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Classified things (represented by common nouns) belong to one of three grammatical genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter). The gender of the classified thing is realized by the last syllables of the adjectives, numbers and pronouns that refer to it: e.g. male animals such as hic vir "this man" and hic gallus "this cock", female animals such ...
Latin declension is the set of patterns according to which Latin words are declined—that is, have their endings altered to show grammatical case, number and gender. Nouns, pronouns, and adjectives are declined (verbs are conjugated ), and a given pattern is called a declension.
Here a masculine–feminine–neuter system previously existed, but the distinction between masculine and feminine genders has been lost in nouns (they have merged into what is called common gender), though not in pronouns that can operate under natural gender. Thus nouns denoting people are usually of common gender, whereas other nouns may be ...
Latin has three genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter) and two numbers (singular and plural). Pronouns, adjectives, participles, and the numbers one to three have to agree in gender and number with the noun they refer to: Masculine : hic est fīlius meus: [25] 'this is my son' Feminine : haec est fīlia mea : 'this is my daughter'
Latin inflection can result in words with much ambiguity: For example, amābit 'he/she/it will love', is formed from amā-, a future tense morpheme -bi-and a third person singular morpheme, -t, the last of which -t does not express masculine, feminine, or neuter gender. A major task in understanding Latin phrases and clauses is to clarify such ...
The gender of animate nouns is generally natural (i.e. nouns referring to males are generally masculine, and vice versa), but for non-animate nouns it is arbitrary, a grammatical category with no correspondence to natural gender. Although Latin had a third gender (neuter), there is little trace of this in most languages.
The term "gender", as used by some linguists, refers to a noun-class system composed with two, three, or four classes, particularly if the classification is semantically based on a distinction between masculine and feminine. Genders are then considered a sub-class of noun classes.
A pronoun can still carry gender even if it does not inflect for it; for example, in the French sentence je suis petit ("I am small") the speaker is male and so the pronoun je is masculine, whereas in je suis petite the speaker is female and the pronoun is treated as feminine, the feminine ending -e consequently being added to the predicate ...