Talk:Grammatical gender/Archive 1

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[edit] Old Discussions

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!

Obviously it's worth it! I attempted it, but be bold in updating pages :)
Only it's not entirely true, at least not in Dutch. The truth is that there are still THREE genders, but that concerning the definite article male is identical to female, but concerning the possesive pronoun male is identical to neuter. Natural gender (if known) tends to trumph grammatical all the time when it comes to personal and possessive pronouns. "Feeling" for grammatical gender of "common" nouns in native standard and northern speakers is very weak, so male is used more and more for all "common words" without a clear natural sex.

ThW5 12:11, 24 October 2006 (UTC)


Chinese doesn't have a large number of personal pronouns. Maybe thinking of Japanese?

The diversity of Japanese personal pronouns has no relation to grammatical gender. That's a problem of honorific varaeties.

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)

not much really. It's not even terribly desirable to segregate humans into two sets of pronouns: it's just another gender straightjacket. It can sometimes help disambiguate sentences -- if two nouns are of differering gender then it's clear which one a pronoun refers to, but that's pure fluke. languages that don't have it get round that with no problems. --- Tarquin 13:59 Jul 24, 2002 (PDT)
In Spanish you can get two words by changing the gender, la colera (anger) and el colera (cholera), and a few dozen more, but Spanish speakers don't always get them right, certainly not me. Would you feel confident in adding something about the uselessness of gender to the article? It's why I came here, actually to look something up but it wasn't there! Having explained that, where do you suppose it came from? Ortolan88 16:57 Jul 24, 2002 (PDT)
Who says, anyway, that it has to be useful? What's the use of having three different classes of verbs in Spanish, plus exceptions? It's just there, it's not something that people voted on. - Montréalais
While it may not have to be useful (I was responding to Tarquin's statement that it didn't have much use), I still want to know what gender's function is. I'm fairly taken with the answer below, and I think I may add it to the article if there are no objections. For my money, there is no analogy between the three forms of verb (some things just are) and the presence of gender in a language. Finnish has nine cases, but they make up for it by having no prepositions, thus, the function of the nine cases. Delighted to be continuing this conversation so many months later, I remain, that masculine guy, Ortolan88 04:37 Nov 19, 2002 (UTC)
I agree with the comment above about disambiguation. Loads of languages have grammatical genders of various types, and in evolutionary terms, the main advantage for a language featuring natural gender types is disambiguation. Dividing objects into two/three classes means that when you say 'he smells', the number of possible referents is divided into two or three. That may still sound pretty ambiguous, but when uttered in a context, there are usually only a few possible referents, so this division can really help. Of course, there are other ways of disambiguating... But acquring a language with grammatical genders (as your first language) is no more difficult than any language without, and so this slight advantage comes at no real cost (other than to adult learners!)
Hm... le fif but la tapette... French hasn't quite made up its mind about me yet ;) (Maybe das Schwülchen?) -Montréalais

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

This can perhaps be made a little more concrete with an example. Spanish has two genders, and this allows you to say things like this: "Maria gave Jorge a guitar and a book. He put it under his bed and it on the table." In Spanish, you can make it clear that the first it ("la") refers to the guitar ("la guitarra"), while the second it ("lo") refers to the book ("el libro"). This is a silly example; this is mostly handy for long, complicated sentences. --Ryguasu 06:58 Nov 19, 2002 (UTC)
I might be wrong, but if I remember things correctly from my Spanish classes, "lo" is only used for the abstract it, like for instance "it's sunny", "it's raining" etc. In this sense, I think "el" would be used for the book.
Way wrong. Lo is a direct object pronoun. There is no direct object pronoun "el." Lo amo: I love him.

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)

Hm, isn't this a bit pointless? Of course it would be valuable to make note of the gender system in each language's article. But with this approach, carrying it through to its bitter conclusion, you will end up with a list of 6000 entries that will not readily yield useful information. It's certainly useful to list a few examples for each type, but beyond that, it would make more sense just to say things like isolating languages by definition have no gender, or finno-ugric languages have no gender, than to list each and every language, thereby obscuring such regularities.... Dbachmann 12:46, 27 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Just because isolating languages don't take suffixes doesn't mean they have no gender. If I understand it correctly, in Mandarin counting you have to use certain classifiers depending upon the characteristics of the noun you're counting, and if you use the wrong classifier, the meaning can be different (I don't know any examples, but it's like the el colera/la colera in Spanish). That's still gender: just because the defining characteristics comply with real-world distinctions doesn't make it any less so.thefamouseccles 11:17, 26 Jan 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Two or three genders in Dutch language?

