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Common gender divisions include masculine and feminine; masculine, feminine, and neuter; or animate and inanimate. The grammatical gender of a noun affects the form of other words related to it. For example, in Spanish, determiners, adjectives, and pronouns change their form depending on the noun to which they refer. [8]
Nouns seem to possess a well defined but covert system of grammatical gender. We may call a noun masculine, feminine or neuter depending on the pronouns which it selects in the singular. Mass or non-count nouns (such as frost, fog, water, love) are called neuter because they select the pronoun it. Count nouns divide into masculine and feminine.
The use of the generic he was approved in an Act of Parliament, the Interpretation Act 1850 (the provision continues in the Interpretation Act 1978, although this states equally that the feminine includes the masculine). On the other hand, in 1879 the word "he" in by-laws was used to block admission of women to the Massachusetts Medical Society.
It has been argued that 17th-century grammaticians who wanted to assert male dominance worked to suppress the feminine forms of certain professions, leading to the modern-day rule that prefers the masculine over the feminine in the French language. [4] There are a number of arguments against such prescriptive rules however. [5]
A very small number of nouns in some languages can be either masculine or feminine. [53] [54] When referring to these mixed-gender nouns, a decision has to be made, based on factors such as meaning, dialect or sometimes even personal preference, whether to use a masculine or feminine pronoun. There are no neutral or mixed-gender singular third ...
In Ancient Greek, all nouns are classified according to grammatical gender (masculine, feminine, neuter) and are used in a number (singular, dual, or plural).According to their function in a sentence, their form changes to one of the five cases (nominative, vocative, accusative, genitive, or dative).
Every Spanish noun has a specific gender, either masculine or feminine, in the context of a sentence. Generally, nouns referring to males or male animals are masculine, while those referring to females are feminine. [1] [2] In terms of importance, the masculine gender is the default or unmarked, while the feminine gender is marked or distinct. [2]
Kathoey is the term used by both males and females that allows them to be alongside the normative masculine and feminine identities. Up until the 1970s hermaphrodites and cross-dressing men and women could all come under the term kathoey, however the term has been dropped for the cross-dressing masculine females who are now referred to as tom.