It might be worth mentioning that some Indo-European languages (notably the Scandinavian languages and Dutch) have in the course of their history merged the masculine and feminine genders into a single gender, known as "common". Thus these languages have two genders, "common" and "neuter", neither of which bears any relationship to maleness or femaleness!
ThW5 12:11, 24 October 2006 (UTC)
Chinese doesn't have a large number of personal pronouns. Maybe thinking of Japanese?
What in the world is grammatical gender for? What function does it serve, outside the case of natural gender? Ortolan88 13:45 Jul 24, 2002 (PDT)
Gender is handy for many things, but primarily for adding clarity while minimizing verbosity. Things like adjective agreement and gendered pronouns make it easy to figure out the structure of a sentence with fewer words and with less reliance on things like word order and extra particles. -- LDC
There's a need to link subject-object problem from this article, and vice versa, since many aspects of that problem relate to grammatical gender and its arbitrary assignment by a culture. For instance the most obvious example is "God" being referred as "He", along with whatever else is masculine in the language, while say "Earth" is "She" (rarely or never "he" although often "it") along with whatever else is feminine. This puts a pretty obvious slant on what is associated with what, and is an obvious example of gender being assigned to things that don't sexually reproduce...
How about a list of languages according to gender type? 1) two genders (masc and fem); 2) two genders (animate and inanimate); 3) three genders (masc, fem, neut). I came here looking for that but I'm not sure how to do it. Mjklin 03:35, 20 Apr 2004 (UTC)
I too thought Dutch had only two genders as stated in this article, partly because foregin-language-teaching books in English say so. But native Dutch speakers have corrected me. Dutch has only two definite articles: "de" (common), and "het" (neuter). But it has separate pronouns for masculine, feminine, and neuter; and these pronouns must agree with the gender of the noun - this makes it harder to see the gender for a non-speaker, and Dutch bilingual dictionares don't seem to include gender information very often. — Hippietrail 12:58, 20 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Ok, I ought to have commented here first before putting Dutch back in the two gender category, my bad. However:
I confess I am a student of Dutch and not (yet) a fluent speaker, but in all the formal lessons I've taken the article for common gender words is 'hij' or 'hem', I've never seen 'zij' or 'haar'. Dutch-English dictionaries list Dutch words as either noun or neuter-noun, I haven't seen one yet that lists masculine feminine and neuter. I realise that some speakers are fortunate to know exactly which words are/were masculine, feminine or neuter, or that some dialects preserve the 'zij/haar' article but does this reflect the majority of speakers or how the language is spoken today? If someone would like to list Dutch under 3 genders, very strictly speaking in linguistic terms this true. But this also gives the false impression that Dutch is like German, strictly delineated into male, female and neuter when this is not the case, especially when many native speakers don't know the difference themselves. Perhaps Dutch should be listed under both common/neuter and 3 genders. -- kudz75 02:20, 10 Jan 2005 (UTC)
I notice somebody has just improved the classification of the various forms of Norwegian. I was under the impression, however, that the feminine forms were optional in Nynorsk meaning that any speaker/writer could choose to use it as either a m/f/n language or a c/n language. Or does this only apply to the use of the definite article? ("en" masc and optionally "ei" fem I think)? — Hippietrail 09:26, 9 Sep 2004 (UTC)
{{ attention}}
Isn't there a vast and lush field of such? English and French would go under the more-than-two-or-three category: he/she/it/one/such/so and roughly il/elle/ça/on/ce/ci for guyly/gally/thingly/ally/thoughtly/wayly. (Oh, I'm goading English-speakers to dump Latin.) lysdexia 18:43, 4 Nov 2004 (UTC)
Aren't countries also feminine in English? Spain allied herself, Russia mobilized her, etc.?
"Actually, "man" for human in general is an older meaning, than the meaning "masculine person", so it isn't applicable. I wondered whether "a" and "an" would count as gender, or if they're phonological rather than grammatical? @@ (They are the same word, originally..., but in "a", the final -n got lost.)
I was shocked to see that English is included in the list of languages with a two-fold gender distinction between masculine and feminine. I should think that a) either English shouldn't be included in neither the 2-gender languages nor in the 3-gender languages because it has already included in the list of languages with no grammatical gender inflection; b) or English should be included in the list of languages with a three-gender distinction (masc, fem and neuter), as English pronoms can take three forms (he for natural masculine, she for natural feminine and it for inanimate). Xinelo 19:56, 23 October 2005 (UTC)
Now, German is listed as a language "without gender on the nouns, but only visible in the adjectives, determiners". This statement is not in accordance with e.g. Hockett's definition, i.e. not in accordance with the standard view within the field. What is "visible on the nouns", be it on the stem or in the declension, is an eventual declension class membership. Gender is, per definition, a classification of nouns as seen in the behaviour of determiners and adjectives. Since this is a situation where we do not (yet) have consensus, I bring it up here on the discussion page, before (or: rather than just) changing the paragraph in the article. Trondtr 20:56, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC).
I see that the article claims that Swahili has 15 noun classes. I'd always thought that it only had 8...how do we get 15? By counting plurals separately? That hardly seems reasonable. For the record, the classes I'm aware of are
Am I missing something? -- Marnen Laibow-Koser (talk) 22:34, 13 Dec 2004 (UTC)
On a related note, do we really need to list "Swahili" and "all Bantu languages" separately? Mga 02:04, 14 October 2006 (UTC)
Hi. Does anyone know of any more examples of words where the real gender is different from grammatical gender? Mädchen and Fräulein from German (which describe females but have neuter grammatical gender) are good examples, but I need to find more... Please post here or e-mail frankie [at] frankieroberto.com if you have any possible examples! -- Frankie Roberto 00:20, 27 Feb 2005 (UTC)
I hope it isn't inappropriate to use this discussion forum to draw attention to two new papers (by me) on the topic of grammatical gender:
One will appear in print in Lingua, and is currently published electronically on the Lingua website; the paper is entitled "Optimizing gender" and may be downloaded from
http://authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S0024384105000252
The other paper is entitled "Optimizing Russian gender: A preliminary analysis" and has just been published in FASL 13. This paper can be downloaded from
http://www.hum.uit.no/a/rice/v2/writing/OptRussGendPrelimRice.pdf
Both of these papers advocate an approach to gender assignment built on the basic insights of Steinmetz (1986, et seq.) and represent the approach within the formalism of Optimality Theory. The paper claims that conflicts in gender assignment invite such a treatment, and suggests that the treatment of gender assignment provides an example of crucial equal ranking in OT.
I hope you'll enjoy these papers, and would of course welcome any feedback or debate on the questions addressed here.
Curt Rice University of Tromsø
Was surprised to see Tamil listed in languages without a grammatical gender. I'm a native speaker and I know that we differentiate gender, rationality, number and person in nouns and these and more in verbs. Can someone clarify? You may want to look at the Tamil language#Grammar and Tamil language#Examples sections. -- Sundar ( talk · contribs) 05:14, Apr 11, 2005 (UTC)
Is it really worth it to note some made-up languages by J.R.R. Tolkein in these lists? I'm sorry but it strikes me as really ridiculous.
I notice English is listed in the "two gender: masculine and feminine" section, while at the same time it is also listed in the section "languages without grammatical genders/noun classes." This is clearly a mistake.
The stylistical uses of "she" for countries and ships does not justify including English in the category of languages with grammatical gender, nor does the gender-specific pronouns "he"/"she." Grammatical gender requires each and every noun to be assigned a gender as an intrinsic property, and this is definitely not the case for English.
Why does this article say English doesn't have grammatical genders? It seems to me that it has three genders based on biology. Example: He takes her hand (English). Er greift ihre Hand (German). "He" and "her" clearly show gender. Is it because "her" isn't inflected to show the gender of "hand" as it is in German? Or because the articles of English don't show gender? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Xideum ( talk • contribs) 15:04 UTC, 24 October 2005.
A. L. Phillips. 'Shall We Teach Gender?', The English Journal, Vol. 11, No. 1. (Jan., 1922), pp. 23-27. It is very interesting that the notion of natural gender has become the norm today, despite its obvious shortcomings. There is a very good article about this that I don't have at hand but will add later - it explains why natural gender results from the omission of neuter as a gender. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 131.111.8.104 ( talk) 20:40, 20 February 2007 (UTC).
This is the continuation of a conversation started here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender.
Here is my proposed rewrite of the introduction of this page:
All languages can use different nouns to differentiate between people of different biological or social gender, e.g., male and female, man and woman, uncle and aunt, but not all have genders in the grammatical sense. Grammatical gender is a type of inflection. We say that a language has grammatical genders, or noun classes, when nouns are divided into groups according to natural characteristics of the concepts which they represent. This division can manifest itself in two ways: through morphological characteristics of the nouns themselves, and through morphological changes in other parts of speech that refer to nouns (gender agreement).
For example, in Spanish, most nouns that end in -o are masculine and most nouns that end in -a are feminine. Thus, niño means “boy”, and niña means “girl”. This allows new nouns with a similar meaning to be readily created in a different class, by analogy: given the noun empresario (businessman), it was straightforward to make the new noun empresaria for “businesswoman”, when women reached the work market.
This kind of class shift can also have more subtle uses, such as making a collective noun like fruta (group of fruits) from a singular noun like fruto (fruit).
To understand gender agreement, consider the sentences "The man is tall" and "The woman is tall". In
English, the only word that differs between them is the noun "man/woman", which has a direct semantic association with sexual identity. In Spanish, however, one says "El hombre es alto" and "La mujer es alta", respectively. Not only do the words for "man" and "woman" change, (hombre vs. mujer), but so do the article (el, la) and the adjective (alto, alta). When a noun belongs to a certain class, other parts of speech that refer to that noun must be inflected to be in the same class. This is similar to number agreement, whereby parts of speech that refer to a noun are inflected to agree with the
grammatical number of that noun.
Curzan illustrates gender agreement in Old English with a “highly contrived” example:
The noun lind (shield) is grammatically feminine, which forces the pronoun seo (the, that) and the adjectives brade (broad) and tilu (good) to appear in their feminine forms, as well as the pronoun hire (her), referring back to lind, which adopts the grammatical gender of the referent.
By comparison, in Modern English the sentence would be:
Here, the shield is understood as a sexless object, and therefore designated by the neuter pronoun it. Old English had three genders, masculine, feminine and neuter, but gender inflections (as well as number inflections) were greatly simplified, and then merged with one another. The only trace of grammatical gender left in modern English are some pronouns, such as he, she, it, which tend to represent natural gender. Animals and plants, however, can be referred to as it, and sometimes the pronoun she is applied to countries, ships and machines, although this is not mandatory.
Some languages do not have noun classes. Finnish, which never had any genders, has only one third person singular pronoun, hän (he/she). On the other hand, Niger-Congo languages can have ten or more noun classes. In Swahili, for instance, nouns that begin with m- in the singular and wa- in the plural denote persons, and nouns that begin with m- in the singular but mi- in the plural denote plants. In the sentence below, the class marker ki- (marking singular nouns in class number 7) shows up on both the adjective (-kubwa) and the verb (-anguka), to express their relation to the class 7 noun kitabu 'book':
(cl.7-book cl.7-big cl.7-PRESENT-fall)
Common criteria for defining noun classes include:
The Algonquian languages have animate and inanimate noun classes, for example, and most Indo-European languages distinguish feminine, masculine and sometimes neuter noun classes. In other languages, masculine and feminine are subsumed in the category of person, either generally, or only in the plural, as in the North Caucasian languages and some Dravidian languages. In the Alamblak language oblong objects and animals are named using masculine nouns, and round ones using feminine nouns. A more or less discernible correlation between the noun gender and the shape of the respective object is found in some languages even in the Indo-European family.