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)

Sorry, but it has two nominal genders. I'm rather loath to count pronominal ones. Otherwise, Spanish has three genders(Masculine, Feminine, Neuter/Abstract), as does English (he/she/it). In German, pronouns often agree with natural(rather than grammatical) gender, for instance, 'Ich sah das Maedchen, und sie war sehr klein'(I saw the girl, and she was very small) is perfectly grammatical, even though the nominal and pronominal genders disagree.User:BovineBeast
You misunderstand me. I'm talking about grammatical gender, not real gender. English pronouns work on real gender where "he" and "she" refer only to humans and higher animals, depending on their sex; "it" refers to everything else. Spanish pronouns work on grammatical gender for most things: "el" and "ella" refer even to inanimate objects though Spanish also has "lo" for referring to ideas rather than nouns. Dutch has 3 grammatical genders as applied to nouns, but it has only two definite articles and no gender is indicated in adjectives. But you cannot arbitrarily choose any pronoun for "it" when referring to inanimate objects - you must use a masculine pronoun for masculine nouns, a feminine pronoun for feminine nouns, and a neuter pronoun for neuter nouns. — Hippietrail 00:54, 24 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Real gender can correspond to grammatical gender. Have a look at Navajo or Mandarin, where the shape, size or geometry of an object may be the defining factor in what classifiers, verbs or pronouns are used. English does have three pronominal genders; the system just doesn't include nouns. Ubykh is the same, its pronominal prefixes distinguish feminine gender in the second person, but not on nouns or free pronouns. "Real gender" is just one way of forming genders or noun classes. thefamouseccles 11:21, 26 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Dutch grammar
www.speakdutch.nl
The conversation which convinced me on Wiktionary
Hmm, yes, but I would have though(and I admit I'm basing most of this on my knowledge of German), that one could use 'het' for all inanimate objects, and 'hij' or 'zij' for animate objects, depending on natural gender. Also, Gender is(I believe) indicated in adjectives, as in 'een goed huis', but 'een goede stad'. But you do have a point.

Ok, I ought to have commented here first before putting Dutch back in the two gender category, my bad. However:

  • This site says there were 3 genders in Dutch, but now only common and neuter.
  • This one again says that there was a feminine in Middle Dutch (implies there is none now?)
  • And this says that most Dutch people can't tell the difference between masculine and feminine.

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)

The first piece of official Dutch I ever saw -- at Oostende, on landing from a cross-channel ferry there (so you can tell how long ago this was) -- appeared on a sign attached to a dockside crane. I remember being struck that it warned passengers to beware of the crane during haar werking: ever since, I have always thought of cranes as being feminine! --Picapica 08:58, 22 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Norwegian

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)

Feminine gender is obligatory in Nynorsk. Bokmål is a bit more complicated -- the feminine forms are usually mandatory, but using forms like "hytten" (the cabin) instead of "hytta" would by many be considered Riksmål (which is consequent in having two genders). On the other hand, "dronninga" (the queen) is considered a very "radical" form in Bokmål (but normal in Nynorsk), although the word is indisputabely of feminine gender. Officially Bokmål is considered to have three genders (see Norwegian language). contrapuncti

{{attention}}

[edit] Should we talk about pronoun classes?

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)

Yes I think we should. One thing which has interested me lately is how English and Spanish both have gender in 3rd person possessive pronouns (his, hers; su, sua) but that the gender relates to different things. In English to the gender of the possessor, in Spanish to the gender of the thing possesed. Same goes for number though that's more blurred. Are there some grammatical terms to disambiguate these phenomena? — Hippietrail 02:59, 5 Nov 2004 (UTC)

[edit] English Gender

Aren't countries also feminine in English? Spain allied herself, Russia mobilized her, etc.?

You can refer to both ships and countries with either feminine or neuter third person singular pronouns, practically. Stylistically, I'd say that using feminine in this case would be a bit old-fashioned for today, but you still definitely use such. 146.151.47.17, 16:14, 3 Dec 2004 (UTC)
  • I would also argue that English retains a remnant of the old grammatical gender system in the usage "Man", referring to the human species. We usually refer back to that with the pronouns he/him/his, after all, even though it means people of both sexes.---------Kelisi 2005/2/4

"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.)

The distinction of a and an is of course only phonological. Compare a happy girl and an unhappy girl. - TAKASUGI Shinji 08:17, 2005 Apr 18 (UTC)


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)

[edit] German Gender

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).

[edit] Swahili

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

  • WA (mtu/watu)
  • VI (kitabu/vitabu)
  • MA (jiwe/mawe)
  • MI (mti/miti)
  • N (ndizi)
  • U (umoja)
  • PA (mahali)
  • MU (locatives such as pembeni)

Am I missing something? --Marnen Laibow-Koser (talk) 22:34, 13 Dec 2004 (UTC)

OK, maybe I'm missing one more class: KU (verbal nouns such as kuimba). But that's still only 9 classes, not 15. --Marnen Laibow-Koser (talk) 15:31, 14 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Since no one has been able to answer this question in over four months, I am editing the article to reflect the revised count. If anyone has more info, please share it. --Marnen Laibow-Koser (talk) 00:03, 26 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I gave a belated answer at Talk:Swahili language; didn't check out the present state of the article yet. — mark ✎ 14:07, 19 May 2005 (UTC)

On a related note, do we really need to list "Swahili" and "all Bantu languages" separately? Mga 02:04, 14 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Real vs Grammatical Gender

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)

