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Many words in modern English refer specifically to people or animals of a particular sex. [28] An example of an English word that has retained gender-specific spellings is the noun-form of blond/blonde, with the former being masculine and the latter being feminine. This distinction is retained primarily in British English.
For example, gender can indirectly influence the productivity of noun-patterns in what he calls the "Israeli" language: the Israeli neologism מברשת (mivréshet, transl. brush) is fitted into the feminine noun-pattern mi⌂⌂é⌂et (each ⌂ represents a slot where a radical is inserted) because of the feminine gender of the matched words ...
The feminine rhyme is rare in a monosyllabic language such as English, but the gerund and participle suffix-ing, which adds an additional stressless syllable, can make it readily available. For instance, the -ing ending makes available three of the feminine rhymes in Shakespeare's sonnet above, rolling , trolling , and doting .
The English personal pronouns are a subset of English pronouns taking various forms according to number, person, case and grammatical gender. Modern English has very little inflection of nouns or adjectives, to the point where some authors describe it as an analytic language, but the Modern English system of personal pronouns has preserved some of the inflectional complexity of Old English and ...
Historically, she was encompassed in he as he had three genders in Old English. The neuter and feminine genders split off during Middle English. Today, she is the only feminine pronoun in English. She is occasionally used as a gender neutral, third-person, singular pronoun (see also singular they). [1]: 492
The English pronouns form a relatively small category of words in Modern English whose primary semantic function is that of a pro-form for a noun phrase. [1] Traditional grammars consider them to be a distinct part of speech, while most modern grammars see them as a subcategory of noun , contrasting with common and proper nouns .
For example, the English word through consists of three phonemes: the initial "th" sound, the "r" sound, and a vowel sound. The phonemes in that and many other English words do not always correspond directly to the letters used to spell them (English orthography is not as strongly phonemic as that of many other languages).
In the chart above a model of simple syncretism is shown in the singular and plural forms of the second person subject pronoun in English. There is another example in the chart of simple syncretism in the masculine and feminine third person plural subject pronouns, both realized as they.