The overlap between grammatical gender and natural gender is not always perfect: the Spanish noun miembro (member) is always masculine, even if it refers to a woman, but persona (person) is always feminine, even when it refers to a man. Thus, grammatical gender is, to some extent, a matter of convention, even when it concerns human beings.
Conversely, the correlation between grammatical gender and noun morphology may also have exceptions. Although in Spanish the suffix -o is characteristic of the masculine gender and the suffix -a is typical of the feminine, problema (problem) is masculine, and radio (radio station) is feminine.
Gender assignment is often different for animals than it is for human beings. In Spanish, a cheetah is always un guepardo (masculine) and a zebra is always una cebra (feminine), regardless of their biological sex. If it becomes necessary to specify the sex of the animal, an adjective is added, as in un guepardo hembra (a female cheetah). Individualized names for the male and the female of a species are more frequent when they refer to common pets or farm animals. E.g., English horse and mare, French chat (male cat) and chatte (female cat).
My comments on some of the proposed changes follow.
"In linguistics, grammatical genders, also called noun classes, are classes of nouns requiring different agreement forms on determiners, adjectives, verbs or other words." I have incorporated this into the previous version, rephrasing it a bit.
"The number of classes varies from two (Masculine and Feminine, as in Spanish or French), three (Masculine, Feminine, Neuter, as in German or Latin), four to eight (as in many Caucasian languages), to as many as twenty or more (as in the Bantu languages and languages of West Africa, such as Fula)." This excerpt gave the wrong impression that whenever a language has two genders they are the masculine and the feminine, and whenever it has three they are masculine, feminine, and neuter, which is not right. Further, most of the information here is already in the rewrite.
"In languages having gender, every noun must belong to one of the classes. Sometimes, we find nouns that can belong to two or more classes. For example , in the Caucasian language Archi the noun lo ("child") can take Masculine gender when it refers to a young boy, Feminine gender to denote a girl, and Neuter gender (normally used for inanimates), when the sex of child is unknown or irrelevant (Corbett 1994)." This is actually a good example of natural gender agreement, not grammatical gender.
"In general, the boundaries of noun classes are rather arbitrary, although there are rules of thumb in many languages." I am hesitant to describe noun classes as ‘arbitrary’, since what appears arbitrary is often (though not always) determined by morphology and etymology. "Rule of thumb" is a poor description for morphology. Furthermore, the term "arbitrary" implies that grammatical gender is supposed to translate into real-world categories. I think it's less misleading to say that grammatical gender and natural gender categories (such as "masculine", "feminine", or "tree", etc.) overlap to some extent, but do not necessarily coincide.
"Gender assignment is in most cases arbitrary for referents that do not have biological gender […]" This is inaccurate, unless you restrict the word gender to languages with the masculine-feminine-neuter complex of noun classes. But Bantu languages, for example Swahili, assign gender to referents that do not have biological gender, in a largely non-arbitrary way.
In the absence of any comments, I have implemented the changes. Dec. 7 2005.
I have made a few changes. Here are the justifications:
"In some local dialects of German, all nouns for female persons have been shifted to the neuter gender, but the female gender remains for some words denoting objects. All this is still arbitrary, and differs between cultures. The ancient Romans believed the Sun to be masculine and the Moon to be feminine (as in French, Spanish, Italian), but the Germans (and Germanic languages) express the opposite belief." Grammatical gender is determined by language, not culture. I don't think the ancient Romans "believed the Sun to be masculine and the Moon to be feminine", or that "the Germans (and Germanic languages) express the opposite belief". The grammatical gender of inanimate objects is just a convention, not a belief, as anyone who speaks a language with genders will confirm. Dec. 6 2005.
I've tried to cleanup and reorganise the article, by abbreviating the introduction and grouping related material scattered over the article together. I've also tried to be more consistent in the use of "noun class" and "grammatical gender", preferring the former - this, I think, makes the explanation of the distinction between natural and grammatical gender clearer, and also is a better description of the concept (particularly since the classes are not directly linked to gender in many non-IE and non-Semitic languages). For the same reason, I would favour moving the article to "Noun classes", but I don't feel too strongly about this so I'm happy to let it lie as it is.
I would very much like to move the extremely long lists of languages at the end to a new article Languages sorted by type of noun classes, or some such thing, if there are no objections. -- Arvind 14:04, 31 December 2005 (UTC)
I've read texts in Latin and in Greek, two ancient Indo-European languages with relatively free word order. With grammatical gender, it is easier to tell which pronouns go with which antecendents. Without grammatical gender, the languages probably would have had to develop more ordered syntax. It seems that those languages with loose word order need grammatical gender for clarity and understanding. Only speakers of those modern Indo-European languages with fixed word order, like English and French, have the luxury of even thinking about not using certain pronouns. BrianGCrawfordMA 18:11, 5 February 2006 (UTC)
Do we have a list of gendered words in English anywhere? Like fiance/finacee and blond/blonde. Rmhermen 17:25, 9 February 2006 (UTC)
I tend to agree with you. "Blond(e)" is a very contrived example, for several reasons:
On the other hand, English certainly has pairs of gendered words such as actor/actress. FilipeS 13:09, 31 October 2006 (UTC)
Yep, the malign influence of French... Just kidding. But you are right, even in a genderless language like English it's almost inevitably the word referring to females that is changed if someone decides that a gender pair is needed; the masculine is the default. (I notice, too, that genderless Turkish also has the word aktris.) The only counterexample I can think of in English is widow-widower, and there the reasoning is obvious, female widows are more common, it's more likely to be a defining part of that person's public identity, etc. ProhibitOnions (T) 21:40, 31 October 2006 (UTC)
I am not a native speaker of English, so I'll gladly accept your corretions. Still I believe that
the discussion about grammatical gender in English goes into a completely wrong direction.
To my understanding, the difference between grammatical gender and natural gender should be defined very sharp and clearly. The only sentence in this article that talks about natural gender is this:
The correlation between grammatical and natural gender need not be perfect, and it often is not.
But what is grammatical gender opposed to natural gender? All of the examples put forward here are concerned with natural gender. A waitress is a female human being that works as a waiter and we find agreement with a pronoun like her, because of the natural gender. It's a derivational process from waiter to waitress so there can be a gender change, just like in other languages. Since English doesn't have grammatical gender, it is a change in natural gender. Let me define natural and grammatical gender first:
Natural gender is the actual gender of an object in reality outside the language. The real-world-object WAITRESS, being referred to as waitress within the language, actually has the natural gender female (as human beings and other animals just have a natural gender. Let's not talk about snails, shells, plants or hermaphrodites, please.).
Also, there are real-world-objects that do not have a natural gender. There are languages that distinguish (grammatical) gender of such objects within the language. I'll take German as an example. It is der Barstuhl (m) (the stool). That doesn't mean that any speaker of German thinks a STOOL was quite a manly real-world-object. No, it is just the grammatical gender, that doesn't mean the object STOOL has a natural gender.
Hence, grammaical gender is a type of gender that is only being assigned to a name of a real-world-object and it is being assigned within the language, not in the real world.
In other words: grammtical gender doesn't have anything to do with natural gender. Only one thing: Where there is a clearly defined natural gender of a real-world-object, quite often the same gender is being used as a grammatical gender for the name of thet object in the language, but that's not necessarily the case.
Important: natural gender can be seen by looking at the real-world-object, grammatical gender can be seen by looking at the word within the language that refers to that real-world-object.
In the English language there are so few words that show grammatical gender without having a natural gender that we can talk about exceptions:
Ships. Natural gender: none. Grammatical gender: fem.
Moon. Natural gender: none. Grammatical gender: fem.? (Is that right, native speakers? In poetry or sth?)
Countries. Natural gender: none. Grammatical gender: fem.?
Animals. Natural gender: f,m. Grammatical gender: n,m,f (The male dog wagged its tail. The bitch wagged its tail.)
All the other examples that have been discussed at this page have a natural gender! For animals I have also seen natural gender before. Something like: (The male dog is eating his bone. The female dog is playing with her toy.)
In sum, grammatical gender is really marginal in English, I'd go so far to say: Not existant. What's the precentage of words you find in Englsh where you can proof (by the use of agreement with pronouns for instance) that there is a gender information and also there is no natural gender of the real-world-object the word is referring to?
In languages that have grammatical gender (like German) the percentage is very high. Also, the grammatical gender does not necessarily agree with the grammatical gender of the word in other languages that refes to the same real-world-object. Take a CAR (real-world-object): the car (n, English); das Auto (n, German); la macchina (f, Italian); el coche (m, Spanish)
Natural gender of the real-world-object CAR? None, of course. Nevertheless, in German a CAR is being referred to as "es" (pronoun, n) in Italian as "la" (pronoun, f), in Spanish as "él" (pronoun, m).
In languages with grammatical gender the disagreement between natural gender and grammatical gender works into the other direction as well. German: das Mädchen (n) (the girl). Agreement within the language (must) should be neutral:
Das Mädchen sitzt auf der Bank. Es ißt eine Banane. (The girl is sitting on a bench. She is eating a banana.) es is a neutral pronoun. Some German native speakers get confused with the natural gender and accept also:
Das Mädchen sitzt auf der Bank. Sie ißt eine Banane. (The girl is sitting on a bench. She is eating a banana.)
But a dative example clearly shows that the grammatical gender is neutral. (Just in case the "das" (German neutral determiner) in front of "Mädchen" wasn't convincing enough)
Ich gebe dem Mädchen das Buch. (I give the girl the book.)
Ich gebe der Frau das Buch. (I give the lady the book.)
If the grammatical gender of Frau (lady) and Mädchen (girl) was identical both must have the same dative determiner. They have not. "der" is singular dative female where as "dem" is the singular dative neutral. The natural gender is the same though: female. That works with every diminuitive form in German. der Bube (m, the boy) das Bübchen (n, the little boy). Even with names: "Helene" (f) "Helenchen" (n). In English, it only goes for animals.
Ships are female in German as well. But in both languages it is a personification. The ship is personified as a woman by the mariner in the mariners sociolect. This personification has swashed over into the standard language. Hence a ship can have female natural gender and neutral grammatical gender in German. das Schiff (n); die AIDA (f) That's why ships are given female names quite often, too. They are ladies, basically. -- Steven 01:47, 19 December 2006 (UTC)
Russian is native to me, yet, I've never noticed that there would be animate/inanimate cases for the masculine. Could someone please give me an example? I even asked my language-savvy mom; she doesn't know about such. -- 84.249.252.211 20:38, 24 February 2006 (UTC)
I have to say that I'm quite baffled by the profusion of noun classes listed for certain Slavic languages. Could it be that someone has been mixing up their genders with their declensions?... FilipeS 19:54, 31 October 2006 (UTC)
But, ProhibitOnions, you're not supposed to identify genders(/noun classes) by looking only at the plural. Grammatical gender and grammatical number should be analysed as orthogonal characteristics. FilipeS 22:36, 31 October 2006 (UTC)
People, if you carefully count the classes on Sesotho language you'll see that, counting singular and plural separately, Sesotho has 9 classes (or 11 if you include 1a and 2a), but the highest number is 18 (note how some classes are missing). Wait - I've confused myself, now. I'll quickly have a look...