Well you could consider the large bulk of nouns in the male and female genders in languages which also have a neuter gender - these would all be examples. — Hippietrail 08:56, 27 Feb 2005 (UTC)
Those examples aren't quite so useful. The best example would be a word which has male or female natural gender and the opposite grammatical gender. However, I expect these examples are rare if not non-existant. Examples where male/female objects have neutral gender would also be welcome. --Frankie Roberto 20:58, 27 Feb 2005 (UTC)
The ancient Greek word παις young boy is neuter gender. thefamouseccles 01:00, 14 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Irish cailín "girl" is masculine, while stail "stallion" is feminine. Go figure. --Marnen Laibow-Koser (talk) 04:52, 11 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Mädchen and Fräulein are neuter because they are diminutives: German classes all diminutives formed with -chen and -lein (cognates of English -kin and -ling) as neuter. Similarly, Irish classifies all diminutives in -ín – e.g. cailín – as masculine (m. and n. having coalesced in the history of that language). --Picapica 08:28, 22 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] two new papers

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

[edit] Tamil doesn't have gender?

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)

I'm removing Tamil from the list until someone clarifies. -- Sundar (talk · contribs) 04:05, Apr 12, 2005 (UTC)
Kannada, Malayalam and Telugu use a system similar to Tamil, so they should go too. I think the confusion is between grammatical gender in the Indo-European sense (which Tamil and the other south and central Dravidian languages do not have) and noun classes (which they do). --Arvind 00:33, 14 Apr 2005 (UTC)
And what, really, is the difference between those two concepts? --Marnen Laibow-Koser (talk) 14:47, 25 Apr 2005 (UTC)
The term gender should be used only for a subset of noun class systems that distinguish nouns mainly or historically based on biological sex.
Unfortunately, making that distinction is easier said than done. Look at the Australian systems mentioned in the article. --Marnen Laibow-Koser (talk) 00:48, 26 Apr 2005 (UTC)
They don't have to be distinguished. Always use noun class, because genders are noun classes anyway. - TAKASUGI Shinji 01:05, 2005 Apr 26 (UTC)
I don't know about Dravidian languages, but there seems to be confusion between noun classes (genders) and noun classifiers in the Wikipedia articles. Noun classifiers are not noun classes. The current version of grammatical gender mentions languages with noun classifiers such as Chinese and Japanese, which is misleading. At least, the following sentence is wrong:
If one agrees that classifiers such as measure words also express noun class, then some Sino-Tibetan languages have even more.
The following is a good site:
SIL Glossary of linguistic terms - What is a noun class?
In a language with noun classes, each noun belongs to one and only one class, which is usually shown by a word form or an accompanying article and functions grammatically. The same referent can be referred by nouns with different noun classes, such as die Frau (f.) and das Weib (n.) in German. A language has at most 20 noun classes or so.
In a language with noun classifiers, a noun may or may not be accompanied by a noun classifier, which shows a conceptual classification of the referent of a noun and is commonly used when you count the referents. Noun classifiers are not grammatical but lexical items, and a language may have hundreds of noun classifiers. For instance, in Japanese, the noun classifier for humans is nin, which is used to count humans, whatever noun you use for them. E.g.:
3-nin no seito (lit. 3 people of student = 3 students)
3-nin no sensei (lit. 3 people of teacher = 3 teachers)
As you see, the noun classifier agrees with the referent of a noun, not the noun itself. Since noun classifiers are words, not grammatical functions, it is not uncommon to import noun classifiers from other languages. They are very much like measure words — when you count cups of coffee, you don't care what noun you use for coffee, such as two cups of Mocha and three cups of Java. See also Talk:Measure word.
Noun classifiers are more appropriately contrasted with grammatical number. Grammatical number and noun classifiers usually don't coexist in a language. English and other European languages are languages with number; Chinese and Japanese are languages without number. A language with noun classes always has number. - TAKASUGI Shinji 00:31, 2005 Apr 26 (UTC)
In keeping with the discussion so far, I've commented out Telugu from the list of gender-less/nounclass-less languages and moved it to the list of languages with three noun-classes as I perceive these distinct classes in Telugu as follows:
  • masculine: pronoun వాడు/vɑːɽu/, అతడు/ʌt̪ʌɽu/, verb-ending -ాడు -/ɑːɽu/
  • feminine/neuter: pronoun ఆమె /ɑːme/, అది /ʌd̪ɪ/, verb-ending -ది -/ʌd̪ɪ/
  • honorific: pronoun వారు /vɑːru/, ఆయన /ɑːyʌnʌ/, ఆవిడ /ɑːvɪɽa/, verb-ending -ారు -/ɑːru/
But I'm not a professional linguist, so any corrections are welcome.
--Rohit Dasari 13:07, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Tolkien

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.

