Talk:Noun class

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[edit] Article split from Grammatical gender

This article has been split from Grammatical gender. See the relevant discussions at Talk:Grammatical gender, perticularly the discussions from this one on.

It's still pretty rough and with duplicates of the material in the other article, but it should improve with time. FilipeS 00:09, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Difference between Noun class and Grammatical gender

The article needs to explain this better. Some ideas, from here:

• Noun class, definition: noun classes exist in a language when nouns are divided into groups defined according to grammatical agreement. When the class of a noun changes, this entails morphological changes in other parts of speech that refer to that noun. Noun class may or may not be marked on the nouns themselves.
• A very simple example of a 2-noun-class system is the singular/plural distinction, in languages that possess these two grammatical numbers.
• When at least some of the noun classes in a language correlate to natural gender, it is common to speak of "grammatical gender". However, the notion of noun class is not a simple extension of that of grammatical gender, because noun classes traditionally include number distinctions, whereas gender is traditionally seen as a classification system orthogonal to number. Thus, for example, one might say that Spanish has 2 grammatical genders, masculine and feminine, and 2 numbers, singular and plural, but 2x2=4 noun classes, masculine singular, feminine singular, masculine plural, and feminine plural.
• The article should explain why this difference in approach is considered relevant.

FilipeS 20:54, 9 November 2006 (UTC)