Okay, so I lied. It has 15 classes, 17 if you count 1a and 2a, 18 only if you incorrectly count the plurals of 14 (these are actually class 6), and 7 according to Doke's counting scheme (sing and plural in same classe, 15 and 17 together...). So that's 7 or 15. I wonder what sources the content comes from? There's a very good reason why the sings are separated from the plurals and it's dumb to compare Bantu langs to Greek as this article does. In case I'm logged out again, this is User:Zyxoas. 216.239.58.136 10:05, 26 March 2006 (UTC)
What's conspicuously missing from this article is any mention of the origins of grammatical gender, and why people in the distant past may have decided that certain objects were intrinsically "masculine," "feminine," or neither (as the categories usually are). What have linguists discovered, or speculated, on this matter? ProhibitOnions 09:50, 1 April 2006 (UTC)
goes like this.. 'noun classes, are certain types of inflections according to which nouns can be divided into categories with semantic or morphological significance. Grammatical gender is analogous to grammatical number, except that it denotes qualities rather than quantities.'
There seem to be some problems here: noun classes are inflections? That's not right: they are categories of nouns. I'm not sure 'morphological significance' is the right thing to say either. They have morphological marking, somewhere, sometimes on the noun, sometimes elsewhere. And gender denotes qualities? Well, yes, sometimes, but it's not part of the definition. This needs redoing. It might be good to start with a simple example so that the non-specialists can understand what's being talked about. A rewrite, in effect. -- Drmaik 21:45, 5 April 2006 (UTC)
The issue of counting genders in a language may be tricky. Let's take Polish as an example: some grammarians say that Polish has three genders in singular (masculine, feminine and neuter), and two in plural (masculine-personal and non-masculine-personal). Others say it has four genders: masculine-personal, masculine non-personal, feminine and neuter, and that the first and second merge in singular, and the third abd fifth merge in plural. Additionally, distinction may be made between animate and inanimate nouns, so it could yield even five genders: masculine-personal, masculine non-personal animate, masculine inanimate, feminine and neuter. Perhaps you could even make a distinction between gender and noun class, and say that there are three genders but five noun classes (based on such attributes as gender, personality and animity). So it depends on the way you're looking at it. Kpalion 11:24, 6 April 2006 (UTC)
Apparently malayalam does have a sort of grammatical gender - [1]- although all inanimate objects only have neuter forms and sometimes the feminine and masculine are completely separate nouns and not derived from the same root, eg. പശു (cow) and കാള (ox). -- Grammatical error 11:10, 7 April 2006 (UTC)
I removed the sentence saying that Portuguese "todo" vs. "tudo" was an example of masculine vs. neuter. Those words simply mean different things ("each" vs. "the whole thing"), and they are both grammatically masculine. Qaramazov
Hi. I only noticed now that you had made a comment here. You are indeed right that "todo" has the masculine grammatical gender. But exactly the same can be said of the article "lo" in Spanish. And the personal pronouns of English, "he", "she", "it", have no gender at all, in this sense. The point is that lexically, there is still an association with gender. And it is the same kind of correspondence for Port. "todo/toda/tudo" as it is for Sp. "el/la/lo", and for English "he/she/it". FilipeS 21:49, 15 April 2006 (UTC)
In the absence of a reply, I have edited the paragraph. I hope it's clear enough now. FilipeS 16:10, 19 April 2006 (UTC)
I am proposing the merger of the entry on 'natural gender' with this one. My reasons are the following:
FilipeS 18:23, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
Yeah, go ahead and merge them. I agree with your points. CRGreathouse 03:04, 24 May 2006 (UTC)
Done. :-) FilipeS 19:21, 27 June 2006 (UTC)
The article stated that "In German, all nouns ending in -ung (corresponding to -ing in English) are grammatically feminine". However, just off the top of my head, I can easily give some counterexamples, for example the male nouns Dung, Schwung and Sprung. The feminine gender is always used, however (as far as I'm aware of), for nouns formed from verbs by taking the infinitive stem (sometimes slightly modifying it) and appending "-ung". Unfortunately, I do not know how this form is called in linguistics. This is very similar to the English gerund except that the substantivierter Infinitiv is actually used in many places where the gerund would be used in English. I think the -ung form is used when a passive meaning of the verb is intended, or when a particular action is described, whereas the "substantivierter Infinitiv" is used when an active or general meaning is expressed. It's a bit complicated, so bear with me. :-) Here are some examples: Verb, "substantivierter Infinitiv" und that strange -ung form (the latter two with the corresponding definitive article).
There are probably thousands of verbs which have a corresponding -ung noun, though there are probably equally many which don't, or at least where the -ung form has fallen out of favor in contemporary German. For instance, neither the "substantivierter Infinitiv" nor the -ung form are typically used for the verb "schaden" (to harm, to damage), though the same is not true for the verb "schädigen" with very similar meaning. Where the -ung form exists, it is always a feminine noun (whereas the "substantivierter Infinitiv" is always a neutral noun). Aragorn2 14:25, 22 April 2006 (UTC)
Point well made. It should say "the diminutive suffix -ung". I will correct it. FilipeS 15:04, 22 April 2006 (UTC)
Maybe I misremembered. But can it still be said that nouns with the suffix -ung are feminine as is currently in the article, then? FilipeS 16:40, 22 April 2006 (UTC)
I came to the article just to look if here's any notion on proportions how are nouns divided into 3 genders in German and 2 genders in French etc. The article does not satisfy my curiousity, could someone link a webpage or comment on the subject?-- Constanz - Talk 14:18, 19 June 2006 (UTC)
I've followed the link. The author points out that, clearly, majority of Dutch nouns belong to group of de words, and het-words form a minority. Interestingly, the latter group was initially neuter and the former is a joint group of nouns that used to be divided into masculine and feminine gender nouns. Something similar has happened in Swedish, where masc and fem (but perhaps neuter as well? I don't remember exactly) have fused into en words group, leaving et words the other group.-- Constanz - Talk 13:27, 29 June 2006 (UTC)
Note though that eventhough Dutch uses the same gender marker (de) for masc. and fem. a gender is still made. Rex 15:41, 10 August 2006 (UTC)
Swedish is listed under "common and neuter" and under "more than three". What's the true?-- Nixer 15:24, 10 August 2006 (UTC)
Swedish do have two genders: normal and neuter. However, the language originally had three: masculine, feminime and neuther. Over the centuries masculine and feminime merged to form the normal gender. During the time Swedish was considered to have four genders: masculine, feminime, normal and neuther. This classification may have stayed in the textbooks for some time later. Today, Swedish use masculine and feminime forms much the same way as English do. There are some exteptions through. A human of unknown gender is usually refered to with feminime forms, but sometimes with normal. Also, a Swede would not say ”den är nio” (”it is nine o'clock”): the correct form is ”hon är nio” (”she is nine o'clock”). However, both the words ”människa” (”human”) and ”klocka” (”clock”) are inflected as normal. There is one more vestige from the three gender system: adjectives have a masculine infliction when refering to a male human mentioned in definite singular. This is done by changing the comon suffix ”-a” to ”-e”. This rule does also applies to ordinal numbers.
2007-02-10 Lena Synnerholm, Märsta, Sweden.
From what I understand, the feminine and the masculine genders are vestigial in those languages. A note could be added about how they are still present in some constructions, though. FilipeS 17:14, 20 February 2007 (UTC)
As a native Spanish speaker, I suggest this example included in Lexical Gender should be changed. Fruta being defined as a group of fruits is not correct: it is not a collective noun used to refer to a group of fruits. It is used to refer mostly to edible fruits (La manzana es una fruta. => The apple is a fruit., see the Royal Spanish Academy Dictionary). Fruto, on the other hand, can be used indisctinctly, but tends to be more commonly used when denoting the origin (La manzana es el fruto del manzano. => The apple is the fruit of the apple tree.) -- Zavreio 17:57, 2 October 2006 (UTC).
Because of identifying gender with noun class, this article seems to infringe NPOV. Here are some facts which should be mentioned in it and they are not.
1) The connotation of gender with sex is characteristic for English speakers only; I do not even know a single language outside English in which the term "gender" would have anything to do with "sex". It should be emphasized in the article, otherwise it is English-biased. Which is more, the custom of understanding "gender" as "sex" is NOT characteristic for the "classic" English. It is a new fashion, perhaps taken from the USA.
2) Many scholars clearly distinguish genders and noun class - is there a word on it in the article? In fact, these notions are mixed by English scholars only, probably because of the false connotation of gender with sex. The second reason is probably the fact that English has lost the grammatical gender during its history and now this notion is hard to be correctly understood by English speakers. It is noticeable that scholars whose mother tongues have the gender, usually do not mix genders with noun classes.
3) The difference between genders and noun classes is emphasized by many linguists. Even if there is a custom for identify these two notions by some, mainly American scholars, Wikipedia SHOULD present also the opposite point of view and the article SHOULD NOT be entirely constructed as if the view that noun classes = genders would be common (from my personal experiences: it is quite inversely, but the view that noun classes and genders are two different things is common, especially in non-English sources!). Otherwise, the Neutral Point of View is not neutral any longer.
4) Once again, we are talking about NOTIONS, not WORDS. If the notions of "gender" and "noun class" are viewed different from each other by MANY scholars, it should be reflected in any encyclopaedia with the NPOV policy.
5) There are serious linguistic theories and typologies that put genders and noun classes on opposite ends of the scale. For example, according to Klimov, the author of so called contensive typology, there are 4 main types of languages: nominative, ergative, active, classifying (plus mixed types and plus languages with no characteristic features of these classes). Genders are present mainly in nominative languages while noun classes are present only in classifying languages (aka "languages with classes"). Basing on the analysis of various languages of Caucasus, he states that two noun classes in active languages ("active" and "inactive" nouns) evolved from a previous system of many language classes (and he finds traces of the previous system in modern Caucasian languages). See his works for details (in Russian, I do not know if any were ever translated into English).
6) W.H.J.Bleek was the first who introduced the notion of languages with classes (see his A Comparative Grammar of South African Languages, London - Cape Town 1862-1869, Franborough). Even if it seems to someone that such an approach is not continued any more, the information about the notion (which is different from the notion of gender) really SHOULD be placed in Wikipedia (at least for historical reasons).
7) Distinguishing genders from noun classes are not only history, though. And there is not a word in the article on it! For example, in this moment I have a book of Dr. Rajmund Ohly, Iwona Kraska-Szlenk and Zofia Podobińska, Język suahili (= The Swahili Language, in Polish), edited by The Academic Editions "Dialog" in Warszawa, in 1998. The first of the author has been a professor of univerities in Dar-es-Salaam, Namibia, Vienna for many years. Together with the co-authors, he states (in my translation):
From the typological point of view, Swahili belongs to so called languages languages with classes. As opposed to languages with grammatical gender, which means with a formal division of nouns according to masculine, feminine and neuter gender, languages with classes divide nouns formally on the base of hyperonomic meanings. (op. cit., p. 121)
And so, either the professor tells lies or the Wikipedia article violates the NPOV!
8) BTW, it is not important whether genders are masculine, feminine and neuter, or common and neuter, or masculine and feminine, etc. Which is important, is the fact that noun classes comprise the notion of number as well: singular and plural forms are forms of two different classes (it is so not only in Bantu languages!). And even more, there is no basis for telling about number when noun classes are present as there is none to be common for all "plural" classes for example. In Swahili, and in many other languages of this type, classes are partially paired (sing. - plur.) but this pairing is not exact and exceptionless. And other processes of the class exchange lead to the building of augmentative or diminutive forms in the same way as "plural". In other words, languages with classes use the classes for what English and gender languages express as number, diminutive, abstract etc. In languages with genders, making the other number does not necessarily mean the exchange of the class (and generally speaking, it does not mean this).
