In linguistics, noun classes, also called grammatical gender is a type of inflection. A language is said to have noun classes when nouns are divided into groups according to characteristics which the concepts they represent are conventionally said to have. This division can manifest itself in two ways: through morphological characteristics of the nouns themselves, and through morphological changes in other parts of speech that refer to nouns (agreement).
Types of noun classes
Most Indo-European languages distinguish feminine, masculine and sometimes neuter noun classes. But this system of classification is not universal. The Algonquian languages, for example, classify nouns into animate and inanimate classes. In other languages, both masculine and feminine nouns are considered to be part of a broader noun class of person, either generally, or only in the plural, as in the North Caucasian languages and some Dravidian languages. Other languages, such as the Alamblak language, classify objects based on their shape: oblong objects and animals are named using masculine nouns, and round ones using feminine nouns. A more or less discernible correlation between the noun gender and the shape of the respective object is also found in some languages even in the Indo-European family.
Not all languages have noun classes. Modern English, for example, does not as is discussed in greater detail in the section on gender-based classification. On the other hand, Niger-Congo languages can have ten or more noun classes. In Swahili, for instance, nouns that begin with m- in the singular and wa- in the plural denote persons, and nouns that begin with m- in the singular but mi- in the plural denote plants. In the sentence below, the class marker ki- (marking singular nouns in class number 7) shows up on both the adjective (-kubwa) and the verb (-anguka), to express their relation to the class 7 noun kitabu 'book':
- kitabu kikubwa kinaanguka
(cl.7-book cl.7-big cl.7-PRESENT-fall)
- 'The big book falls.'
Common criteria for defining noun classes include:
Some languages, such as Japanese, Chinese and the Tai languages, have elaborate systems of measure words which classify nouns into types based on shape and function, but are only used with counting modifiers. Because the classes of nouns created by these measure words are not generally distinguished in other contexts, many if not most linguists take the view that they do not create noun classes.
Manifestations of noun classes
Agreement
The most common way in which noun classes are manifested in a language is through gender agreement. To understand gender agreement, consider the sentences "The man is tall" and "The woman is tall". In English, the only word that differs between them is the noun "man/woman", which has a direct semantic association with sexual identity. In Spanish, however, one says "El hombre es alto" and "La mujer es alta", respectively. Not only do the words for "man" and "woman" change, (hombre vs. mujer), but so do the article (el, la) and the adjective (alto, alta). When a noun belongs to a certain class, other parts of speech that refer to that noun must be inflected to be in the same class. This is similar to number agreement, whereby parts of speech that refer to a noun are inflected to agree with the grammatical number of that noun.
Agreement in relation to noun classes usually affects modifiers (such as adjectives), pronouns, and sometimes verbs.
Morphological marking on nouns
One way in which noun classes may manifest themselves is through morphological markings on nouns. For example, in Spanish, most nouns that end in -o are masculine and most nouns that end in -a are feminine. Thus, niño means “boy”, and niña means “girl”. This allows new nouns with a similar meaning to be readily created in a different class, by analogy: given the noun empresario (businessman), it was straightforward to make the new noun empresaria for “businesswoman”, when women reached the work market. This kind of class shift can also have more subtle uses, such as making a collective noun like fruta (group of fruits) from a singular noun like fruto (fruit).
Not all languages which classify nouns exhibit these markings. In German, for example, most nouns give no clue as to their gender other than the forms of the article, determiner, and adjectives they must use. Conversely, the correlation between grammatical gender and noun morphology is usually not perfect and may also have exceptions. Although in Spanish the suffix -o is characteristic of the masculine gender and the suffix -a is typical of the feminine, problema (problem) is masculine, and radio (radio station) is feminine.
