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Old English grammatical gender was, as in other Germanic languages, remarkably opaque: that is, one often could not know the gender of a noun by its meaning or by the form of the word; this was especially true for nouns referencing inanimate objects. Learners would have had to simply memorize which word has which gender.
The gender of an English pronoun typically coincides with the natural gender of its referent, rather than with the grammatical gender of its antecedent. The choice between she , he , they , and it comes down to whether the pronoun is intended to designate a woman, a man, or someone or something else.
The Oxford Etymological Dictionary of the English Language of 1882 defined gender as kind, breed, sex, derived from the Latin ablative case of genus, like genere natus, which refers to birth. [25] The first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED1, Volume 4, 1900) notes the original meaning of gender as "kind" had already become obsolete.
Many Australian languages have a system of gender superclassing in which membership in one gender can mean membership in another. [15] Worrorra: Masculine, feminine, terrestrial, celestial, and collective. [16] Halegannada: Originally had 9 gender pronouns but only 3 exist in present-day Kannada. Zande: Masculine, feminine, animate, and inanimate.
A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language, for instance, refers to the semantically based "covert" gender (e.g. male and female, not masculine and feminine) of English nouns, as opposed to the "overt" gender of some English pronouns; this yields nine gender classes: male, female, dual, common, collective, higher male animal, higher female ...
Historically, there were two gender-neutral pronouns native to English dialects, ou and (h)a. [67] According to Dennis Baron's Grammar and Gender: [68] In 1789, William H. Marshall records the existence of a dialectal English epicene pronoun, singular "ou": " 'Ou will' expresses either he will, she will, or it will."
"Gender is the mind and sex is the body," explains Dr. Reed. "Gender identity is a social construct of what we think is masculine or feminine and where we think we fit in those categories.
It is a meaning relation in which a phrase "stands in" for (expresses the same content as) another where the meaning is recoverable from the context. [4] In English, pronouns mostly function as pro-forms, but there are pronouns that are not pro-forms and pro-forms that are not pronouns. [5]: 239 Pronouns can be pro-forms for non-noun phrases.