9) There is another important reason for distinguishing genders from noun classes. There is a hypothesis of a distant genetic relation between the Zinj, or Niger-Saharan (Niger-Congo + Nilo-Saharan) languages with the (also hypothetic) Indo-Pacific macrophylum, called "Afro-Pacific" (see for example the short paper of Christopher Efret, Implications of African Language Family Histories for Human History, there the bibliography for further reading). One of the bases for this view is the fact that both most Niger-Saharan languages and some languages of New Guinea are languages with classes. And so, if classes were commonly indentified with genders, they would be nothing special (as genders are widely spread over the world). But it is quite differently: the presence of noun classes (not genders) is one of the fundaments for the formulating of the Afro-Pacific hypothesis, nota bene which has grown in strength lately because of genetic data.
10) Anyway, the most important for the authors of the article should be the fact that MANY modern scholars do distinguish the two notions of gender and of class noun. The article does not take this into consideration, and this way the author forces his personal point of view (that genders and noun classes are interchangeable terms). It should not occur in Wikipedia. Hence my proposal to remove all the cases of the equation "class noun/gender" - as this clearly terminological alternative is not commonly accepted (and rather REJECTED by specialists and authors of hopeful and probable hypotheses!)
Grzegorj 11:59, 29 October 2006 (UTC)
The SIL Team believes that the notion of grammatical gender is subordinate (and NOT EQUAL) to the notion of noun class.
Please have a look below as well, especially on the section Requested move for more arguments.
- Grzegorj 07:09, 1 November 2006 (UTC)
There is another reason for suspecting that this article violates the NPOV policy: it is incosistant with some other national Wikipedias (all emphasizing is mine).
Taking into consideration all what I have written above, I can agree with this. But, as a consequence, the title of the article should be renamed, because the problem of the grammatical gender is only one of many problem discussed there.
I have refined all the article (some parts really doubled each other), changed the sequence of some paragraphs, removed some evidently false information, and recorded my work under noun class. Feel free to change it if you are sure that you do correctly. See the discussion page to the article there for more details.
Grzegorj 15:48, 30 October 2006 (UTC)
In any event, I do not think this justifies a NPOV dispute. Perhaps an accuracy dispute, but not a NPOV. Discussion continues below... FilipeS 17:04, 2 November 2006 (UTC)
The above is not how article are moved on Wikipedia. First, you get some consensus that "grammatical gender" really belongs as a subset of "noun class" and does not deserve its own article. Secondly, once consensus exists, request the article be moved to the new title, if you cannot do it yourself. Cutting and pasting is a no-no, regardless of the merits of the move, because it loses the edit history.
As there was evidently little discussion of the move, and no users expressed agreement with Grzegorj's suggestions, I have reverted both pages. Please also be aware of Wikipedia:No original research. ProhibitOnions (T) 16:16, 30 October 2006 (UTC)
Please do not inform me that I do any original research - but my basis for the change are SIL pages. Is it not enough???
And please, do not DESTROY my work first than you can read my explanations!!!
Grzegorj 16:38, 30 October 2006 (UTC)
The SIL Team believes that the notion of grammatical gender is subordinate (and NOT EQUAL) to the notion of noun class. Taking into consideration all what I have written above, I can agree with such an approach (plus the statement that nominal classes and noun classes are also different notions). As a consequence, the title of the article must be renamed ( ProhibitOnions made it impossible and destroyed my version without even having read it), because the problem of the grammatical gender is only one of many problems discussed there. I hope that such a solution will be accepted by other Wikipedists as it is not only in concordance with my private opinions on the topic (or any "original research" what has been suggested here without any basis) but also with other serious descriptions, like that on SIL pages.
I have refined all the article (some parts really doubled each other), changed the sequence of some paragraphs, removed or changed some evidently false information. Namely:
I have also added the "citation needed" remark by the information that the feminine gender in Indo-European as if has originated from inanimate; what I can remember from the sources I have studied, the feminine and masuline genders are both believed to have evolved from the common, or aninmate, gender - but I have left it for now.
Feel free to make further corrections! However, please at least READ my work before you revert it!
Grzegorj 16:54, 30 October 2006 (UTC)
More on Bantu nominal classes as NOT BEING genders: here. The link has been added in the proper section.
22:57, 31 October 2006 (UTC) Grzegorj
Read this. At best, that's a matter of convention. FilipeS 23:32, 31 October 2006 (UTC)
Some native speakers disagree with that linguistic convention. And what about the other languages?... FilipeS 11:20, 2 November 2006 (UTC)
O.K., I've been doing some reading, and some thinking, and I feel more inclined to agree with Grzegorj's point of view. As a proposal for a rewrite of the article, I suggest something along the following lines:
Opinions and critiques are welcome. FilipeS 17:33, 2 November 2006 (UTC)
The result of the debate was NO CONSENSUS TO MOVE PAGE per discussion below. There seems to be stronger support for splitting Noun class off as an article about a different, more general topic. As a student of Spanish and Swahili, I'm definitely aware of the difference between gender and noun class. Information from this article about more general noun classes should be split off so that this article may focus on the particular type of noun class called "gender". - GTBacchus( talk) 22:47, 7 November 2006 (UTC)
Grammatical gender → Noun class — The notion of gender is generally understood as subordinate to noun class, cf. here and here: "Grammatical gender is a kind of" noun class. The contents of the page is in great accordance with this common view now, and the article is not only about genders but also about other types of noun classes. – Grzegorj 17:31, 30 October 2006 (UTC)
Add * '''Support''' or * '''Oppose''' on a new line followed by a brief explanation, then sign your opinion using ~~~~.
Add any additional comments:
The term gender cannot be the alternative for noun class because these terms have different meanings.
Some evidence:
1) As the author of this paper states: "There seem to be no good reason, therefore, for not considering gender, noun classes, and classifiers as diverse expressions of a fundamental faculty of the human mind, namely classification". And so, gender, noun classes, and classifiers are three different things (threee diverse expressions of classification). I hope that the term "diverse" is clear and makes no controversy.
2) "Gender systems differ from noun class systems in the following ways : (a) there are only 2 or 3 genders ; (b) classification is based on sex which is of course only relevant for animate beings.": "WHAT’S IN A NOUN : NOUN CLASSES, GENDER, AND NOUNNESS"
3) Alexandra Aikhenvald considers “gender” to refer to a system of three or less distinctions (“always including masculine and feminine”), and “noun class” to refer to systems with more distinctions (these would include the well-known Bantu noun class systems), see her book "A typology of noun classification devices", New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. So, the opinion like this: "In recent literature there is no longer a distinction between gender and noun class, see Corbett 1999" ( here) is simply false; the book of Aikhenvald is more recent than that of Corbett.
4) The notions of gender and nominal class are treated commonly as different by Bantuists, see the four citations above (and also other sources, if you like). Especially, see the statement The concept of "gender", which remains controversial in the description of Bantu languages. Why should Wikipedia force controversial things?
5) Such a distinction is needed in other branches of linguistics as well. For Sino-Tibetan, see e.g. On the relationship of morphological class and gender
6) And which is the most important: the other, serious dictionaries and encyclopaedias (like SIL also treat noun classes and genders as different things. See also "Some Bantu languages have 20 genderlike noun classes" ("genderlike" does not mean "genders" and it is far from "noun classes also known as genders"!), The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. 2001-05. See also "Gender is intended here in the usual European / Afro-Asiatic meaning : masculine / feminine (/neuter), and is opposed here to noun class even if both phenomena can be considered similar." Projet International de Coopération Scientifique Please tell me one reason for which Wikipedia should not follow them.
Above, I have noticed that the previous form of the article violated the Neutral Point of View, as most sources treat genders and noun classes as different terms. Is the evidence from the six points enough or really must I search for more? Or rather, if you do not agree, please prove it now first them stating that gender is just "more familiar" than noun class.
Once again: these are two different terms, and the article treats about all noun classes, not only about genders. If you do not agree with the statement, and if you vote against what, say why, please.
Grzegorj 06:33, 1 November 2006 (UTC)
I have written "The contents of the page is in great accordance with this common view now" - it is not true any longer as FilipeS has cleared all my corrections. Until the article is in the present form, there is no need and no sense for any renaming it.
So, the content of the article is again NOT consistant with other sources as FilipeS have just reverted the page to the previous disorder. I do not continue playing this game any longer.
I have done a great job on making all the article clear, readible and consistant with other sources of knowledge, like the documents od SIL. I have removed false statements as well, as I have explained this above. The request of renaming has no sense if FilipeS who thinks that the article is his property keeps reverting it to the previous form. These "other sources" tell clearly that gender is only one of the form of noun classes.
Moreover, because of the FilipeS's reverting, we have all the old disorder again. Under "Lexical gender" we can read: "In Spanish, the suffix -o is characteristic of masculine nouns and the suffix -a is characteristic of feminine nouns."
And under "Noun classes and morphology" we can read: "In Spanish, grammatical gender is overwhelmingly determined by noun morphology. Since nouns that refer to male persons usually end in -o or a consonant and nouns that refer to female persons usually end in -a, most other nouns that end in -o or a consonant are also treated as masculine, and most nouns that end in -a are treated as feminine, regardless of their meaning."
Hey, you reverter and "the owner" of the text, do you think that it is better version than mine??? Is it better in your opinion to keep the same information twice? And, which one is true, "in Spanish, the suffix -o is characteristic of masculine", or "in Spanish [...] nouns that refer to male persons usually end in -o or a consonant"? So what - in -o, or in -o or a consonant? Have you ever thought that this information, repeated twice, is just confusing for the reader?
My aim was to remove such repeated information. But if FelipeS prefers the previous version, I do not fight any longer. From my point of view the situation is as follows: I spent some hours making this article clearer. And some insolent, conceited all-knowing bandit has just removed all my work again! So, bye-bye! It is not a place for me. I have thought that Wikipedia is free. But I was wrong. Here only FelipeS is right.
22:17, 31 October 2006 (UTC) Grzegorj
I accuse YOU of influencing the decision because you have REMOVED my version!!! The decision cannot be "yes" until we discuss MY version! Can you understand it?
And I accuse you that you removing my many-hour work just states that all what I have written is false.
Please other Wikipedists to take a look at the classes / gender problem in Bantu, above. Who is right - me or FilipeS? Does the source confirm my point (classes are not genders), or FilipeS (classes are genders)?
22:42, 31 October 2006 (UTC) Grzegorj
Let's discuus MY VERSION. Only this make the renaming sensible.
22:50, 31 October 2006 (UTC) Grzegorj
Let's discuss the version that was the subject of the request of renaming. Now is OK? "My" was a shortening. Grzegorj 00:20, 1 November 2006 (UTC)
And a little explanation: I have drastically changed the contents because I have found many things OBVIOUS (like the information repeated twice). I am not a revisionist.
22:53, 31 October 2006 (UTC) Grzegorj
I have submitted a NPOV violation in this article ( here). Nobody has said "no" to this so far. I have been asked of contribution. I have spent many hours of hard work and removed the violation, leaving all the rest of the article. I have removed the doubling of the information about the gender in Spanish. I have presented the arguments and sources. I have also add some facts to the article. And the user CharlotteWebb removed all my corrections without having said a word to all my arguments and the submission of NPOV violation. This violates the following reverting don'ts:
I am about informing administrators about this incident - Grzegorj 07:18, 1 November 2006 (UTC)
In light of the above discussions, I think it might be wise to split Grammatical gender into Grammatical gender and Noun class. Most of the material currently in the article would stay there, as it applies to the notion of grammatical gender. The parts about noun classes, such as the examples from Bantu languages, would be moved to the new article. Any comments, or does this have to be done more formally? FilipeS 23:11, 7 November 2006 (UTC)
I've been thinking about this article, and I think it's time for a rewrite. I don't know if Grzegorj is still around, but some of his changes went in the right direction. Even though I made a considerable contribution to the present version of the article, I now see some flaws in it:
Other opinons and suggestions are welcome. FilipeS 20:54, 8 November 2006 (UTC)
It might be worth mentioning that some Indo-European languages (notably the Scandinavian languages and Dutch) have in the course of their history merged the masculine and feminine genders into a single gender, known as "common". Thus these languages have two genders, "common" and "neuter", neither of which bears any relationship to maleness or femaleness!
