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The word female comes from the Latin femella, the diminutive form of femina, meaning "woman", by way of the Old French femelle. [7] It is not etymologically related to the word male, but in the late 14th century the English spelling was altered to parallel that of male. [7] [8] It has been used as both noun and adjective since the 14th century. [7]
Masculine nouns which form their plural by palatalization of their final consonant can change gender in their plural form, as a palatalized final consonant is often a marker of a feminine noun, e.g. balach beag ("small boy"), but balaich bheaga ("small boys"), with the adjective showing agreement for both feminine gender (lenition of initial ...
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 ...
She occasionally appears as a modifier in a noun phrase. Subject: She's there; her being there; she paid for herself to be there. Object: I saw her; I introduced him to her; She saw herself. Predicative complement: The only person there was her. Dependent determiner: This is her book. Independent determiner: This is hers. Adjunct: She did it ...
"From a very practical standpoint, grammatical gender produces markers on the nouns and on the words associated with nouns, like their articles or their ending their adjectives. And so, in a ...
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 ...
The word woman can be used generally, to mean any female human, or specifically, to mean an adult female human as contrasted with girl. The word girl originally meant "young person of either sex" in English; [ 19 ] it was only around the beginning of the 16th century that it came to mean specifically a female child. [ 20 ]
Adjective phrases containing complements after the adjective cannot normally be used as attributive adjectives before a noun. Sometimes they are used attributively after the noun , as in a woman proud of being a midwife (where they may be converted into relative clauses: a woman who is proud of being a midwife ), but it is wrong to say * a ...