Advanced Grammar Topics: Genders

Written by Blackkdark on 27th June 2007

An interesting thing which English no longer has is Grammatical Gender. Although I have heard of other languages without grammatical gender, English, Japanese and Chinese are the only languages of that kind I've encountered so far.

What is grammatical gender? And why do I need to know about? Interesting questions you might be asking yourself. Grammatical gender, or for now just gender, is what many languages use to classify nouns in that language. They determine categories and lump their nouns into them. Most Indo-European languages have either 2 or 3 genders today (excluding English). Although in the cases of a living being, if the being is male it will likely be masculine, if it is female then it will likely be feminine. However, most other objects' genders cannot be determined by what those objects are.  This is because gender is arbitrary. Some don't even follow that rule, like the noun Das Mädchen in German which means the Girl, yet is neuter.

Although the noun is the core of the gender, adjectives, articles and sometimes even verbs can be and usually are affected by it. In most languages, adjectives have to agree with the noun they describe. In the plurals of many Indo-European languages, if it is only female, it gets the feminine plural, but if it's a mixed crowd or male only, it usualy gets the masculine plural.

In Romance languages, one must even change the adjective depending on the subject of a to be phrase. An example:
Estoy listo. = I'm ready (spoken by a male).
Estoy lista. = I'm ready (spoken by a female).
In Italian and German, certain verbs use the verb to be as the auxilary for the past perfect (we use to have). The past participale also must change to agree with the subject.
Sono andato. = I have gone (spoken by a male).
Sono andata. = I have gone (spoken by a female).

Most Romance languages have two Genders, (except Latin and Romanian, the first has Neuter, and the second has parts of neuter left) Masculine and Feminine. The helpful thing in learning the genders in these languages is the pattern of -o for masculine and -a for feminine (French doesn't really follow this pattern). There are still many words which end in consonants which still make it difficult but these are usually true (with a few exceptions, mano is usually feminine, etc). This is also the pattern for Adjectives as well.

In Germanic languages there are usually Common and Neuter (again except the root, German which has Masculine, Feminine, and Neuter). Although most of these used to have three, usually the masculine and feminine merge together and become common. In dialects of Norwegian we can still see the feminine, but mostly it is gone to many speakers of these languages. Slavic languages usually have the three Genders, as well as Greek. The hardest thing about these languages is that it is hard to determine the gender of the nouns. The endings may always be changing or the endings might not help at all. This means one must memorize the gender right along with the meaning.

The other thing that must agree with the noun is the article. This can be helpful when memorizing the gender of a noun, because one can memorize the article (if the language has articles) with it.

The other issue is the mixture of gender and declension. In languages like Latin, Romanian, Russian and others, which have both a gender and a declension system, often one has to memorize patterns for both. Sometimes people split the nouns into different classes to help with that, but it's not always so easy. And when it comes to adjective agreement it can be even more murderous. An adjective can have up to 36 different forms in Latin, based on 6 declensions, 2 numbers (singular and plural), and 3 grammatical genders! But there are always tricks to help remember.

Gender can affect verbs in some languages, I believe Hebrew is one. In langauges like this, the speaker would have a different verb ending depending on his or her gender.

There are languages with more than 4 genders as well. I've heard of a language with up to 20 noun genders or classifications. But most are a bit more mild, so take it one step at a time and don't be be afraid of it, now that you better understand it.