ThW5 12:11, 24 October 2006 (UTC)
Chinese doesn't have a large number of personal pronouns. Maybe thinking of Japanese?
What in the world is grammatical gender for? What function does it serve, outside the case of natural gender? Ortolan88 13:45 Jul 24, 2002 (PDT)
Gender is handy for many things, but primarily for adding clarity while minimizing verbosity. Things like adjective agreement and gendered pronouns make it easy to figure out the structure of a sentence with fewer words and with less reliance on things like word order and extra particles. -- LDC
There's a need to link subject-object problem from this article, and vice versa, since many aspects of that problem relate to grammatical gender and its arbitrary assignment by a culture. For instance the most obvious example is "God" being referred as "He", along with whatever else is masculine in the language, while say "Earth" is "She" (rarely or never "he" although often "it") along with whatever else is feminine. This puts a pretty obvious slant on what is associated with what, and is an obvious example of gender being assigned to things that don't sexually reproduce...
How about a list of languages according to gender type? 1) two genders (masc and fem); 2) two genders (animate and inanimate); 3) three genders (masc, fem, neut). I came here looking for that but I'm not sure how to do it. Mjklin 03:35, 20 Apr 2004 (UTC)
I too thought Dutch had only two genders as stated in this article, partly because foregin-language-teaching books in English say so. But native Dutch speakers have corrected me. Dutch has only two definite articles: "de" (common), and "het" (neuter). But it has separate pronouns for masculine, feminine, and neuter; and these pronouns must agree with the gender of the noun - this makes it harder to see the gender for a non-speaker, and Dutch bilingual dictionares don't seem to include gender information very often. — Hippietrail 12:58, 20 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Ok, I ought to have commented here first before putting Dutch back in the two gender category, my bad. However:
I confess I am a student of Dutch and not (yet) a fluent speaker, but in all the formal lessons I've taken the article for common gender words is 'hij' or 'hem', I've never seen 'zij' or 'haar'. Dutch-English dictionaries list Dutch words as either noun or neuter-noun, I haven't seen one yet that lists masculine feminine and neuter. I realise that some speakers are fortunate to know exactly which words are/were masculine, feminine or neuter, or that some dialects preserve the 'zij/haar' article but does this reflect the majority of speakers or how the language is spoken today? If someone would like to list Dutch under 3 genders, very strictly speaking in linguistic terms this true. But this also gives the false impression that Dutch is like German, strictly delineated into male, female and neuter when this is not the case, especially when many native speakers don't know the difference themselves. Perhaps Dutch should be listed under both common/neuter and 3 genders. -- kudz75 02:20, 10 Jan 2005 (UTC)
I notice somebody has just improved the classification of the various forms of Norwegian. I was under the impression, however, that the feminine forms were optional in Nynorsk meaning that any speaker/writer could choose to use it as either a m/f/n language or a c/n language. Or does this only apply to the use of the definite article? ("en" masc and optionally "ei" fem I think)? — Hippietrail 09:26, 9 Sep 2004 (UTC)
{{ attention}}
Isn't there a vast and lush field of such? English and French would go under the more-than-two-or-three category: he/she/it/one/such/so and roughly il/elle/ça/on/ce/ci for guyly/gally/thingly/ally/thoughtly/wayly. (Oh, I'm goading English-speakers to dump Latin.) lysdexia 18:43, 4 Nov 2004 (UTC)
Aren't countries also feminine in English? Spain allied herself, Russia mobilized her, etc.?
"Actually, "man" for human in general is an older meaning, than the meaning "masculine person", so it isn't applicable. I wondered whether "a" and "an" would count as gender, or if they're phonological rather than grammatical? @@ (They are the same word, originally..., but in "a", the final -n got lost.)
I was shocked to see that English is included in the list of languages with a two-fold gender distinction between masculine and feminine. I should think that a) either English shouldn't be included in neither the 2-gender languages nor in the 3-gender languages because it has already included in the list of languages with no grammatical gender inflection; b) or English should be included in the list of languages with a three-gender distinction (masc, fem and neuter), as English pronoms can take three forms (he for natural masculine, she for natural feminine and it for inanimate). Xinelo 19:56, 23 October 2005 (UTC)
Now, German is listed as a language "without gender on the nouns, but only visible in the adjectives, determiners". This statement is not in accordance with e.g. Hockett's definition, i.e. not in accordance with the standard view within the field. What is "visible on the nouns", be it on the stem or in the declension, is an eventual declension class membership. Gender is, per definition, a classification of nouns as seen in the behaviour of determiners and adjectives. Since this is a situation where we do not (yet) have consensus, I bring it up here on the discussion page, before (or: rather than just) changing the paragraph in the article. Trondtr 20:56, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC).
I see that the article claims that Swahili has 15 noun classes. I'd always thought that it only had 8...how do we get 15? By counting plurals separately? That hardly seems reasonable. For the record, the classes I'm aware of are
Am I missing something? -- Marnen Laibow-Koser (talk) 22:34, 13 Dec 2004 (UTC)
On a related note, do we really need to list "Swahili" and "all Bantu languages" separately? Mga 02:04, 14 October 2006 (UTC)
Hi. Does anyone know of any more examples of words where the real gender is different from grammatical gender? Mädchen and Fräulein from German (which describe females but have neuter grammatical gender) are good examples, but I need to find more... Please post here or e-mail frankie [at] frankieroberto.com if you have any possible examples! -- Frankie Roberto 00:20, 27 Feb 2005 (UTC)
I hope it isn't inappropriate to use this discussion forum to draw attention to two new papers (by me) on the topic of grammatical gender:
One will appear in print in Lingua, and is currently published electronically on the Lingua website; the paper is entitled "Optimizing gender" and may be downloaded from
http://authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S0024384105000252
The other paper is entitled "Optimizing Russian gender: A preliminary analysis" and has just been published in FASL 13. This paper can be downloaded from
http://www.hum.uit.no/a/rice/v2/writing/OptRussGendPrelimRice.pdf
Both of these papers advocate an approach to gender assignment built on the basic insights of Steinmetz (1986, et seq.) and represent the approach within the formalism of Optimality Theory. The paper claims that conflicts in gender assignment invite such a treatment, and suggests that the treatment of gender assignment provides an example of crucial equal ranking in OT.
I hope you'll enjoy these papers, and would of course welcome any feedback or debate on the questions addressed here.
Curt Rice University of Tromsø
Was surprised to see Tamil listed in languages without a grammatical gender. I'm a native speaker and I know that we differentiate gender, rationality, number and person in nouns and these and more in verbs. Can someone clarify? You may want to look at the Tamil language#Grammar and Tamil language#Examples sections. -- Sundar ( talk · contribs) 05:14, Apr 11, 2005 (UTC)
Is it really worth it to note some made-up languages by J.R.R. Tolkein in these lists? I'm sorry but it strikes me as really ridiculous.
I notice English is listed in the "two gender: masculine and feminine" section, while at the same time it is also listed in the section "languages without grammatical genders/noun classes." This is clearly a mistake.
The stylistical uses of "she" for countries and ships does not justify including English in the category of languages with grammatical gender, nor does the gender-specific pronouns "he"/"she." Grammatical gender requires each and every noun to be assigned a gender as an intrinsic property, and this is definitely not the case for English.
Why does this article say English doesn't have grammatical genders? It seems to me that it has three genders based on biology. Example: He takes her hand (English). Er greift ihre Hand (German). "He" and "her" clearly show gender. Is it because "her" isn't inflected to show the gender of "hand" as it is in German? Or because the articles of English don't show gender? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Xideum ( talk • contribs) 15:04 UTC, 24 October 2005.
A. L. Phillips. 'Shall We Teach Gender?', The English Journal, Vol. 11, No. 1. (Jan., 1922), pp. 23-27. It is very interesting that the notion of natural gender has become the norm today, despite its obvious shortcomings. There is a very good article about this that I don't have at hand but will add later - it explains why natural gender results from the omission of neuter as a gender. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 131.111.8.104 ( talk) 20:40, 20 February 2007 (UTC).
This is the continuation of a conversation started here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender.
Here is my proposed rewrite of the introduction of this page:
All languages can use different nouns to differentiate between people of different biological or social gender, e.g., male and female, man and woman, uncle and aunt, but not all have genders in the grammatical sense. Grammatical gender is a type of inflection. We say that a language has grammatical genders, or noun classes, when nouns are divided into groups according to natural characteristics of the concepts which they represent. This division can manifest itself in two ways: through morphological characteristics of the nouns themselves, and through morphological changes in other parts of speech that refer to nouns (gender agreement).
For example, in Spanish, most nouns that end in -o are masculine and most nouns that end in -a are feminine. Thus, niño means “boy”, and niña means “girl”. This allows new nouns with a similar meaning to be readily created in a different class, by analogy: given the noun empresario (businessman), it was straightforward to make the new noun empresaria for “businesswoman”, when women reached the work market.
This kind of class shift can also have more subtle uses, such as making a collective noun like fruta (group of fruits) from a singular noun like fruto (fruit).
To understand gender agreement, consider the sentences "The man is tall" and "The woman is tall". In
English, the only word that differs between them is the noun "man/woman", which has a direct semantic association with sexual identity. In Spanish, however, one says "El hombre es alto" and "La mujer es alta", respectively. Not only do the words for "man" and "woman" change, (hombre vs. mujer), but so do the article (el, la) and the adjective (alto, alta). When a noun belongs to a certain class, other parts of speech that refer to that noun must be inflected to be in the same class. This is similar to number agreement, whereby parts of speech that refer to a noun are inflected to agree with the
grammatical number of that noun.
Curzan illustrates gender agreement in Old English with a “highly contrived” example:
The noun lind (shield) is grammatically feminine, which forces the pronoun seo (the, that) and the adjectives brade (broad) and tilu (good) to appear in their feminine forms, as well as the pronoun hire (her), referring back to lind, which adopts the grammatical gender of the referent.
By comparison, in Modern English the sentence would be:
Here, the shield is understood as a sexless object, and therefore designated by the neuter pronoun it. Old English had three genders, masculine, feminine and neuter, but gender inflections (as well as number inflections) were greatly simplified, and then merged with one another. The only trace of grammatical gender left in modern English are some pronouns, such as he, she, it, which tend to represent natural gender. Animals and plants, however, can be referred to as it, and sometimes the pronoun she is applied to countries, ships and machines, although this is not mandatory.
Some languages do not have noun classes. Finnish, which never had any genders, has only one third person singular pronoun, hän (he/she). On the other hand, Niger-Congo languages can have ten or more noun classes. In Swahili, for instance, nouns that begin with m- in the singular and wa- in the plural denote persons, and nouns that begin with m- in the singular but mi- in the plural denote plants. In the sentence below, the class marker ki- (marking singular nouns in class number 7) shows up on both the adjective (-kubwa) and the verb (-anguka), to express their relation to the class 7 noun kitabu 'book':
(cl.7-book cl.7-big cl.7-PRESENT-fall)
Common criteria for defining noun classes include:
The Algonquian languages have animate and inanimate noun classes, for example, and most Indo-European languages distinguish feminine, masculine and sometimes neuter noun classes. In other languages, masculine and feminine are subsumed in the category of person, either generally, or only in the plural, as in the North Caucasian languages and some Dravidian languages. In the Alamblak language oblong objects and animals are named using masculine nouns, and round ones using feminine nouns. A more or less discernible correlation between the noun gender and the shape of the respective object is found in some languages even in the Indo-European family.