If you feel a change is needed, feel free to make it yourself! Wikipedia is a wiki, so anyone (yourself included) can edit any article by following the Edit this page link. You don't even need to log in, although there are several reasons why you might want to. Wikipedia convention is to be bold and not be afraid of making mistakes. If you're not sure how editing works, have a look at How to edit a page, or try out the Sandbox to test your editing skills. New contributors are always welcome. — mark ✎ 21:26, 22 Apr 2005 (UTC)
It probably isn't as ridiculous as one might think. Tolkien's languages have attracted a great deal of interest and study among those who like languages and linguistics. --Marnen Laibow-Koser (talk) 14:46, 25 Apr 2005 (UTC)

[edit] English

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.

[edit] New English question

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.

English has natural gender (males are he, females are she, inanimate objects are it), but it doesn't have grammatical gender, by which the gender of a noun is not necessarily related to its natural sex or gender (as in German, where "table" is masculine, "turnip" is feminine, and "girl" is neuter, or in Irish, where "boy scout" is feminine and "girl" masculine). --Angr/tɔk tə mi 16:08, 24 October 2005 (UTC)
OK, I think I understand what you're saying. However, isn't natural gender still a function of grammar? For instance, "The woman felt cold, so he put on a coat," would be grammatically incorrect, right? It must, by the rules of grammar, be "The woman felt cold, so she put on a coat." Furthermore, the article states, "Gender assignment is in most cases arbitrary for referents that do not have biological gender, but there are exceptions...." Finally in the Natural gender article, it says, "In a language that primarily uses natural gender, such as English, the grammatical gender of a word will normally agree with its referent's natural gender." I'm just having a difficult time seperating natural and grammatical gender because they both seem to be issues inherently grammatical.--xideum 17:27, 24 October 2005 (UTC)
I guess the article should say English doesn't have arbitrary grammatical genders, but rather grammatical genders determined by the biological sex/gender of the referent. Even in languages with arbitrary grammatical genders, though, it isn't always arbitrary. In both German and Irish the word for "man" is masculine and the word for "woman" feminine; in German, almost any masculine noun that refers to a human being has to be made feminine by adding a suffix if it refers to a female person. (Sort of like "actor/actress", "waiter"/"waitress" in English, except in German it's extended to almost everything: "friend/friendess", "student"/"studentess", "voter/voteress", and so on.) The big difference between most European languages and English is that in English, grammatical gender is never arbitrary, while in the other languages it usually is (except with human referents where it usually isn't). (The thing about ships and planes being called "she" in English isn't a case of arbitrary grammatical gender IMO; rather, it's just anthropomorphism.) --Angr/tɔk tə mi 18:54, 24 October 2005 (UTC)
We only speak of grammatical gender when all nouns in a language are divided into classes, and words that refer to a specific noun (articles, pronouns, adjectives...) change according to the class to which the noun belongs. For example, in the English sentences "The man is tall" and "The woman is tall", nothing changes except the word "man/woman". In Spanish, however, you would have to say "El hombre es alto" and "La mujer es alta", respectively. The article and the adjective that refer to "hombre/mujer" change according to the gender of the word. The situation of English is a bit borderline. It used to have genders (three of them, masculine, feminine and neuter), and it still has some traces of gender, in the 3rd. person singular pronouns "he", "she", "it". However, no other (non-noun) words besides these pronouns change with gender. Pragmatically, you don't need to worry about having adjectives agree in gender with nouns if you're learning English, as you would in Spanish. In that sense, I think it's fair to say that English does not have grammatical gender, or that grammatical gender in English is, at best, vestigial. Biological and social gender, of course, are not determined by language, but by genetics and social construction, respectively.
This article explains the difference between grammatical and natural gender and argues that natural gender is a fallacy.

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).

[edit] Proposed rewrite

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).

this is just wrong: 'fruto - fruta' is an old rest of latin 'neutrum' gender: singular in -um (fructum)(->o) and plural in -a (fructa) (like medium, media). Neutrum has since disapeared in allneo-latin languages but Rumanian. Plch 16:08, 14 October 2006 (UTC)
I also wrote before that this example is not addressed properly. Neither fruta or fruto are collective noun versions of one another, they are both singular nouns referring to single items. -- Zavreio 02:20, 15 October 2006 (UTC)


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:

Seo brade line wæs tilu and ic hire lufod.
(Literal translation:) That broad shield was good and I loved her.

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:

That broad shield was good and I loved it.

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':

kitabu kikubwa kinaanguka

(cl.7-book cl.7-big cl.7-PRESENT-fall)

'The big book falls.'

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.

[edit] Changes to paragraph on Indo-European

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.

[edit] Cleanup

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)

As for the last point, I am very much in favour of a split. We might even think of having one article for the gender system of each language. As for the first point, I am more sceptical. A grammatical gender is a noun class, but one may think of noun classes which are not gender classes. Also, the gender assignment literature uses the term "gender" also for e.g. Australian and Dravidian languages. In some languages nouns can be divided in classes defined by their classifiers, this is in the literature thought of as being different from gender. Most (all?) gender systems have a basis in biological sex. Trondtr 23:52, 7 February 2006 (UTC).

