Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
The third-person singular personal pronouns (and their possessive forms) are gender specific: he/him/his (masculine gender, used for men, boys, and male animals), she/her(s) (feminine gender, for women, girls, and female animals), the singular they/them/their(s) (common gender, used for people or animals of unknown, irrelevant, or non-binary ...
In principle, animals are triple-gender nouns, being able to take masculine, feminine and neuter pronouns. However, animals viewed as less important to humans, also known as ‘lower animals’, are generally referred to using it; higher (domestic) animals may more often be referred to using he and she, when their sex is known. [14]
In the English language, many animals have different names depending on whether they are male, female, young, domesticated, or in groups. The best-known source of many English words used for collective groupings of animals is The Book of Saint Albans, an essay on hunting published in 1486 and attributed to Juliana Berners. [1]
Hird (2006) has also stated that whether or not non-human animals consider themselves to be feminine or masculine is a "difficult, if not impossible, question to answer", as this would require "judgements about what constitutes femininity or masculinity in any given species". Nonetheless, she asserts that "non-human animals do experience ...
The second part of a binomial is often a person's name in the genitive case, ending -i (masculine) or -ae (feminine), such as Kaempfer's tody-tyrant, Hemitriccus kaempferi. The name may be converted into a Latinised form first, giving -ii and -iae instead. Words that are very similar to their English forms have been omitted.
Nouns referring to people and animals of known sex are generally referred to by nouns with the equivalent gender. Thus Mann (meaning man) is masculine and is associated with a masculine definite article to give der Mann, while Frau (meaning woman) is feminine and is associated with a feminine definite article to give die Frau.
Androgyny is the possession of both masculine and feminine characteristics. [1] Androgyny may be expressed with regard to biological sex or gender expression.. When androgyny refers to mixed biological sex characteristics in humans, it often refers to conditions in which characteristics of both sexes are expressed in a single individual.
For people and animals with specified gender, the masculine or feminine pronouns are used, but the nouns still take either neutral or common articles. There is no gender distinction in the plural. In Swedish, the word hen was introduced generally in the 2000s as a complement to the gender-specific hon ("she") and han ("he").