The overlap between grammatical gender and natural gender is not always perfect: the Spanish noun miembro (member) is always masculine, even if it refers to a woman, but persona (person) is always feminine, even when it refers to a man. Thus, grammatical gender is, to some extent, a matter of convention, even when it concerns human beings.
Conversely, the correlation between grammatical gender and noun morphology may also have exceptions. Although in Spanish the suffix -o is characteristic of the masculine gender and the suffix -a is typical of the feminine, problema (problem) is masculine, and radio (radio station) is feminine.
Gender assignment is often different for animals than it is for human beings. In Spanish, a cheetah is always un guepardo (masculine) and a zebra is always una cebra (feminine), regardless of their biological sex. If it becomes necessary to specify the sex of the animal, an adjective is added, as in un guepardo hembra (a female cheetah). Individualized names for the male and the female of a species are more frequent when they refer to common pets or farm animals. E.g., English horse and mare, French chat (male cat) and chatte (female cat).
My comments on some of the proposed changes follow.
"In linguistics, grammatical genders, also called noun classes, are classes of nouns requiring different agreement forms on determiners, adjectives, verbs or other words." I have incorporated this into the previous version, rephrasing it a bit.
"The number of classes varies from two (Masculine and Feminine, as in Spanish or French), three (Masculine, Feminine, Neuter, as in German or Latin), four to eight (as in many Caucasian languages), to as many as twenty or more (as in the Bantu languages and languages of West Africa, such as Fula)." This excerpt gave the wrong impression that whenever a language has two genders they are the masculine and the feminine, and whenever it has three they are masculine, feminine, and neuter, which is not right. Further, most of the information here is already in the rewrite.
"In languages having gender, every noun must belong to one of the classes. Sometimes, we find nouns that can belong to two or more classes. For example , in the Caucasian language Archi the noun lo ("child") can take Masculine gender when it refers to a young boy, Feminine gender to denote a girl, and Neuter gender (normally used for inanimates), when the sex of child is unknown or irrelevant (Corbett 1994)." This is actually a good example of natural gender agreement, not grammatical gender.
"In general, the boundaries of noun classes are rather arbitrary, although there are rules of thumb in many languages." I am hesitant to describe noun classes as ‘arbitrary’, since what appears arbitrary is often (though not always) determined by morphology and etymology. "Rule of thumb" is a poor description for morphology. Furthermore, the term "arbitrary" implies that grammatical gender is supposed to translate into real-world categories. I think it's less misleading to say that grammatical gender and natural gender categories (such as "masculine", "feminine", or "tree", etc.) overlap to some extent, but do not necessarily coincide.
"Gender assignment is in most cases arbitrary for referents that do not have biological gender […]" This is inaccurate, unless you restrict the word gender to languages with the masculine-feminine-neuter complex of noun classes. But Bantu languages, for example Swahili, assign gender to referents that do not have biological gender, in a largely non-arbitrary way.
In the absence of any comments, I have implemented the changes. Dec. 7 2005.
I have made a few changes. Here are the justifications:
"In some local dialects of German, all nouns for female persons have been shifted to the neuter gender, but the female gender remains for some words denoting objects. All this is still arbitrary, and differs between cultures. The ancient Romans believed the Sun to be masculine and the Moon to be feminine (as in French, Spanish, Italian), but the Germans (and Germanic languages) express the opposite belief." Grammatical gender is determined by language, not culture. I don't think the ancient Romans "believed the Sun to be masculine and the Moon to be feminine", or that "the Germans (and Germanic languages) express the opposite belief". The grammatical gender of inanimate objects is just a convention, not a belief, as anyone who speaks a language with genders will confirm. Dec. 6 2005.
I've tried to cleanup and reorganise the article, by abbreviating the introduction and grouping related material scattered over the article together. I've also tried to be more consistent in the use of "noun class" and "grammatical gender", preferring the former - this, I think, makes the explanation of the distinction between natural and grammatical gender clearer, and also is a better description of the concept (particularly since the classes are not directly linked to gender in many non-IE and non-Semitic languages). For the same reason, I would favour moving the article to "Noun classes", but I don't feel too strongly about this so I'm happy to let it lie as it is.
I would very much like to move the extremely long lists of languages at the end to a new article Languages sorted by type of noun classes, or some such thing, if there are no objections. -- Arvind 14:04, 31 December 2005 (UTC)
I've read texts in Latin and in Greek, two ancient Indo-European languages with relatively free word order. With grammatical gender, it is easier to tell which pronouns go with which antecendents. Without grammatical gender, the languages probably would have had to develop more ordered syntax. It seems that those languages with loose word order need grammatical gender for clarity and understanding. Only speakers of those modern Indo-European languages with fixed word order, like English and French, have the luxury of even thinking about not using certain pronouns. BrianGCrawfordMA 18:11, 5 February 2006 (UTC)
Do we have a list of gendered words in English anywhere? Like fiance/finacee and blond/blonde. Rmhermen 17:25, 9 February 2006 (UTC)
I tend to agree with you. "Blond(e)" is a very contrived example, for several reasons:
On the other hand, English certainly has pairs of gendered words such as actor/actress. FilipeS 13:09, 31 October 2006 (UTC)
Yep, the malign influence of French... Just kidding. But you are right, even in a genderless language like English it's almost inevitably the word referring to females that is changed if someone decides that a gender pair is needed; the masculine is the default. (I notice, too, that genderless Turkish also has the word aktris.) The only counterexample I can think of in English is widow-widower, and there the reasoning is obvious, female widows are more common, it's more likely to be a defining part of that person's public identity, etc. ProhibitOnions (T) 21:40, 31 October 2006 (UTC)
I am not a native speaker of English, so I'll gladly accept your corretions. Still I believe that
the discussion about grammatical gender in English goes into a completely wrong direction.
To my understanding, the difference between grammatical gender and natural gender should be defined very sharp and clearly. The only sentence in this article that talks about natural gender is this:
The correlation between grammatical and natural gender need not be perfect, and it often is not.
But what is grammatical gender opposed to natural gender? All of the examples put forward here are concerned with natural gender. A waitress is a female human being that works as a waiter and we find agreement with a pronoun like her, because of the natural gender. It's a derivational process from waiter to waitress so there can be a gender change, just like in other languages. Since English doesn't have grammatical gender, it is a change in natural gender. Let me define natural and grammatical gender first:
Natural gender is the actual gender of an object in reality outside the language. The real-world-object WAITRESS, being referred to as waitress within the language, actually has the natural gender female (as human beings and other animals just have a natural gender. Let's not talk about snails, shells, plants or hermaphrodites, please.).
Also, there are real-world-objects that do not have a natural gender. There are languages that distinguish (grammatical) gender of such objects within the language. I'll take German as an example. It is der Barstuhl (m) (the stool). That doesn't mean that any speaker of German thinks a STOOL was quite a manly real-world-object. No, it is just the grammatical gender, that doesn't mean the object STOOL has a natural gender.
Hence, grammaical gender is a type of gender that is only being assigned to a name of a real-world-object and it is being assigned within the language, not in the real world.
In other words: grammtical gender doesn't have anything to do with natural gender. Only one thing: Where there is a clearly defined natural gender of a real-world-object, quite often the same gender is being used as a grammatical gender for the name of thet object in the language, but that's not necessarily the case.
Important: natural gender can be seen by looking at the real-world-object, grammatical gender can be seen by looking at the word within the language that refers to that real-world-object.
In the English language there are so few words that show grammatical gender without having a natural gender that we can talk about exceptions:
Ships. Natural gender: none. Grammatical gender: fem.
Moon. Natural gender: none. Grammatical gender: fem.? (Is that right, native speakers? In poetry or sth?)
Countries. Natural gender: none. Grammatical gender: fem.?
Animals. Natural gender: f,m. Grammatical gender: n,m,f (The male dog wagged its tail. The bitch wagged its tail.)
All the other examples that have been discussed at this page have a natural gender! For animals I have also seen natural gender before. Something like: (The male dog is eating his bone. The female dog is playing with her toy.)
In sum, grammatical gender is really marginal in English, I'd go so far to say: Not existant. What's the precentage of words you find in Englsh where you can proof (by the use of agreement with pronouns for instance) that there is a gender information and also there is no natural gender of the real-world-object the word is referring to?
In languages that have grammatical gender (like German) the percentage is very high. Also, the grammatical gender does not necessarily agree with the grammatical gender of the word in other languages that refes to the same real-world-object. Take a CAR (real-world-object): the car (n, English); das Auto (n, German); la macchina (f, Italian); el coche (m, Spanish)
Natural gender of the real-world-object CAR? None, of course. Nevertheless, in German a CAR is being referred to as "es" (pronoun, n) in Italian as "la" (pronoun, f), in Spanish as "él" (pronoun, m).
In languages with grammatical gender the disagreement between natural gender and grammatical gender works into the other direction as well. German: das Mädchen (n) (the girl). Agreement within the language (must) should be neutral:
Das Mädchen sitzt auf der Bank. Es ißt eine Banane. (The girl is sitting on a bench. She is eating a banana.) es is a neutral pronoun. Some German native speakers get confused with the natural gender and accept also:
Das Mädchen sitzt auf der Bank. Sie ißt eine Banane. (The girl is sitting on a bench. She is eating a banana.)
But a dative example clearly shows that the grammatical gender is neutral. (Just in case the "das" (German neutral determiner) in front of "Mädchen" wasn't convincing enough)
Ich gebe dem Mädchen das Buch. (I give the girl the book.)
Ich gebe der Frau das Buch. (I give the lady the book.)
If the grammatical gender of Frau (lady) and Mädchen (girl) was identical both must have the same dative determiner. They have not. "der" is singular dative female where as "dem" is the singular dative neutral. The natural gender is the same though: female. That works with every diminuitive form in German. der Bube (m, the boy) das Bübchen (n, the little boy). Even with names: "Helene" (f) "Helenchen" (n). In English, it only goes for animals.
Ships are female in German as well. But in both languages it is a personification. The ship is personified as a woman by the mariner in the mariners sociolect. This personification has swashed over into the standard language. Hence a ship can have female natural gender and neutral grammatical gender in German. das Schiff (n); die AIDA (f) That's why ships are given female names quite often, too. They are ladies, basically. -- Steven 01:47, 19 December 2006 (UTC)
Russian is native to me, yet, I've never noticed that there would be animate/inanimate cases for the masculine. Could someone please give me an example? I even asked my language-savvy mom; she doesn't know about such. -- 84.249.252.211 20:38, 24 February 2006 (UTC)
I have to say that I'm quite baffled by the profusion of noun classes listed for certain Slavic languages. Could it be that someone has been mixing up their genders with their declensions?... FilipeS 19:54, 31 October 2006 (UTC)
But, ProhibitOnions, you're not supposed to identify genders(/noun classes) by looking only at the plural. Grammatical gender and grammatical number should be analysed as orthogonal characteristics. FilipeS 22:36, 31 October 2006 (UTC)
People, if you carefully count the classes on Sesotho language you'll see that, counting singular and plural separately, Sesotho has 9 classes (or 11 if you include 1a and 2a), but the highest number is 18 (note how some classes are missing). Wait - I've confused myself, now. I'll quickly have a look...
