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And even with nouns referring to persons, one could not always determine gender by meaning or form: for example, with two words ending in -mæg, there was the female-specific neuter noun wynmæg, meaning "winsome maid" or attractive woman; as well as the gender-neutral noun meaning "paternal kindred" or member of father's side of the family ...
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 other gender, the neuter/inanimate, is referred to objects, including parts of the body, and abstract concepts or collective nouns, e.g. "family, assembly, troops, humanity". Some common examples of neuter declension are the u-stem nouns and the nouns formed by the suffixes -ātar, -eššar and the suffix for collective nouns -a(i)-.
Italian - there is a trace of the neuter in some nouns and personal pronouns. E.g.: singular l'uovo , il dito ; plural le uova , le dita ('the egg(s)', 'the finger(s)'), although singulars of the type dito and uovo and their agreements coincide in form with masculine grammatical gender and the plurals conform to feminine grammatical morphology.
The grammar of Old English differs greatly from Modern English, predominantly being much more inflected.As a Germanic language, Old English has a morphological system similar to that of the Proto-Germanic reconstruction, retaining many of the inflections thought to have been common in Proto-Indo-European and also including constructions characteristic of the Germanic daughter languages such as ...
It is considered to be neuter or impersonal/non-personal in gender. In Old English, (h)it was the neuter nominative and accusative form of hē. But by the 17th century, the old gender system, which marked gender on common nouns and adjectives, as well as pronouns, had disappeared, leaving
For example, the diminutive of the ancient Greek word παῖς (pais, "child") is παιδίον (paidion) and hence the modern noun παιδί (paidi). [19] Other neuter nouns end in -α (-a) and -ος (-os) and their declension is similar to the ancient one.
Some athematic noun stems have different final consonants in different cases and are termed heteroclitic stems. Most of the stems end in *-r-in the nominative and accusative singular, and in *-n-in the other cases. An example of such r/n-stems is the acrostatic neuter *wód-r̥ 'water', genitive *wéd-n̥-s.