Questions tagged [gender]
A system of classes of nouns which trigger specific types of inflections in associated words.
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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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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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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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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 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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Do any Indo European languages reflect noun class types other than gender?
In the comments of another question about animate as noun gender in some Slavic languages an interesting point was raised.
Many if not most Indo European languages exhibit grammatical gender for ...
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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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Do some Slavic languages have an "extra" gender distinction for animate nouns?
I seem to recall hearing and reading that certain Slavic languages including Czech treat animate nouns as something like an extra gender. Even Wikipedia in some places counts more than three genders ...
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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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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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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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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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Are there purely isolating/analytic languages with grammatical gender?
It seems that all the things which reflect grammatical gender in languages have to do with inflectional (presumably also agglutinative) morphology, such as agreement.
But is that just coincidence, it ...
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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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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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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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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 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 first ...
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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 ...
user5306
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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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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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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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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 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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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 ...
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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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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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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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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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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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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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How exactly are noun classes different to classifiers?
Before the beta I would've thought questions like this one would be such basic concepts that most contributors would be familiar with them. But after a few questions on gender and animacy it seems ...
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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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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-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 ...
user1609
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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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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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Translation of electrical connection gender names into non-Indo-European languages [closed]
The "male/female" terminology used to identify the two halves of many, if not all, connectors and fasteners seems universal in the Western Indo-European speaking world.
Do other language families ...
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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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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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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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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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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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