Gender (definition)
Grammatical gender, in the linguistics sense, refers to classes of particular nouns based on their inflectional endings and over all word structure. This is not be confused with the sex related gender, often referred to as 'biological gender,' which is used in cases where the grammatical gender agrees with the biological sex of the concept to which a noun refers. This means that words such as 'woman' would have feminine gender and 'man' would have masculine gender due to the fact that they are biologically defined as something feminine or masculine. Many languages that use cases also exhibit grammatical gender, as is the case with German, Russian and French, as well as Scottish Gaelic.
Examples in Scottish Gaelic
In Scottish-Gaelic, nouns belong principally to two grammatical genders: masculine and feminine. This affects the lenition of initial consonants for adjectives as well as the initial consonants of verb initial nouns when the definite article is used.
See Also
External Links
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References
- Matthews, P. H. (1997) The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Crystal, David (1999) The Penguin Dictionary of Language. London: Penguin.