[edit] Why I'm glad grammatical gender exists in ancient Indo-European languages

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)

I'm sorry, but I disagree on your "I'm glad...". The price for the ease of telling the antecedent is too high to pay, in my opinion. Rememering which gender is spiritus/manus, dies/res, puella/poeta, rex/lex, ανθροπος/παρθηνος etc is a pain, and memory is much better spent on more worthwhile things. Also, whatever clarity you gain from the gender endings is by chance, just as the German "die bräutliche Schwester befreite der Bruder" (from one of Wagner's operas) happens to work only because Bruder is masculine singular (the only instance where German distinguishes between nom. and acc.). The Latin "astra regunt homines" (as opposed to "astra regit Deus") is just as ambiguous. I'm much better served by case endings than by the occasional difference of genders. --Shlomital 16:16, 10 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] English words

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'm curious too. To tell you the truth, I was surprised to learn that English has any gendered words at all, apart from pronouns and, archaicly, things like Ships. This sounds more like prescriptive than descriptive grammar, unless it's more common outside of the U.S. Neilmsheldon 21:50, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

I tend to agree with you. "Blond(e)" is a very contrived example, for several reasons:

  1. It's a pair of loanwords from French.
  2. They are pronounced exactly the same way; only their spelling is different.
  3. As I understand, "blond" is not used very often for males, in modern English.

On the other hand, English certainly has pairs of gendered words such as actor/actress. FilipeS 13:09, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

Not exactly. English has some gender markers that are fairly rarely used ("-ess" being the most common). While the handful of words that are built using this ("actress" "hostess" "waitress") ipso facto refer to females, the root words ("actor" "host" "waiter") are still technically generic (ie, not gender-marked) nouns that can be used for persons of either sex, even if this usage can be less common (and I have met women waiters, though this is probably the least common term). The situation is not exactly parallel to that of gendered languages, which do have such pairs.
Of course, there are plenty of "natural gender" words in English referring to things that are really male or female where this is a defining characteristic (sister/brother, queen/king, mother/father, etc.), though even here there is a non-gendered word of some sort (sibling, sovereign, parent). I suppose the persistence of words like "actress" (itself a French loanword) is due to a wide belief that it is sort of a natural-gender word (inasmuch as men and women play different roles in the theater, films, or TV) in the way that, say, "dentist" is not.
Third-person singular pronouns are the only real remnant of grammatical gender in English. "Blond" is a loanword, as you say, but the gender-marked usage isn't universal. A few other loanwords retain gender usage: alumnus/alumna/alumni/alumnae; Filipino/Filipina; parvenu/parvenue. I think Bill Bryson is in part responsible for spreading this "blond/blonde" business, as he wrote in one of his books that it was the only gendered adjective in English.  ProhibitOnions  (T) 14:54, 31 October 2006 (UTC)
Are you saying that it's normal to introduce a woman as "an actor", or "a waiter", in English? FilipeS 16:05, 31 October 2006 (UTC)
It's not incorrect, although some people might find it a bit unusual. Quite a few women actors dislike the term "actress" as it is a secondary form along the lines of "she-actor" and since it goes against the grain of most English nouns not being inflected. Note that the definition of actor is "a person" not "a man". Likewise waiter, although it's fairly uncommon to hear the term applied to a woman, despite the desire for a neutral term; lots of restaurants use another word instead, often "server".
Perhaps more pertinent are the many words (usually denoting professions) ending in -man, the origin of which ending predates the use of "man" to refer only to male adults. In most cases, -woman or -person are easily substituted, or a different term is used; however people often object to this on the basis that the term is inclusive (Congressman Virginia Smith of Nebraska always used the term), or that it is traditional (the University of the South once contemplated renaming its Order of Gownsmen to something else, but the students revolted). Even so, a word like "Congresswoman" is really a compound rather than a genuine gender-inflected noun.  ProhibitOnions  (T) 18:02, 31 October 2006 (UTC)
And even "actor/actress" and "waiter/waitress" are probably words influenced by French. However, the point I was trying to get to was that English is not exceptional in that regard. In languages with a masculine/feminine gender system, the masculine is typically the default. Portuguese ministra (morphologically feminine) means "female minister", but ministro (morphologically masculine) can mean either "male minister", or "person who is a minister, regardless of sex". The difference is that (because gender is still very much alive in Portuguese) describing a specific woman as ministro is entirely unacceptable. It does not sound cautiously gender-neutral; just bizarre (or funny), unlike in English. FilipeS 19:51, 31 October 2006 (UTC)
Masculine Gender is dominant in many Romance languages and to a certain degree in other IE languages, but it is by no means universally dominant over feminine. In fact, even with in IE, there are certain languages (ie Welsh) where the feminine gender is the common default. 168.150.253.55 08:01, 23 December 2006 (UTC) —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 168.150.253.55 (talk) 08:00, 23 December 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)

There are a few names of professions in Portuguese that people tend to use as feminine by default: empregada doméstica (cleaning lady), educadora de infância (childcare worker?), hospedeira de bordo / aeromoça (air hostess). Clearly, we're talking about professions which were traditionally reserved for women, but where you find some men, nowadays. :-) FilipeS 22:42, 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)

[edit] Russian, four genders (or 3 with one special case)...

