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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.
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 ...
The masculine pronouns, he, him, and his are used to refer to male persons. The feminine pronouns she, her, and hers are used to refer to female persons. It and its are normally used to refer to an inanimate object or abstract concept; however, babies and young children may sometimes be referred to as it (e.g. a child needs its mother).
Polish: Masculine personal, Masculine animate, Masculine inanimate, Feminine, Neuter (traditionally, only masculine, feminine and neuter genders are recognized). Pama–Nyungan languages including Dyirbal and other Australian languages have gender systems such as: Masculine, feminine (see Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things), vegetable and neuter ...
However the words for inanimate objects are commonly masculine (e.g. der Tisch, the table) or feminine (die Armbanduhr, the watch), and grammatical gender can diverge from biological sex; for instance the feminine noun [die] Person refers to a person of either sex, and the neuter noun [das] Mädchen means "the girl". [107]
For example, the difference in the nominative case between masculine li voisins "the neighbor" and li pere "the father", and feminine la riens "the thing" vs. la fame "the woman", faithfully reflects the corresponding Latin inflectional differences (vicīnus vs. pater, fēmina vs. rēs).
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 ...
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").