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When nouns deviate from the rules for gender, there is usually an etymological explanation: problema ("problem") is masculine in Spanish because it was derived from a Greek noun of the neuter gender, whereas foto ("photo") and radio ("broadcast signal") are feminine because they are clippings of fotografía and radiodifusión respectively, both ...
In these languages, animate nouns are predominantly of common gender, while inanimate nouns may be of either gender. Danish (Danish has four gendered pronouns, but only two grammatical genders in the sense of noun classes. See Gender in Danish and Swedish.) Dutch (The masculine and the feminine have merged into a common gender in standard Dutch ...
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 ...
The term "gender", as used by some linguists, refers to a noun-class system composed with two, three, or four classes, particularly if the classification is semantically based on a distinction between masculine and feminine. Genders are then considered a sub-class of noun classes.
Often the gender distinction for these neutral nouns is established by inserting the word "male" or "female". [13] Sam is a male nurse. No, he is not my boyfriend; he is just a male friend. I have three female cousins and two male cousins. Rarely, nouns illustrating things with no gender are referred to with a gendered pronoun to convey ...
Likewise, verbs are neuter when used as nouns. Since gender is noun-specific and ultimately a feature of morphophonology rather than semantics (word-meaning), it goes without saying that any "thing" might be referred to as a different name of a different gender: a "mountain" could be denoted by the masculine beorg or feminine dūn, a "star ...
The English word noun is derived from the Latin term, through the Anglo-Norman nom (other forms include nomme, and noun itself). The word classes were defined partly by the grammatical forms that they take. In Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, for example, nouns are categorized by gender and inflected for case and number.
Rules other than phonetic can be used when the meaning of the noun is known or at least its semantic group is recognized. In this category obvious examples are proper names of people, or nouns designating nationality, profession, etc. Nouns referring to animals and birds are always specific to their biological gender, and often occur in pairs the same way as we have cow and bull in English.