Grammatical Gender
In linguistics, grammatical gender is defined as a system of noun classification present in approximately one fourth of the world's languages. In languages with grammatical gender, every noun must pertain to one category called gender. The different genders form a closed set of usually 2 or 3 divisions, in which all the nouns are included. Very few items can belong to several classes at once. Common gender divisions include: masculine, feminine, neuter, animate, or inanimate.
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Some articles on grammatical gender:
... Many constructed languages have natural gender systems similar to that of English ... Animate nouns can have distinct forms reflecting natural gender, and personal pronouns are selected according to natural gender ... There is no gender agreement on modifiers ...
... Russian intrinsically shares many of the same non-gender-neutral characteristics with other European languages ... to either men or women regardless of their grammatical gender ... ("woman" feminine), and are in fact traditionally used in cases where gender-specific terms would be used in English ...
... (he created) agrees with a subject with masculine grammatical gender ... Elohim also has masculine grammatical gender ... The masculine gender in Hebrew can be used for objects with no inherent gender, as well as objects with masculine natural gender ...
... In French both the singular and plural pronouns in the third person are marked for grammatical gender, and the antecedent always has grammatical gender ... both generic and non-generic antecedents, the natural gender of the antecedent, whether known or unknown, is irrelevant, as the deciding factor for the choice of a referring pronoun is the grammatical gender of ... Some French speakers advocate the use of created gender-free pronouns, such as illes or els for ils et elles ("they (masculine) and they (feminine)") and celleux or ceulles for celles et ...
Famous quotes containing the words gender and/or grammatical:
“But there, where I have garnered up my heart,
Where either I must live or bear no life;
The fountain from the which my current runs
Or else dries up: to be discarded thence,
Or keep it as a cistern for foul toads
To knot and gender in!”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“As a particularly dramatic gesture, he throws wide his arms and whacks the side of the barn with the heavy cane he uses to stab at contesting bidders. With more vehemence than grammatical elegance, he calls upon the great god Caveat Emptor to witness with what niggardly stinginess these flinty sons of Scotland make cautious offers for what is beyond any question the finest animal ever beheld.”
—Administration in the State of Arka, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)