Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
A few nouns are said to be of "ambiguous" gender, meaning that they are sometimes treated as masculine and sometimes as feminine. [4] Additionally, the terms "common gender" and "epicene gender" are used to classify ways in which grammatical gender interacts (or not) with "natural gender" (the gender identity of a person, or the sex of an animal).
Some languages without noun class may have noun classifiers instead. This is common in East Asian languages.. American Sign Language; Bengali (Indo-European); Burmese; Modern written Chinese (Sino-Tibetan) has gendered pronouns introduced in the 1920s to accommodate the translation of Western literature (see Chinese pronouns), which do not appear in spoken Chinese.
Languages with grammatical gender, such as French, German, Greek, and Spanish, present unique challenges when it comes to creating gender-neutral language.Unlike genderless languages like English, constructing a gender-neutral sentence can be difficult or impossible in these languages due to the use of gendered nouns and pronouns.
Activists against sexism in language are also concerned about words whose feminine form has a different (usually less prestigious) meaning: An ambiguous case is "secretary": a secretaria is an attendant for her boss or a typist, usually female, while a secretario is a high-rank position—as in secretario general del partido comunista, "secretary general of the communist party"—usually held ...
Even proficient bilingual Mandarin-English learners do not process gender information in the conceptualizer. [126] As a result, Mandarin speakers often mix up the gendered pronouns of European languages in speech. [127] Even if they seldom make other types of errors, native Mandarin speakers can make such pronoun errors when speaking in English.
In Spanish, as in other Romance languages, all nouns belong to one of two genders, "masculine" or "feminine", and many adjectives change their form to agree in gender with the noun they modify. For most nouns that refer to persons, grammatical gender matches biological gender.
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]
This system of gender is quite minimal compared to languages with grammatical gender. [10] Historically, "he" referred to a generic person whose gender is unspecified in formal language, but the gender-neutral singular they has long [11] [12] [13] been common in informal language, and is becoming increasingly so in formal language. [14]