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 think it refers to the fact that in Russian (and most other Slavic languages) the accusative of animate masculine singular nouns is identical to the genitive (e.g. вижу человека) while the accusative in inanimate masculine singular nouns is identical to the nominative (e.g. вижу дом). Angr/talk 17:28, 10 March 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)

Nope, because there are reams of declensions as well, usually depending on the sound of the final consonant or vowel (soft, hard, historically soft, etc.). The Polish plural, however, disregards word endings as the gender determinant, and has one gender for male humans (the masculine personal) and one for everything else (the common). That always cracks me up.  ProhibitOnions  (T) 21:21, 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)

Um, I was just drawing your attention to an interesting peculiarity. In the singular it's much the same as most of he other Slavic languages...  ProhibitOnions  (T) 23:44, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Sesotho classes

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)

[edit] Origins of grammatical gender?

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)

I've heard Hittite language had two noun classes, animate and inanimate, and they somehow changed to masculine and feminine. I hope someone will kindly explain it. - TAKASUGI Shinji 16:23, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] intro

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)

Hi. Perhaps I did not write clearly enough. What I meant was that noun classes are identified by certain inflections. For example, in Spanish the suffix -a characterizes the feminine gender.
If the marking is only on the nouns, then there is only lexical gender, not grammatical gender proper. See the example of Esperanto. It has lexical marking for gender, but not grammatical gender. There must be some kind of marking in other parts of speech, for true grammatical gender to exist.
I used the term 'qualities' only to make a contrast with grammatical number, which is otherwise a type of inflection very similar to grammatical gender. I'm open to better ways of phrasing this contrast.
You will find examples in the main body of the text. I did not think it was appropriate to give any in the introduction, particularly since grammatical gender is difficult to exemplify in English. FilipeS 13:25, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Lists of languages by number of genders/noun classes

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)

[edit] Gender in malayalam?

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)

[edit] Tudo and todo in Portuguese

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)

[edit] Merger with 'natural gender'?

I am proposing the merger of the entry on 'natural gender' with this one. My reasons are the following:

  • As far as I can tell, the 'natural gender' entry exists only to contrast natural with grammatical gender, and point out that they don't always coincide. But that could be done in the 'grammatical gender' entry itself;
  • The 'natural gender' entry is very small;
  • There already is a lengthy entry for 'gender' in the general sense, including biological and sociological aspects. That covers the concept of 'natural gender', to the extent that it intersects with sexuality.

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)

[edit] "-ung" nouns in German

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).

  • handeln, das Handeln, die Handlung ("to act", "the acting" and "the action"; alternatively "to trade", "the trading", "the store" in compound nouns, e.g. Buchhandlung = book store)
  • erklären, das Erklären, die Erklärung ("to explain", "the explaining", "the explanation")
  • mutmaßen, das Mutmaßen, die Mutmaßung ("to conjecture", "the conjecturing", "the conjecture"; alternatively "to suppose", "the supposing", "the supposition")

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)

Good point. What you're getting at, and what the article should be saying, is that all nouns that are formed by appending the suffix -ung are feminine. From this automatically follows another characteristic of these nouns: they are by definition morphologically complex, whereas the counterexamples you name are morphologically simplex. — mark ✎ 14:42, 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)

I don't think it's a diminutive. The German diminutive suffixes would be -chen as in 'Mädchen' and -lein as in 'Männlein' 'little man'. I think it would be better to call it the nominalizing suffix -ung. — mark ✎ 15:48, 22 April 2006 (UTC)
As user Mark Dingemanse has pointed out, this has nothing to do with the diminutive. I removed this suggestion from the article. Aragorn2 15:55, 22 April 2006 (UTC)
As a sidenote, the suffix "-ling" is used in German in multiple ways: to make countable nouns from uncountable ones, e.g. "Teig" (dough) -> "Teigling" (piece of dough), and to form personal nouns from abstract nouns, or from adjectives, e.g. "Lehre" (teaching) -> "Lehrling" (apprentice), "Strafe" (punishment) -> "Sträfling" (convict) and "feige" (cowardly) -> "Feigling" (coward). Maybe there are more uses. The resulting nouns are masculine. Note that this is not a diminutive form either, as is currently falsely claimed on the English WP article on the diminutive. Aragorn2 16:11, 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)

[edit] Statistics on nouns by grammatical gender

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)

In the External Links section, you will find an interesting article by author van Berkum which contains percentages for Dutch. FilipeS 18:30, 27 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)

I wouldn't say "majority" and "minority", though. Notice that by some of his counts the ratio of de-words to het-words is roughly 2:1. FilipeS 20:03, 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)

What do you mean by that? FilipeS

[edit] Swedish

Swedish is listed under "common and neuter" and under "more than three". What's the true?--Nixer 15:24, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

As I was taught it in Swedish class (in Swedish schools), Swedish has four genders (genus): maskulinum, femininum, reale and neutrum. It can also be classified as having two, with masculine and feminine being subclasses of reale, thus being common + neuter. Cases where masculine/feminine distinctions exist, other than the pronouns, are few and getting fewer. -Ahruman 23:46, 25 November 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.

