin (assuming that there is a single origin, if there are many origins)? Or what are the origins?
How and for what ...
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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 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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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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Why do many French and Spanish noun cognates have opposing grammatical gender?
While most French/Spanish noun cognates share the same gender (both descending from the same vulgar latin root), there are many exceptions having opposing genders (e.g. la couleur / el color; la ...
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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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