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A similar system applies in Czech, but the situation is somewhat different in the plural: Only masculine nouns are affected, and the distinctive feature is a distinct inflective ending for masculine animate nouns in the nominative plural and for adjectives and verbs agreeing with those nouns. See Czech declension.
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 ...
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.
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 ...
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 ...
For example, being female characterizes one as a woman, and being a woman signifies one as weak, emotional, and irrational, and incapable of actions attributed to a "man". Butler said that gender and sex are more like verbs than nouns. She reasoned that her actions are limited because she is female.
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]
In linguistics, feminization refers to the process of re-classifying nouns and adjectives which as such refer to male beings, including occupational terms, as feminine. This is done most of the time by adding inflectional suffixes denoting a female (such as the standard suffix -ess in English, or its equivalent -a in Spanish).