Other manifestations
Languages may also evidence noun classes in other ways. Welsh provides a good example. On the whole, gender marking has been lost in Welsh, both on the noun, and, often, on the adjective. However, it has one unusual feature, that of initial mutation, where the first consonant changes to another in certain places. In Welsh, gender can cause mutation, especially the soft mutation. For instance, the word merch means girl or daughter. However 'the girl' is y ferch. This only occurs with feminine nouns, masculine nouns remain unchanged after the definite article (for example mab — 'son', y mab — 'the son'). Gender also affects following adjectives in a similar way, for instance 'the large girl' is y ferch fawr, but 'the large son' is y mab mawr.
Natural gender and grammatical gender
The use of gender-based classification of nouns (as is common in Indo-European and Semitic languages) can sometimes be confusing, because the mere fact that a language distinguishes between men and women in some way does not mean it uses gender to grammatically classify nouns. All languages represent natural gender - the biological distinction between men and women - in some way. These distinctions can exist at various levels. e.g., male and female, man and woman, uncle and aunt Even Finnish, which never had any grammatical gender and has only one third person singular pronoun hän (which means both "he" and "she"), uses different nouns for "man" and "woman". Similarly, languages may also differentiate between people of different biological or social gender, , or use different noun endings to distinguish between biologically male and biologically female individuals.
This does not mean they have genders in the grammatical sense. Languages which classify nouns by grammatical gender distinguish themselves from languages which simply recognize natural gender principally through the existence of an extra system of gender agreement. In addition, they may also lack perfect correlation between grammatical gender and natural gender. These principles also apply to the variety of gender-describing common names some tribal languages have for intersexual or transgender individuals, which do not necessarily reflect grammatical gender or form a noun class.
Gender agreement and marking of natural gender
Languages that have no grammatical gender can have quite pervasive lexical marking of natural gender. This should not be confused with grammatical gender. A notable example is the Esperanto suffix -in, which can be used to change, for example patro, "father" into patrino, "mother." This particular suffix is extremely productive (there is no atomic term for "mother" in Esperanto), leading some people to the erroneous assumption that it is a grammatical rather than a lexical gender marker.
Similarly, personal pronouns often have different forms based on the natural gender of the reference; this is also not the same concept as grammatical gender. Gendered pronouns and their corresponding inflections vary considerably across languages: there are languages that have different pronouns and inflections in the third person only to differentiate between humans and inanimate objects, like Hungarian and Finnish. Even this distinction is commonly waived in spoken Finnish. Modern Japanese has particular distinction of verbs between animate and inanimate in existential sentences; aru is for inanimate, iru is for animate. In negative sentences, nai (adjective) and inai is used respectively.
The distinction between marking of natural gender and genuine grammatical gender can be illustrated with reference to changes from Old English to modern English. Curzan illustrates gender agreement in Old English with a “highly contrived” example:
- Seo brade lind wæs tilu and ic hire lufod.
- (Literal translation:) That broad shield was good and I loved her.
The noun lind (shield) is grammatically feminine, which forces the pronoun seo (the, that) and the adjectives brade (broad) and tilu (good) to appear in their feminine forms, as well as the pronoun hire (her), referring back to lind, which adopts the grammatical gender of the referent.
By comparison, in Modern English the sentence would be:
- That broad shield was good and I loved it.
Here, the shield is understood as a sexless object, and therefore designated by the neuter pronoun it. Old English had three genders, masculine, feminine and neuter, but gender inflections (as well as number inflections) were greatly simplified, and then merged with one another. The only trace of grammatical gender left in modern English are some pronouns, such as he, she, it, which tend to represent natural gender. The forms of modifiers used with the nouns, and of verbs, do not change according to gender in modern English: the word man is naturally masculine, and the word girl naturally feminine, but the form of the adjective tall used with both is still tall. From a linguistic perspective, therefore, English and other similar languages lack grammatical gender.