Okay, so I lied. It has 15 classes, 17 if you count 1a and 2a, 18 only if you incorrectly count the plurals of 14 (these are actually class 6), and 7 according to Doke's counting scheme (sing and plural in same classe, 15 and 17 together...). So that's 7 or 15. I wonder what sources the content comes from? There's a very good reason why the sings are separated from the plurals and it's dumb to compare Bantu langs to Greek as this article does. In case I'm logged out again, this is User:Zyxoas. 216.239.58.136 10:05, 26 March 2006 (UTC)
What's conspicuously missing from this article is any mention of the origins of grammatical gender, and why people in the distant past may have decided that certain objects were intrinsically "masculine," "feminine," or neither (as the categories usually are). What have linguists discovered, or speculated, on this matter? ProhibitOnions 09:50, 1 April 2006 (UTC)
goes like this.. 'noun classes, are certain types of inflections according to which nouns can be divided into categories with semantic or morphological significance. Grammatical gender is analogous to grammatical number, except that it denotes qualities rather than quantities.'
There seem to be some problems here: noun classes are inflections? That's not right: they are categories of nouns. I'm not sure 'morphological significance' is the right thing to say either. They have morphological marking, somewhere, sometimes on the noun, sometimes elsewhere. And gender denotes qualities? Well, yes, sometimes, but it's not part of the definition. This needs redoing. It might be good to start with a simple example so that the non-specialists can understand what's being talked about. A rewrite, in effect. -- Drmaik 21:45, 5 April 2006 (UTC)
The issue of counting genders in a language may be tricky. Let's take Polish as an example: some grammarians say that Polish has three genders in singular (masculine, feminine and neuter), and two in plural (masculine-personal and non-masculine-personal). Others say it has four genders: masculine-personal, masculine non-personal, feminine and neuter, and that the first and second merge in singular, and the third abd fifth merge in plural. Additionally, distinction may be made between animate and inanimate nouns, so it could yield even five genders: masculine-personal, masculine non-personal animate, masculine inanimate, feminine and neuter. Perhaps you could even make a distinction between gender and noun class, and say that there are three genders but five noun classes (based on such attributes as gender, personality and animity). So it depends on the way you're looking at it. Kpalion 11:24, 6 April 2006 (UTC)
Apparently malayalam does have a sort of grammatical gender - [1]- although all inanimate objects only have neuter forms and sometimes the feminine and masculine are completely separate nouns and not derived from the same root, eg. പശു (cow) and കാള (ox). -- Grammatical error 11:10, 7 April 2006 (UTC)
I removed the sentence saying that Portuguese "todo" vs. "tudo" was an example of masculine vs. neuter. Those words simply mean different things ("each" vs. "the whole thing"), and they are both grammatically masculine. Qaramazov
Hi. I only noticed now that you had made a comment here. You are indeed right that "todo" has the masculine grammatical gender. But exactly the same can be said of the article "lo" in Spanish. And the personal pronouns of English, "he", "she", "it", have no gender at all, in this sense. The point is that lexically, there is still an association with gender. And it is the same kind of correspondence for Port. "todo/toda/tudo" as it is for Sp. "el/la/lo", and for English "he/she/it". FilipeS 21:49, 15 April 2006 (UTC)
In the absence of a reply, I have edited the paragraph. I hope it's clear enough now. FilipeS 16:10, 19 April 2006 (UTC)
I am proposing the merger of the entry on 'natural gender' with this one. My reasons are the following:
FilipeS 18:23, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
Yeah, go ahead and merge them. I agree with your points. CRGreathouse 03:04, 24 May 2006 (UTC)
Done. :-) FilipeS 19:21, 27 June 2006 (UTC)
The article stated that "In German, all nouns ending in -ung (corresponding to -ing in English) are grammatically feminine". However, just off the top of my head, I can easily give some counterexamples, for example the male nouns Dung, Schwung and Sprung. The feminine gender is always used, however (as far as I'm aware of), for nouns formed from verbs by taking the infinitive stem (sometimes slightly modifying it) and appending "-ung". Unfortunately, I do not know how this form is called in linguistics. This is very similar to the English gerund except that the substantivierter Infinitiv is actually used in many places where the gerund would be used in English. I think the -ung form is used when a passive meaning of the verb is intended, or when a particular action is described, whereas the "substantivierter Infinitiv" is used when an active or general meaning is expressed. It's a bit complicated, so bear with me. :-) Here are some examples: Verb, "substantivierter Infinitiv" und that strange -ung form (the latter two with the corresponding definitive article).
There are probably thousands of verbs which have a corresponding -ung noun, though there are probably equally many which don't, or at least where the -ung form has fallen out of favor in contemporary German. For instance, neither the "substantivierter Infinitiv" nor the -ung form are typically used for the verb "schaden" (to harm, to damage), though the same is not true for the verb "schädigen" with very similar meaning. Where the -ung form exists, it is always a feminine noun (whereas the "substantivierter Infinitiv" is always a neutral noun). Aragorn2 14:25, 22 April 2006 (UTC)
Point well made. It should say "the diminutive suffix -ung". I will correct it. FilipeS 15:04, 22 April 2006 (UTC)
Maybe I misremembered. But can it still be said that nouns with the suffix -ung are feminine as is currently in the article, then? FilipeS 16:40, 22 April 2006 (UTC)
I came to the article just to look if here's any notion on proportions how are nouns divided into 3 genders in German and 2 genders in French etc. The article does not satisfy my curiousity, could someone link a webpage or comment on the subject?-- Constanz - Talk 14:18, 19 June 2006 (UTC)
I've followed the link. The author points out that, clearly, majority of Dutch nouns belong to group of de words, and het-words form a minority. Interestingly, the latter group was initially neuter and the former is a joint group of nouns that used to be divided into masculine and feminine gender nouns. Something similar has happened in Swedish, where masc and fem (but perhaps neuter as well? I don't remember exactly) have fused into en words group, leaving et words the other group.-- Constanz - Talk 13:27, 29 June 2006 (UTC)
Note though that eventhough Dutch uses the same gender marker (de) for masc. and fem. a gender is still made. Rex 15:41, 10 August 2006 (UTC)
Swedish is listed under "common and neuter" and under "more than three". What's the true?-- Nixer 15:24, 10 August 2006 (UTC)
Swedish do have two genders: normal and neuter. However, the language originally had three: masculine, feminime and neuther. Over the centuries masculine and feminime merged to form the normal gender. During the time Swedish was considered to have four genders: masculine, feminime, normal and neuther. This classification may have stayed in the textbooks for some time later. Today, Swedish use masculine and feminime forms much the same way as English do. There are some exteptions through. A human of unknown gender is usually refered to with feminime forms, but sometimes with normal. Also, a Swede would not say ”den är nio” (”it is nine o'clock”): the correct form is ”hon är nio” (”she is nine o'clock”). However, both the words ”människa” (”human”) and ”klocka” (”clock”) are inflected as normal. There is one more vestige from the three gender system: adjectives have a masculine infliction when refering to a male human mentioned in definite singular. This is done by changing the comon suffix ”-a” to ”-e”. This rule does also applies to ordinal numbers.
2007-02-10 Lena Synnerholm, Märsta, Sweden.
From what I understand, the feminine and the masculine genders are vestigial in those languages. A note could be added about how they are still present in some constructions, though. FilipeS 17:14, 20 February 2007 (UTC)
As a native Spanish speaker, I suggest this example included in Lexical Gender should be changed. Fruta being defined as a group of fruits is not correct: it is not a collective noun used to refer to a group of fruits. It is used to refer mostly to edible fruits (La manzana es una fruta. => The apple is a fruit., see the Royal Spanish Academy Dictionary). Fruto, on the other hand, can be used indisctinctly, but tends to be more commonly used when denoting the origin (La manzana es el fruto del manzano. => The apple is the fruit of the apple tree.) -- Zavreio 17:57, 2 October 2006 (UTC).
Because of identifying gender with noun class, this article seems to infringe NPOV. Here are some facts which should be mentioned in it and they are not.
1) The connotation of gender with sex is characteristic for English speakers only; I do not even know a single language outside English in which the term "gender" would have anything to do with "sex". It should be emphasized in the article, otherwise it is English-biased. Which is more, the custom of understanding "gender" as "sex" is NOT characteristic for the "classic" English. It is a new fashion, perhaps taken from the USA.
2) Many scholars clearly distinguish genders and noun class - is there a word on it in the article? In fact, these notions are mixed by English scholars only, probably because of the false connotation of gender with sex. The second reason is probably the fact that English has lost the grammatical gender during its history and now this notion is hard to be correctly understood by English speakers. It is noticeable that scholars whose mother tongues have the gender, usually do not mix genders with noun classes.
3) The difference between genders and noun classes is emphasized by many linguists. Even if there is a custom for identify these two notions by some, mainly American scholars, Wikipedia SHOULD present also the opposite point of view and the article SHOULD NOT be entirely constructed as if the view that noun classes = genders would be common (from my personal experiences: it is quite inversely, but the view that noun classes and genders are two different things is common, especially in non-English sources!). Otherwise, the Neutral Point of View is not neutral any longer.
4) Once again, we are talking about NOTIONS, not WORDS. If the notions of "gender" and "noun class" are viewed different from each other by MANY scholars, it should be reflected in any encyclopaedia with the NPOV policy.
5) There are serious linguistic theories and typologies that put genders and noun classes on opposite ends of the scale. For example, according to Klimov, the author of so called contensive typology, there are 4 main types of languages: nominative, ergative, active, classifying (plus mixed types and plus languages with no characteristic features of these classes). Genders are present mainly in nominative languages while noun classes are present only in classifying languages (aka "languages with classes"). Basing on the analysis of various languages of Caucasus, he states that two noun classes in active languages ("active" and "inactive" nouns) evolved from a previous system of many language classes (and he finds traces of the previous system in modern Caucasian languages). See his works for details (in Russian, I do not know if any were ever translated into English).
6) W.H.J.Bleek was the first who introduced the notion of languages with classes (see his A Comparative Grammar of South African Languages, London - Cape Town 1862-1869, Franborough). Even if it seems to someone that such an approach is not continued any more, the information about the notion (which is different from the notion of gender) really SHOULD be placed in Wikipedia (at least for historical reasons).
7) Distinguishing genders from noun classes are not only history, though. And there is not a word in the article on it! For example, in this moment I have a book of Dr. Rajmund Ohly, Iwona Kraska-Szlenk and Zofia Podobińska, Język suahili (= The Swahili Language, in Polish), edited by The Academic Editions "Dialog" in Warszawa, in 1998. The first of the author has been a professor of univerities in Dar-es-Salaam, Namibia, Vienna for many years. Together with the co-authors, he states (in my translation):
From the typological point of view, Swahili belongs to so called languages languages with classes. As opposed to languages with grammatical gender, which means with a formal division of nouns according to masculine, feminine and neuter gender, languages with classes divide nouns formally on the base of hyperonomic meanings. (op. cit., p. 121)
And so, either the professor tells lies or the Wikipedia article violates the NPOV!
8) BTW, it is not important whether genders are masculine, feminine and neuter, or common and neuter, or masculine and feminine, etc. Which is important, is the fact that noun classes comprise the notion of number as well: singular and plural forms are forms of two different classes (it is so not only in Bantu languages!). And even more, there is no basis for telling about number when noun classes are present as there is none to be common for all "plural" classes for example. In Swahili, and in many other languages of this type, classes are partially paired (sing. - plur.) but this pairing is not exact and exceptionless. And other processes of the class exchange lead to the building of augmentative or diminutive forms in the same way as "plural". In other words, languages with classes use the classes for what English and gender languages express as number, diminutive, abstract etc. In languages with genders, making the other number does not necessarily mean the exchange of the class (and generally speaking, it does not mean this).
