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The grammatical gender of a noun does not always coincide with its natural gender. An example of this is the German word Mädchen ("girl"); this is derived from Magd ("maiden"), umlauted to Mäd-with the diminutive suffix-chen, and this suffix always makes the noun grammatically neuter.
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 ...
Gender-neutral language or gender-inclusive language is language that avoids reference towards a particular sex or gender. In English, this includes use of nouns that are not gender-specific to refer to roles or professions, [1] formation of phrases in a coequal manner, and discontinuing the collective use of male or female terms. [2]
ka tama-ŋɔ river-prox. in- ka this ka tama- ā -ŋɔ river-pl-prox. in- ka - ā these ka tama-ŋɔ in- ka / ka tama- ā -ŋɔ in- ka - ā river-prox. this / river-pl-prox. these In this example, what is copied is not a prefix, but rather the initial syllable of the head "river". By language Languages can have no conventional agreement whatsoever, as in Japanese or Malay ; barely any, as in ...
In others, such as many of the Niger–Congo languages, there is a system of grammatical gender (or noun classes), but the divisions are based on classifications other than sex, such as animacy, rationality, or countability. [3] In Swahili, for example, the independent third person pronoun yeye 'she/he' can be used to refer to a female or male ...
Unlike genderless languages like English, constructing a gender-neutral sentence can be difficult or impossible in these languages due to the use of gendered nouns and pronouns. For example, in Spanish, the masculine gender generally precedes the feminine, and the default form of address for a group of students is the masculine plural los ...
Using a default gender. Romance (and some other) languages, like Italian and Spanish, default to the masculine for describing mixed gender groups, for example, and so masculine becomes the default for new nouns that are not easily assigned a gender.
In the first Swahili example, the noun has the prefix m-because it is part of class 1 for human beings. The prefix m-then agrees with the adjective m-dogo. The verb agreement is different simply because the verb agreement for class 1 is a-rather than m-. The second example has the prefix ki-because the noun basket is part of class 7. Class 7 ...