If English is listed under "Languages with three grammatical genders", then the Scandinavian languages (at least Danish and Swedish) should be listed as "Languages with four grammatical genders", since the pronouns "he/him/his" and "she/her" also exist in these languages, when speaking of persons (and pets/allegorical beings etc.). But all nouns are classified as either common or neuter, not masculine or feminine. As Lena Synnerholm's comment above shows, Swedish has even more rudiments of the feminine gender than English does. So please move English to the category with one gender, or otherwise move the Scandinavian languages. 130.225.127.135 15:21, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

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)

[edit] "Fruta" is not an example

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).

By the way, I think I missed my point. What I meant to say is that both Fruta and Fruto are singular nouns that refer to singular items, not groups. --Zavreio 18:15, 2 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] NPOV Dispute - Gender vs. noun classes

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)

Why don't you contribute to the article, explaining exactly how those linguists distinguish "genders" from "noun classes"?
Incidentally, I put a lot of the current version of this article together, and I am not a native English speaker. My native language has genders. FilipeS 17:15, 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.

Really? Where do they say that? FilipeS 23:34, 31 October 2006 (UTC)
Really: What Is Grammatical Gender
"Generic
Grammatical gender is a kind of
* What is a noun class? "
And also: "Grammatical gender is a noun class system, composed of two or three classes" (on the same page). Isn't it obvious that this definition does not comprise Bantu nominal classes?

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).

  • "Das Genus-System, das vor allem in den indogermanischen und semitischen Sprachen vorkommt, ist nur eine spezielle Ausprägung des Nominalklassen-Systems" de:Genus
  • "Многие языки не имеют рода, например финно-угорские, тюркские, монгольские, банту и др." ru:Род (лингвистика) (translation: Many languages have no gender, for example Finno-Ugric, Turkic, Mongolian, Bantu etc.; compare this with the statement in the English version that Bantu has many genders) - Grzegorj 09:28, 1 November 2006 (UTC)

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)

Wikipedia is inconsistent. Learn to live with it. We need an article on gender; we may also need an article on noun class. Septentrionalis 13:37, 1 November 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 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"”
In Sweden, the field of gender studies is called “genusvetenskap”, and “genus” is used to refer to the concept of gender in the not-exactly-sex sense. This would appear to be a word-by-word translation from the English usage. -Ahruman 23:54, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Revert move

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)

Your work isn't destroyed, you can always retrieve it by looking at the older versions of the pages. And I'm making no judgement as to whether what you wrote is original research; however, radical changes should usually be discussed first. Others had already taken issue with some of your premises.  ProhibitOnions  (T) 20:58, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Explanation and description of changes in the article

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:

  • Spanish nouns that ends with a consonant are NOT masculine in general, compare cf. ciudad ‘town’, lección ‘lesson’, mujer ‘woman’ are all feminine (and these are not specially rare examples). Even the rule that -o marks masculine and -a marks feminine is obviously false, ex. artista ‘artist’ may be both masculine and feminine, mano ‘hand’ is feminine, día ‘day’ is masculine, etc.
  • In general, gender in IE and AA do not need to be marked on noun in any way. Personally I do not think that any affixes were historically gender markers in both language families, and I cannot remember a source whose author would state otherwise. Gender is a syntactic phenomenon, and does not depend on any markers, even if with time, particular affixes begin to be associated with a given gender. I believe that this is the neutral point of view, and it should be presented in Wikipedia in the first place.
  • I have changed all the contents on Bantu languages (btw., Fulbe is not Bantu, and I've transferred it to the proper place). To my best intention, I must state that the Meinhof's system of numbering nominal classes is commonly accepted among Bantuists, and I see no reason to construct this part of the article on the base of the view of those critics who do not like the Meinhof's idea. Of course, I have left the information that such a criticism also exists. I have only general orientation in Swahili grammar, and all the information and examples given by me are based on two books which I have added to the bibliography.

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.

  • Your second link does call the noun classes of Swahili "genders"!
  • The SIL website does not contradict any of what was previously in the article.
  • Your critiques of the comments that were in the article regarding Spanish are straw men: the article never claimed that all Spanish nouns that end in -o are masculine; only that most are. Are you going to stand there and deny this?
  • Incidentally, kindly stop making substantial changes to the article before discussing them here first. FilipeS 20:34, 30 October 2006 (UTC)
Dear FelipeS, can you read at all? Here are statements under my second link:
  • "In swahili, as in any other Bantu languages, substantives are not divided into genders of the masculine / feminine / neutral types, but in nominal classes."
  • "In order to rationalize the study of the nominal classes, these can be grouped into 7 "genders" (or categories) that each include 2 classes"
  • "The concept of "gender", which remains controversial in the description of Bantu languages."
  • "The concept of "gender" far from substituting itself to that of "class", superposes upon it and completes it."
Dear other Wikipedists, please tell who is right, and please answer, basing on these quotations, whether my "second link does call the noun classes of Swahili "genders"!" (as FilipeS suggests) or he cannot read. But if the second is true, I strongly request of reverting the article to my version!
22:35, 31 October 2006 (UTC)Grzegorj
This is from the caption on their table: Summarized table of the 13 nominal classes in Swahili, grouped into 7 genders, and the 3 locative classes. Clearly, they are unable to abandon the term "genders" entirely. The only significant difference is that in their "noun classes" they've decided to count the singular and the plural separately -- not a consensual choice, by the way. FilipeS 22:50, 31 October 2006 (UTC)
Oh, if you deduce that classes and genders are the same from the statement "13 nominal classes in Swahili, grouped into 7 genders", we never understand each other. For me, if A is grouped into B, A and B are different.