9) There is another important reason for distinguishing genders from noun classes. There is a hypothesis of a distant genetic relation between the Zinj, or Niger-Saharan (Niger-Congo + Nilo-Saharan) languages with the (also hypothetic) Indo-Pacific macrophylum, called "Afro-Pacific" (see for example the short paper of Christopher Efret, Implications of African Language Family Histories for Human History, there the bibliography for further reading). One of the bases for this view is the fact that both most Niger-Saharan languages and some languages of New Guinea are languages with classes. And so, if classes were commonly indentified with genders, they would be nothing special (as genders are widely spread over the world). But it is quite differently: the presence of noun classes (not genders) is one of the fundaments for the formulating of the Afro-Pacific hypothesis, nota bene which has grown in strength lately because of genetic data.
10) Anyway, the most important for the authors of the article should be the fact that MANY modern scholars do distinguish the two notions of gender and of class noun. The article does not take this into consideration, and this way the author forces his personal point of view (that genders and noun classes are interchangeable terms). It should not occur in Wikipedia. Hence my proposal to remove all the cases of the equation "class noun/gender" - as this clearly terminological alternative is not commonly accepted (and rather REJECTED by specialists and authors of hopeful and probable hypotheses!)
Grzegorj 11:59, 29 October 2006 (UTC)
The SIL Team believes that the notion of grammatical gender is subordinate (and NOT EQUAL) to the notion of noun class.
Please have a look below as well, especially on the section Requested move for more arguments.
- Grzegorj 07:09, 1 November 2006 (UTC)
There is another reason for suspecting that this article violates the NPOV policy: it is incosistant with some other national Wikipedias (all emphasizing is mine).
Taking into consideration all what I have written above, I can agree with this. But, as a consequence, the title of the article should be renamed, because the problem of the grammatical gender is only one of many problem discussed there.
I have refined all the article (some parts really doubled each other), changed the sequence of some paragraphs, removed some evidently false information, and recorded my work under noun class. Feel free to change it if you are sure that you do correctly. See the discussion page to the article there for more details.
Grzegorj 15:48, 30 October 2006 (UTC)
In any event, I do not think this justifies a NPOV dispute. Perhaps an accuracy dispute, but not a NPOV. Discussion continues below... FilipeS 17:04, 2 November 2006 (UTC)
The above is not how article are moved on Wikipedia. First, you get some consensus that "grammatical gender" really belongs as a subset of "noun class" and does not deserve its own article. Secondly, once consensus exists, request the article be moved to the new title, if you cannot do it yourself. Cutting and pasting is a no-no, regardless of the merits of the move, because it loses the edit history.
As there was evidently little discussion of the move, and no users expressed agreement with Grzegorj's suggestions, I have reverted both pages. Please also be aware of Wikipedia:No original research. ProhibitOnions (T) 16:16, 30 October 2006 (UTC)
Please do not inform me that I do any original research - but my basis for the change are SIL pages. Is it not enough???
And please, do not DESTROY my work first than you can read my explanations!!!
Grzegorj 16:38, 30 October 2006 (UTC)
The SIL Team believes that the notion of grammatical gender is subordinate (and NOT EQUAL) to the notion of noun class. Taking into consideration all what I have written above, I can agree with such an approach (plus the statement that nominal classes and noun classes are also different notions). As a consequence, the title of the article must be renamed ( ProhibitOnions made it impossible and destroyed my version without even having read it), because the problem of the grammatical gender is only one of many problems discussed there. I hope that such a solution will be accepted by other Wikipedists as it is not only in concordance with my private opinions on the topic (or any "original research" what has been suggested here without any basis) but also with other serious descriptions, like that on SIL pages.
I have refined all the article (some parts really doubled each other), changed the sequence of some paragraphs, removed or changed some evidently false information. Namely:
I have also added the "citation needed" remark by the information that the feminine gender in Indo-European as if has originated from inanimate; what I can remember from the sources I have studied, the feminine and masuline genders are both believed to have evolved from the common, or aninmate, gender - but I have left it for now.
Feel free to make further corrections! However, please at least READ my work before you revert it!
Grzegorj 16:54, 30 October 2006 (UTC)
More on Bantu nominal classes as NOT BEING genders: here. The link has been added in the proper section.
22:57, 31 October 2006 (UTC) Grzegorj
Read this. At best, that's a matter of convention. FilipeS 23:32, 31 October 2006 (UTC)
Some native speakers disagree with that linguistic convention. And what about the other languages?... FilipeS 11:20, 2 November 2006 (UTC)
O.K., I've been doing some reading, and some thinking, and I feel more inclined to agree with Grzegorj's point of view. As a proposal for a rewrite of the article, I suggest something along the following lines:
Opinions and critiques are welcome. FilipeS 17:33, 2 November 2006 (UTC)
The result of the debate was NO CONSENSUS TO MOVE PAGE per discussion below. There seems to be stronger support for splitting Noun class off as an article about a different, more general topic. As a student of Spanish and Swahili, I'm definitely aware of the difference between gender and noun class. Information from this article about more general noun classes should be split off so that this article may focus on the particular type of noun class called "gender". - GTBacchus( talk) 22:47, 7 November 2006 (UTC)
Grammatical gender → Noun class — The notion of gender is generally understood as subordinate to noun class, cf. here and here: "Grammatical gender is a kind of" noun class. The contents of the page is in great accordance with this common view now, and the article is not only about genders but also about other types of noun classes. – Grzegorj 17:31, 30 October 2006 (UTC)
Add * '''Support''' or * '''Oppose''' on a new line followed by a brief explanation, then sign your opinion using ~~~~.
Add any additional comments:
The term gender cannot be the alternative for noun class because these terms have different meanings.
Some evidence:
1) As the author of this paper states: "There seem to be no good reason, therefore, for not considering gender, noun classes, and classifiers as diverse expressions of a fundamental faculty of the human mind, namely classification". And so, gender, noun classes, and classifiers are three different things (threee diverse expressions of classification). I hope that the term "diverse" is clear and makes no controversy.
2) "Gender systems differ from noun class systems in the following ways : (a) there are only 2 or 3 genders ; (b) classification is based on sex which is of course only relevant for animate beings.": "WHAT’S IN A NOUN : NOUN CLASSES, GENDER, AND NOUNNESS"
3) Alexandra Aikhenvald considers “gender” to refer to a system of three or less distinctions (“always including masculine and feminine”), and “noun class” to refer to systems with more distinctions (these would include the well-known Bantu noun class systems), see her book "A typology of noun classification devices", New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. So, the opinion like this: "In recent literature there is no longer a distinction between gender and noun class, see Corbett 1999" ( here) is simply false; the book of Aikhenvald is more recent than that of Corbett.
4) The notions of gender and nominal class are treated commonly as different by Bantuists, see the four citations above (and also other sources, if you like). Especially, see the statement The concept of "gender", which remains controversial in the description of Bantu languages. Why should Wikipedia force controversial things?
5) Such a distinction is needed in other branches of linguistics as well. For Sino-Tibetan, see e.g. On the relationship of morphological class and gender
6) And which is the most important: the other, serious dictionaries and encyclopaedias (like SIL also treat noun classes and genders as different things. See also "Some Bantu languages have 20 genderlike noun classes" ("genderlike" does not mean "genders" and it is far from "noun classes also known as genders"!), The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. 2001-05. See also "Gender is intended here in the usual European / Afro-Asiatic meaning : masculine / feminine (/neuter), and is opposed here to noun class even if both phenomena can be considered similar." Projet International de Coopération Scientifique Please tell me one reason for which Wikipedia should not follow them.
Above, I have noticed that the previous form of the article violated the Neutral Point of View, as most sources treat genders and noun classes as different terms. Is the evidence from the six points enough or really must I search for more? Or rather, if you do not agree, please prove it now first them stating that gender is just "more familiar" than noun class.
Once again: these are two different terms, and the article treats about all noun classes, not only about genders. If you do not agree with the statement, and if you vote against what, say why, please.
Grzegorj 06:33, 1 November 2006 (UTC)
I have written "The contents of the page is in great accordance with this common view now" - it is not true any longer as FilipeS has cleared all my corrections. Until the article is in the present form, there is no need and no sense for any renaming it.
So, the content of the article is again NOT consistant with other sources as FilipeS have just reverted the page to the previous disorder. I do not continue playing this game any longer.
I have done a great job on making all the article clear, readible and consistant with other sources of knowledge, like the documents od SIL. I have removed false statements as well, as I have explained this above. The request of renaming has no sense if FilipeS who thinks that the article is his property keeps reverting it to the previous form. These "other sources" tell clearly that gender is only one of the form of noun classes.
Moreover, because of the FilipeS's reverting, we have all the old disorder again. Under "Lexical gender" we can read: "In Spanish, the suffix -o is characteristic of masculine nouns and the suffix -a is characteristic of feminine nouns."
And under "Noun classes and morphology" we can read: "In Spanish, grammatical gender is overwhelmingly determined by noun morphology. Since nouns that refer to male persons usually end in -o or a consonant and nouns that refer to female persons usually end in -a, most other nouns that end in -o or a consonant are also treated as masculine, and most nouns that end in -a are treated as feminine, regardless of their meaning."
Hey, you reverter and "the owner" of the text, do you think that it is better version than mine??? Is it better in your opinion to keep the same information twice? And, which one is true, "in Spanish, the suffix -o is characteristic of masculine", or "in Spanish [...] nouns that refer to male persons usually end in -o or a consonant"? So what - in -o, or in -o or a consonant? Have you ever thought that this information, repeated twice, is just confusing for the reader?
My aim was to remove such repeated information. But if FelipeS prefers the previous version, I do not fight any longer. From my point of view the situation is as follows: I spent some hours making this article clearer. And some insolent, conceited all-knowing bandit has just removed all my work again! So, bye-bye! It is not a place for me. I have thought that Wikipedia is free. But I was wrong. Here only FelipeS is right.
22:17, 31 October 2006 (UTC) Grzegorj
I accuse YOU of influencing the decision because you have REMOVED my version!!! The decision cannot be "yes" until we discuss MY version! Can you understand it?
And I accuse you that you removing my many-hour work just states that all what I have written is false.
Please other Wikipedists to take a look at the classes / gender problem in Bantu, above. Who is right - me or FilipeS? Does the source confirm my point (classes are not genders), or FilipeS (classes are genders)?
22:42, 31 October 2006 (UTC) Grzegorj
Let's discuus MY VERSION. Only this make the renaming sensible.
22:50, 31 October 2006 (UTC) Grzegorj
Let's discuss the version that was the subject of the request of renaming. Now is OK? "My" was a shortening. Grzegorj 00:20, 1 November 2006 (UTC)
And a little explanation: I have drastically changed the contents because I have found many things OBVIOUS (like the information repeated twice). I am not a revisionist.
22:53, 31 October 2006 (UTC) Grzegorj
I have submitted a NPOV violation in this article ( here). Nobody has said "no" to this so far. I have been asked of contribution. I have spent many hours of hard work and removed the violation, leaving all the rest of the article. I have removed the doubling of the information about the gender in Spanish. I have presented the arguments and sources. I have also add some facts to the article. And the user CharlotteWebb removed all my corrections without having said a word to all my arguments and the submission of NPOV violation. This violates the following reverting don'ts:
I am about informing administrators about this incident - Grzegorj 07:18, 1 November 2006 (UTC)
In light of the above discussions, I think it might be wise to split Grammatical gender into Grammatical gender and Noun class. Most of the material currently in the article would stay there, as it applies to the notion of grammatical gender. The parts about noun classes, such as the examples from Bantu languages, would be moved to the new article. Any comments, or does this have to be done more formally? FilipeS 23:11, 7 November 2006 (UTC)
I've been thinking about this article, and I think it's time for a rewrite. I don't know if Grzegorj is still around, but some of his changes went in the right direction. Even though I made a considerable contribution to the present version of the article, I now see some flaws in it:
Other opinons and suggestions are welcome. FilipeS 20:54, 8 November 2006 (UTC)