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The word female comes from the Latin femella, the diminutive form of femina, meaning "woman", by way of the Old French femelle. [7] It is not etymologically related to the word male, but in the late 14th century the English spelling was altered to parallel that of male. [7] [8] It has been used as both noun and adjective since the 14th century. [7]
Masculine nouns which form their plural by palatalization of their final consonant can change gender in their plural form, as a palatalized final consonant is often a marker of a feminine noun, e.g. balach beag ("small boy"), but balaich bheaga ("small boys"), with the adjective showing agreement for both feminine gender (lenition of initial ...
So can those ending in -ch / -tch (e.g. "the French", "the Dutch") provided they are pronounced with a 'ch' sound (e.g. the adjective Czech does not qualify). Many place-name adjectives and many demonyms are also used for various other things, sometimes with and sometimes without one or more additional words.
Nouns seem to possess a well defined but covert system of grammatical gender. We may call a noun masculine, feminine or neuter depending on the pronouns which it selects in the singular. Mass or non-count nouns (such as frost, fog, water, love) are called neuter because they select the pronoun it. Count nouns divide into masculine and feminine.
"From a very practical standpoint, grammatical gender produces markers on the nouns and on the words associated with nouns, like their articles or their ending their adjectives. And so, in a ...
The English personal pronouns are a subset of English pronouns taking various forms according to number, person, case and grammatical gender. Modern English has very little inflection of nouns or adjectives, to the point where some authors describe it as an analytic language, but the Modern English system of personal pronouns has preserved some of the inflectional complexity of Old English and ...
President Trump will on his first day in office Monday issue an order defining a person's sex as "male or female" — requiring government agencies to use the "immutable" designation on forms and ...
The word woman can be used generally, to mean any female human, or specifically, to mean an adult female human as contrasted with girl. The word girl originally meant "young person of either sex" in English; [ 19 ] it was only around the beginning of the 16th century that it came to mean specifically a female child. [ 20 ]