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"Natural" gender can be masculine or feminine, [23] while "grammatical" gender can be masculine, feminine, or neuter. This third, or "neuter" gender is reserved for abstract concepts derived from adjectives: such as lo bueno, lo malo ("that which is good/bad"). Natural gender refers to the biological sex of most animals and people, while ...
Dutch - the masculine and the feminine have merged into a common gender in standard Dutch, but a distinction is still made by many when using pronouns. In South-Dutch (Flemish) spoken language all articles, possessives and demonstratives differentiate between masculine and feminine: see gender in Dutch grammar. Faroese; Gaulish; German
A hendiadys is a phrase that contains two complementary words, and a gender-neutral hendiadys will include a feminine word and a masculine word, e.g. toutes et tous, citoyennes et citoyens. Within France, this gender-inclusive language has been met with some harsh resistance from the Académie Française and French conservatives .
In principle, animals are triple-gender nouns, being able to take masculine, feminine and neuter pronouns. However, animals viewed as less important to humans, also known as ‘lower animals’, are generally referred to using it; higher (domestic) animals may more often be referred to using he and she, when their sex is known. [14]
For example, the Basque language is considered a genderless language, but it has been influenced by the Spanish feminine-masculine two-gender system. Additionally, there are approximately 7,000 languages in the world, [ 5 ] thus a sample of 256 languages constitutes roughly 3.7% of all spoken languages.
Example of gender-neutral masculine: English (5) a. If anybody comes, tell him. masculine him used to refer to a person of unknown sex b. *If anybody comes, tell her. feminine her is not used to refer to a person of unknown sex Example of collective masculine: French (6) a. Vos amis sont arrivés — Ils étaient en avance.
In contrast to most other Indo-European languages Persian is grammatically gender-neutral. [16] It does not distinguish between masculine, feminine or neuter genders. [17] Arabic loanwords with the feminine ending ـة reduce to a gender-less Persian ـه which is pronounced -e in Persian and -a in Arabic.
Gender-neutral language is language that avoids assumptions about the social gender or biological sex of people referred to in speech or writing. In contrast to most other Indo-European languages, English does not retain grammatical gender and most of its nouns, adjectives and pronouns are therefore not gender-specific.