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.
Scottish Gaelic
There are two genders in Scottish Gaelic: Masculine and Feminine. The gender of a noun affects a number of grammatical properties.
- The form of the article: an clach 'the stone' (m) vs a' chaora 'the sheep' (f)
- The form of adjectives: an clach mòr 'the book stone' vs a' chaora mhòr 'the big sheep'
- The pronoun used to refer to the noun (there is no pronoun equivalent to "it" in Scottish Gaelic.) Masculine nouns are referred to with e; feminine nouns are referred to with i.
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.
