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In some languages with grammatical gender, for example Dutch, there is a tendency to assign the feminine gender to certain – in particular abstract – nouns which are originally masculine or neuter. This also happened to some words in Middle English (which, in contrast to Modern English, had grammatical gender) which denoted virtue and vice. [1]
Common gender divisions include masculine and feminine; masculine, feminine, and neuter; or animate and inanimate. The grammatical gender of a noun affects the form of other words related to it. For example, in Spanish, determiners, adjectives, and pronouns change their form depending on the noun to which they refer. [8]
The singular possessive pronoun ei is the same word for both masculine and feminine referents, but the gender difference is seen in the sound changes it effects on the following word. When masculine, ei the subsequent word will take a soft mutation , but when feminine, ei causes an aspirate mutation or prefixes an h to a vowel and the semivowel ...
Many words in modern English refer specifically to people or animals of a particular sex. [28] An example of an English word that has retained gender-specific spellings is the noun-form of blond/blonde, with the former being masculine and the latter being feminine. This distinction is retained primarily in British English.
The use of the generic he was approved in an Act of Parliament, the Interpretation Act 1850 (the provision continues in the Interpretation Act 1978, although this states equally that the feminine includes the masculine). On the other hand, in 1879 the word "he" in by-laws was used to block admission of women to the Massachusetts Medical Society ...
For people and animals with specified gender, the masculine or feminine pronouns are used, but the nouns still take either neutral or common articles. There is no gender distinction in the plural. In Swedish, the word hen was introduced generally in the 2000s as a complement to the gender-specific hon ("she") and han ("he"). It can be used when ...
Many borrowed Arabic feminine words retain their Arabic feminine plural form ـات (-ât), but Persian descriptive adjectives modifying them have no gender. Arabic adjectives also lose their gender in Persian. [18] For example, the word "او"(-u) means "he or she" and does not determine the gender of the person. All of the grammatical rules ...
Feminist language reform seeks to remove words like this because they help to sustain unhealthy gender norms. [20] Some modern feminists, like Sergio Bolaños Cuellar, argue that feminist language reforms need to reverse the generic masculine forms and create a generic feminine form with words like he or man being replaced with she or woman. [39]