The role of convention
A second characteristic that distinguishes grammatical gender from natural gender is that it is largely a matter of convention. This is very clear when one considers the application of grammatical gender to objects - there is nothing intrinsic in a table that makes it masculine (as the German word "Tisch" is) or neuter (as the Norwegian word "bord" is). However, grammatical gender is equally a matter of convention even when it concerns human beings, as the overlap between grammatical gender and natural gender is not perfect. Persons who are biologically male or female may be assigned a different grammatical gender in some contexts. The most-often cited example of this is the German word Mädchen, which means "girl", but grammatically has neuter gender, not feminine. (The actual reason for this is that Mädchen is the diminutive for Maid, (all diminuitives such as "-chen" or "-lein" are neuter) which is however a word that nobody uses nowadays. Even native German speakers are often confused whether to choose the feminine or neuter possessive pronoun when talking about a girl.) Similarly, the Spanish noun miembro (member) is always masculine, even if it refers to a woman, but persona (person) is always feminine, even when it refers to a man.
Animals
The relationship between natural gender and grammatical gender for animals is often different from the relationship for human beings. In Spanish, a cheetah is always un guepardo (masculine) and a zebra is always una cebra (feminine), regardless of their biological sex. If it becomes necessary to specify the sex of the animal, an adjective is added, as in un guepardo hembra (a female cheetah). Individualized names for the male and the female of a species are more frequent when they refer to common pets or farm animals. E.g., English horse and mare, French chat (male cat) and chatte (female cat).
Personal names
Personal names often have characteristic culture-specific forms that identify the gender of the bearer. For example, in an English-speaking culture, John (masculine) and Joan or Jane (feminine) are gendered variants on the Hebrew name of John the Evangelist. Again, this is natural gender, and not necessarily grammatical gender.
For Russian gender-related tradition of personal naming, see Names in Russian Empire, Soviet Union and CIS countries.
Noun classes in specific linguistic families
The Ojibwe language and other members of the Algonquian languages distinguish between animate and inanimate classes. Some sources argue that the distinction is between things which are powerful and things which are not. All living things, as well as sacred things and things connected to the Earth are considered powerful and belong to the "animate" class. Still, the assignment is somewhat arbitrary, as "raspberry" is animate, but "strawberry" is inanimate.
In Navajo (Southern Athabaskan) nouns are classified according to their animacy, shape, and consistency. Morphologically, however, the distinctions are not expressed on the nouns themselves, but on the verbs of which the nouns are the subject or direct object. For example, in the sentence Shi’éé’ tsásk’eh bikáa’gi dah siłtsooz "My shirt is lying on the bed", the verb siłtsooz "lies" is used because the subject shi’éé’ "my shirt" is a flat, flexible object. In the sentence Siziiz tsásk’eh bikáa’gi dah silá "My belt is lying on the bed", the verb silá "lies" is used because the subject siziiz "my belt" is a slender, flexible object. See Navajo language#Classificatory Verbs for more discussion.
Koyukon (Northern Athabaskan) has a more intricate system of classification. Like Navajo, it has classificatory verb stems that classify nouns according to animacy, shape, and consistency. However, in addition these verb stems, Koyukon verbs have what are called gender prefixes that further classify nouns. That is, Koyukon has two different systems that classify nouns: (a) a classificatory verb system and (b) a gender system. To illustrate, the verb stem -tonh is used for enclosed objects. When -tonh is combined with different gender prefixes, it can result in daaltonh which refers to objects enclosed in boxes or etltonh which refers to objects enclosed in bags.
The Dyirbal language is well known for its system of four noun classes, which tend to be divided along the following semantic lines:
- I — animate objects, men
- II — women, water, fire, violence
- III — edible fruit and vegetables
- IV — miscellaneous (includes things not classifiable in the first three)
The class usually labeled "feminine", for instance, includes the word for fire and nouns relating to fire, as well as all dangerous creatures and phenomena. This inspired the title of the George Lakoff book Women, Fire and Dangerous Things (ISBN 0226468046).
The Ngangikurrunggurr language has noun classes reserved for canines, and hunting weapons, and the Anindilyakwa language has a noun class for things that reflect light. The Diyari language distinguishes only between female and other objects. Perhaps the most noun classes in any Australian language are found in Yanyuwa, which has 16 noun classes.