22:57, 31 October 2006 (UTC)Grzegorj

Read this. At best, that's a matter of convention. FilipeS 23:32, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

Yes, I've read: "In the Bantuist linguistic tradition, singular and plural classes are most often counted separately". Do you understand "most often"?

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:

  • 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.
  • Considering that the current article is already quite large and that, at least in some linguistics traditions, noun classes are not plain extensions of grammatical genders, I think there is justification to split the current article into two, grammatical gender -- dealing only with gender-related noun class systems --, and noun class -- a more general article, but focusing mostly on classification systems that do not correlate with natural gender.

Opinions and critiques are welcome. FilipeS 17:33, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

That seems entirely reasonable. It is arbitary and unhelpful to discuss Latin, Greek, or Sanskrit as noun-classes, when "gender" is strongly established. Septentrionalis 18:45, 2 November 2006 (UTC)
The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

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)

[edit] Requested move

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)

This nomination was incomplete, listing now. —Mets501 (talk) 21:29, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Survey

Add  * '''Support'''  or  * '''Oppose'''  on a new line followed by a brief explanation, then sign your opinion using ~~~~.

[edit] Discussion

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.

The version referred to here is this one. This is how to handle disputed versions; they should also be discussed on the talk page. Septentrionalis 23:02, 31 October 2006 (UTC)


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

Mr. Grzegorj does not seem to be willing to discuss anything about the article. It looks like he's already made up his mind on what is the truth, and will not even listen to any different views. That's a shame.
Anyway, I've only just noticed his recent proposal to rename the page. I don't want to be accused of influencing the decision anymore, so I'll stop my editing, for the time being. FilipeS 22:25, 31 October 2006 (UTC)
Just one more note. The first paragraph of the current version of the article, which Mr. Grzegorj does not seem to have read with any attention, openly admits that some authors prefer to reserve the term "grammatical gender" for when at least one of the noun classes has a relation to sex:
In linguistics, the term gender refers to various forms of expressing biological or sociological gender by inflecting words. By extension, the same term is used for the expression of non-sexual natural characteristics by inflecting words, although many authors prefer the term noun classes when none of the inflections in a language relate to sexuality. Note however that the word "gender" derives from Latin genus, which is also the root of genre, and originally meant "kind", so it does not necessarily have a sexual meaning. FilipeS 22:32, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

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 not be revisionist, O.K.? I reverted your changes, so that they would be discussed first, before you went and asked to have the page moved. FilipeS 22:48, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

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 propose a split, instead of a move. See above. FilipeS 18:35, 2 November 2006 (UTC)
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

[edit] Complaint

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:

  • Do not simply revert changes that are made as part of a dispute.
  • Do not revert good faith edits. (My aim was to remove NPOV violations so my faith was good).
  • There are misconceptions that problematic sections of an article or recent changes are the reasons for reverting or deletion. If they contain valid information, these texts should simply be edited and improved accordingly. (Nobody has even expressed the opinion that my corrections were problematic, and nobody has proved that it is not valid).
  • Improve the edit, rather than reverting it.

I am about informing administrators about this incident -Grzegorj 07:18, 1 November 2006 (UTC)

Call the cops if you must, but I reverted your edits because you were attempting to use them to gain an advantage in the requested move discussion above. Also I only made one revert. If you stick around, you'll probably grow more accustomed to being reverted, and realize (if nothing else) that it's part of the editing process. Just remember nobody actually hates you. — CharlotteWebb 10:56, 1 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Split article?

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)

There's no need for any formal process. I'd just indicate in the first edit summary at Noun class that there's material that came from here, so its GFDL history can be traced if necessary. A note to that effect at Talk:Noun class wouldn't be a bad idea either. That noted, I'd say go for it! -GTBacchus(talk) 23:38, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Rewrite

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:

  1. It gives too much emphasis to the distinction between "marking of gender" in nouns and "gender agreement" in other parts of speech. This is an artificial distinction; the two things typically go hand in hand in natural languages. Compare it with Grammatical number, a very similar phenomenon: there, too, there can be marking on the nouns or in other parts of speech, but both are analysed together.
  2. For that reason, the article is too dogmatic about the status of grammatical gender in English. I now think it's fairer to say that the English language is a borderline case: it has very little gender marking, but there are still a few traces of it, and gender in English is not fundamentally distinct from gender marking in other languages.

Other opinons and suggestions are welcome. FilipeS 20:54, 8 November 2006 (UTC)