Grammatical gender

[9] These related words can be, depending on the language: determiners, pronouns, numerals, quantifiers, possessives, adjectives, past and passive participles, articles, verbs, adverbs, complementizers, and adpositions.

This is similar to systems with a masculine–feminine contrast, except that there is a third available gender, so nouns with sexless or unspecified-sex referents may be either masculine, feminine, or neuter.

As shown, the merger of masculine and feminine in these languages and dialects can be considered a reversal of the original split in Proto-Indo-European (see below).

In some of the Slavic languages, for example, within the masculine and sometimes feminine and neuter genders, there is a further division between animate and inanimate nouns—and in Polish, also sometimes between nouns denoting humans and non-humans.

[20][18] Another kind of test asks people to describe a noun, and attempts to measure whether it takes on gender-specific connotations depending on the speaker's native language.

Note, however, that the word "gender" derives from Latin genus (also the root of genre) which originally meant "kind", so it does not necessarily have a sexual meaning.

[9] These related words can be, depending on the language: determiners, pronouns, numerals, quantifiers, possessives, adjectives, past and passive participles, verbs, adverbs, complementizers, and adpositions.

Example with Bulgarian: клещи (kleshti, "pincers"), гащи (gashti, "pants"), очила (ochila, "spectacles"), хриле (hrile, "gills").

A similar, apparently arbitrary gender assignment may need to be made in the case of indefinite pronouns, where the referent is generally unknown.

For example, in Spanish, mujer ("woman") is feminine whereas hombre ("man") is masculine; these attributions occur solely due to the semantically inherent gender character of each noun.

She is now doing her homework" can be translated in two ways: Though the second sentence may appear grammatically incorrect (constructio ad sensum), it is common in speech.

To specify the sex of an animal, an adjective may be added, as in un guepardo hembra ("a female cheetah"), or una cebra macho ("a male zebra").

In such languages there may be a correlation, to a greater or lesser degree, between gender and the form of a noun (such as the vowel or consonant or syllable with which it ends).

In Arabic, nouns whose singular form ends in a tāʾ marbūṭah (traditionally a [t], becoming [h] in pausa) are of feminine gender, the only significant exceptions being the word خليفة khalīfah ("caliph") and certain masculine personal names (e.g. أسامة ʾUsāmah).

Gender may also be predictable from the type of derivation: for instance, the verbal nouns of Stem II (e.g. التفعيل al-tafʿīl, from فعّل، يفعّل faʿʿala, yufaʿʿil) are always masculine.

Slavic feminine given names: Olga (Russian), Małgorzata (Polish), Tetiana (Ukrainian), Oksana (Belarusian), Eliška (Czech), Bronislava (Slovak), Milica (Serbian), Darina (Bulgarian), Lucja (Croatian), Lamija (Bosnian) and Zala (Slovenian).

The feminine includes all living beings of female sex (e.g. woman, girl, cow...) and diminutives; the masculine encompasses all other nouns (e.g. man, boy, pot, broom...).

Second-language learners are often encouraged to memorize a modifier, usually a definite article, in conjunction with each noun—for example, a learner of French may learn the word for "chair" as la chaise (meaning "the chair"); this carries the information that the noun is chaise, and that it is feminine (because la is the feminine singular form of the definite article).

(This is related to the forms of the second declension Latin neuter nouns from which they derive: ovum and bracchium, with nominative plurals ova and bracchia.)

(Even within a given language, nouns that denote the same concept may differ in gender—for example, of three German words for "car", Wagen is masculine whereas Auto is neuter, and Karre is feminine.)

For instance, latte ("milk") is masculine in Italian (as are French lait and Portuguese leite), whereas Spanish leche is feminine and Romanian lapte is neuter.

[41]: 86 Similarly, argues Zuckermann, the Israeli neologism for "library", ספריה (sifriá), matches the feminine gender of the parallel pre-existent European words: Yiddish transl.

biblioték, Russian bibliotéka, Polish biblioteka, German Bibliothek and French bibliothèque, as well as of the pre-existent Arabic word for "library": مكتبة (máktaba, also feminine.

The result of this neologism might have been, more generally, the strengthening of Israeli יה- (-iá) as a productive feminine locative suffix (combined with the influence of Polish -ja and Russian -ия (-iya)).

Conversely, grammatical gender is usually absent from the Koreanic, Japonic, Tungusic, Turkic, Mongolic, Austronesian, Sino-Tibetan, Uralic and most Native American language families.

A few traces of the neuter remain, such as the distinct Spanish pronoun ello and Italian nouns with so-called "mobile gender"), as well as Hindustani and the Celtic languages.

There is no gender agreement in English between nouns and their modifiers (articles, other determiners, or adjectives, with the occasional exception such as blond/blonde, a spelling convention borrowed from French).

Only a relatively small number of English nouns have distinct male and female forms; many of them are loanwords from non-Germanic languages (the suffixes -rix and -ress in words such as aviatrix and waitress, for instance, derive directly or indirectly from Latin).

[citation needed] An example of such a marker might be the suffix -ette (of French provenance), but this is seldom used today, surviving mostly in either historical contexts or with disparaging or humorous intent.

In Russian, the different treatment of animate nouns involves their accusative case (and that of adjectives qualifying them) being formed identically to the genitive rather than to the nominative.