Of the Caucasian languages, some members of the Northwest Caucasian family, and almost all of the Northeast Caucasian languages, manifest noun class. In the Northeast Caucasian family, only Lezgi, Udi, and Aghul do not have noun classes. Some languages have only two classes, while the Bats language has eight. The most widespread system, however, has four classes: male, female, animate beings and certain objects, and finally a class for the remaining nouns. The Andi language has a noun class reserved for insects.
Among Northwest Caucasian languages, Abkhaz shows a human male/human female/non-human distinction. Ubykh shows some inflections along the same lines, but only in some instances, and in some of these instances inflection for noun class is not even obligatory.
In all Caucasian languages that manifest class, it is not marked on the noun itself but on the dependent verbs, adjectives, pronouns and prepositions.
An entire website has been devoted to exploring the possibilities of inanimate genders in Caucasian languages.
In Indo-European languages, genders typically include feminine, masculine and neuter. Latin has these three, but in many of its modern descendants, such as French and Spanish, the neuter gender has all but disappeared, though a few words, especially pronouns with no clear gender such as "cela" in French, have been assigned by some grammarians to a neuter gender. In Spanish, there exists a "neuter singular" gender whose only nouns are adjectives used as abstract nouns. (eg "lo único" = "the only thing"; "lo mismo" = "the same thing"). Romanian has preserved all three genders from Latin, but the neuter gender is a combination of the other two, in the sense that neuter nouns in the singular behave like masculine nouns, while in the plural they behave like feminine nouns; as a consequence, adjectives, pronouns, and pronominal adjectives only have two forms, both in the singular and in the plural.
In other languages, feminine and masculine have merged into a common gender with a neuter gender, for example, in Danish. English generally exhibits gender only in third-person singular pronouns (as with he, she, and it), with the masculine and feminine genders used only for persons or higher animals, sometimes objects in colloquial speech as in 'Isn't she a beauty?'. Other languages may group genders differently: Slavic languages further divide the masculine gender into animate and inanimate groups (the extent varies between individual languages, and some of them also apply the distinction in the feminine plural); The Spanish constructions for direct objects are different for humans and for objects, although its Latin-influenced grammar tradition doesn't usually count this as a noun class distinction; the Nostratic language, a theoretical language that gave rise to the Indo-European languages and other language families, is believed by its proponents to have had human, animal, and object as grammatical genders.
In common nouns, grammatical gender is usually only peripherally related to sex. For example, in Spanish, the word hijo (son) is masculine and hija (daughter) is feminine, as one might expect. This is called natural gender, or sometimes logical gender. Other times, there are elaborate (and mostly incomplete) rules to define the gender of a word. For example, in German, nouns ending in -ung (corresponding to -ing in English) are feminine, and car brand names are masculine. Words with the -lein and -chen ending (meaning little, young) are neuter, thus the grammatical genders of Mädchen (girl) and Fräulein (young woman) are neuter. In some local dialects of German, all nouns for female persons have been shifted to the neuter gender, but the female gender remains for some words denoting objects. All this is language-specific. In Latin, the word Sol (Sun) was masculine and the word Luna (Moon) was feminine (as in French, Spanish, Italian), but in German (and Germanic languages in general), the opposite occurs. The learner of a language thus must regard the gender as part of the noun, and memorize accordingly to use the language correctly. A frequent recommendation is to memorize the definite article and the noun as a unit.
In Indo-European languages that assign genders to all nouns, the genders often correspond roughly to declensions that govern the way the nouns are inflected. In Latin, for example, almost all of the -a stem nouns of the first declension are feminine; the main exceptions are a handful of nouns that identify typically male roles like nauta, "sailor," agricola, "farmer," and poeta, "poet". Likewise, almost all of the -o stem nouns of the second declension that end in -us in the nominative case are masculine; those ending in -um are neuter. Names of places and trees are feminine though, like ulmus, "elm," or Ægyptus, "Egypt." Most other Indo-European languages that have retained declensional systems have similar rules.
