Gender (definition)
Grammatical gender refers to classes of particular nouns based on their inflectional endings and overall word structure. It is also sometimes known as noun class. Grammatical Gender is not be confused with the biological sex of an object or person or psychological gender of a person. While many biologically male objects might hold masculine grammatical gender in a language, they need not be masculine. Grammatical Gender is typically arbitrary. Languages can have any number of grammatical genders. Many Indo-European Languages have three (masculine, feminine and neuter), but others -- like Scottish Gaelic -- have only two: masculine and feminine. Indigenous languages of Africa, North America, and Australia often have many more genders than 3.
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.
