1006: Indication of Gender (g.w. 7) Sep 10, 2017

Only nouns have grammatical gender, insofar as adjectives, articles, and pronouns are either modified or selected in order to agree with the nouns they modify. Not all genders have to be distinct from each other in every word however; in German, masculine and neuter forms for possessive pronouns are often identical, and there are only two Dutch articles: one for neuter, 'het', and a common form for masculine and feminine words, 'de'. So long as there is a fairly consistent manner in which words are distinguished in such as way, however, grammatical gender can be said to exist. If people stopped using different forms for adjectives, articles, and pronouns to modify nouns with which they agree, there would be no gender, because, though the gender is determined by the noun, it is indicated by those other aforementioned lexical classes. It is partly for this reason that certain languages will include articles where there would not be one in English, which has no grammatical gender. For instance, there is no article used for unspecified referents, meaning that "cats are smart" and "the cats are smart" convey two different messages, the latter of which would only refer to cats that had been previously identified. The same sentence in Spanish however, "los gatos son inteligentes", uses an article to show the gender, but does not refer to preciously specified, in this case, cats.

This is the last day of Word Facts' Gender Week, and though there may still be posts concerning grammatical gender in the future, if you have any remaining questions, please write a comment or send a message.