According to Carl Meinhof, the Bantu languages have a total of 22 noun classes. While no single language is known to express all of them, all of them have at least 10 noun classes. For example, by Meinhof's numbering, Swahili has 15 classes, and Sesotho has 18. However, Meinhof's numbering system counts singular and plural numbers of the same noun as belonging to separate classes (see Sesotho language for examples). This is inconsistent with the way other languages are traditionally considered, where number is orthogonal to gender (a Meinhof-style analysis would give Ancient Greek 9 genders!). If one follows broader linguistic tradition and counts singular and plural as belonging to the same class, then Swahili has 8 or 9 noun classes and Sesotho has 11.
Often, certain noun classes are reserved for humans. The Fula language has a noun class reserved for liquids. According to Steven Pinker, the Kivunjo language has 16 genders including classes for precise locations and for general locales, classes for clusters or pairs of objects and classes for the objects that come in pairs or clusters, and classes for abstract qualities.
The Zande language distinguishes four noun classes:
| Criterion |
Example |
Translation |
| human male |
kumba |
man |
| human female |
dia |
wife |
| animate |
nya |
beast |
| other |
bambu |
house |
There are about 80 inanimate nouns which are in the animate class, including nouns denoting heavenly objects (moon, rainbow), metal objects (hammer, ring), edible plants (sweet potato, pea), and non-metallic objects (whistle, ball). Many of the exceptions have a round shape, and some can be explained by the role they play in Zande mythology.
Other
The Alamblak language, a Sepik Hill language spoken in Papua New Guinea, has a "masculine" noun class, which includes males, as well as things which are tall or long and slender, or narrow such as fish, crocodile, long snakes, arrows, spears and tall slender trees, and a "feminine" noun class, which includes females, as well as things which are short, squat or wide, such as turtles, frogs, houses, fighting shields and trees that are typically more round and squat than others.
Noun classes in specific languages
List of languages without grammatical genders/noun classes
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List of languages with grammatical genders/noun classes
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Two genders/noun classes
Masculine and feminine
Common and neuter
Animate and inanimate
- Sumerian
- Many Native American languages, such as Navajo
- Polish and Russian
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Three grammatical genders/noun classes
Masculine, feminine, and neuter
Three genders, other classifications
- Klingon (being capable of speaking, body part and other)
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More than three grammatical genders/noun classes
- Swahili
- Zulu
- Dyirbal
- Bats
- all Bantu languages
- some Slavic languages, including Russian and Czech, make certain grammatical distinctions between animate and inanimate nouns, but only in the masculine gender.
- Polish distinguishes singular masculine animated versus inanimated nouns and plural masculine human vs. non-human nouns
- Swedish distinguishes masculine (han), feminine (hon), neuter (det) and non-masculine non-feminine non-neuter (den)
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More than three noun classes counting measure words
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Bibliography
- Craig, Colette G. (1986). Noun classes and categorization: Proceedings of a symposium on categorization and noun classification, Eugene, Oregon, October 1983. Amsterdam: J. Benjamins.
- Corbett, Greville G. (1991) Gender, Cambridge University Press —A comprehensive study; looks at 200 languages.
- Corbett, Geville (1994) "Gender and gender systems". En R. Asher (ed.) The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, Oxford: Pergamon Press, pp. 1347--1353.
- Greenberg, J. H. (1978) "How does a language acquire gender markers?". En J. H. Greenberg et al. (eds.) Universals of Human Language, Vol. 4, pp. 47--82.
- Hockett, Charles F. (1958) A Course in Modern Linguistics, Macmillan.
- Ibrahim, M. (1973) Grammatical gender. Its origin and development. La Haya: Mouton.
- Iturrioz, J. L. (1986) "Structure, meaning and function: a functional analysis of gender and other classificatory techniques". Función 1. 1-3.
- Meissner, Antje & Anne Storch (eds.) (2000) Nominal classification in African languages, Institut für Afrikanische Sprachwissenschaften, Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main. Köln: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag. ISBN 3-89645-014-X.
- Pinker, Steven (1994) The Language Instinct, William Morrow and Company.
The content of this page is retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender under GFDL
