3 ms·

This now makes me wonder if there are languages that do not make a who/what distinction. Hungarian has no gender and doesn't even have distinct pronouns for he

This now makes me wonder if there are languages that do not make a who/what distinction. Hungarian has no gender and doesn't even have distinct pronouns for he and she, but it does have a distinction between the pronoun ő (he/she/sentient animal/sometimes informally for inanimate objects) on the one hand and the determiners (?) ez/az (literally this/that, for inanimate objects) on the other hand. There is also a clear distinction between ki/mi (who/what). I've never heard of this being analyzed as a "gender" distinction, but I guess if the definition of gender is along the lines of "a group of words that behave in a distinct way", then it applies.

thaumasiotes 6y ago
The Latin interrogative pronouns are quis (masculine and feminine) and quid (neuter). I do not believe there is any distinction made between people and nonpeople. (Quis on its own will be translated as "who", and quid as "what", but this is just an example of the more general phenomenon that when modifiers appear alone in Latin, you supply an implicit "man", "woman", or "thing" as the noun to be modified. Thus dicta is common in the meaning "things that were said", without the need to explicitly say res [things] dictae or verba [words] dicta, and quis is common in the meaning "who?" without the need to explicitly say quis homo. If you wanted to ask "what sand...?", you'd say quis harena, not quid harena.) The relative pronouns are qui (masculine) / quae (feminine) / quod (neuter); again I don't think any distinction is available to be made between people and nonpeople. You have to use the pronoun that matches m/f/n gender. > I guess if the definition of gender is along the lines of "a group of words that behave in a distinct way" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender : > In linguistics, grammatical gender is a specific form of noun class system in which the division of noun classes forms an agreement system with another aspect of the language, such as adjectives, articles, pronouns, or verbs. In this case, we have an agreement system between nouns and pronouns. There is another very significant division of noun classes in English, the division between mass nouns ("stuff"; "ice cream") and count nouns ("things"; "ice cube"). This has effects in several areas of the grammar (e.g. mass nouns do not have plural forms), and it does have some agreement effects also (you could analyze many and much as the same word in agreement with a count noun (for many) or a mass noun (for much)), but this distinction for whatever reason usually wouldn't be thought of as a "gender". The people/nonpeople distinction, which is reflected only in agreement effects, is much more typical of the terminology "gender".

thaumasiotes 6y ago

The Latin interrogative pronouns are quis (masculine and feminine) and quid (neuter). I do not believe there is any distinction made between people and nonpeople. (Quis on its own will be translated as "who", and quid as "what", but this is just an example of the more general phenomenon that when modifiers appear alone in Latin, you supply an implicit "man", "woman", or "thing" as the noun to be modified. Thus dicta is common in the meaning "things that were said", without the need to explicitly say res [things] dictae or verba [words] dicta, and quis is common in the meaning "who?" without the need to explicitly say quis homo. If you wanted to ask "what sand...?", you'd say quis harena, not quid harena.) The relative pronouns are qui (masculine) / quae (feminine) / quod (neuter); again I don't think any distinction is available to be made between people and nonpeople. You have to use the pronoun that matches m/f/n gender. > I guess if the definition of gender is along the lines of "a group of words that behave in a distinct way" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender : > In linguistics, grammatical gender is a specific form of noun class system in which the division of noun classes forms an agreement system with another aspect of the language, such as adjectives, articles, pronouns, or verbs. In this case, we have an agreement system between nouns and pronouns. There is another very significant division of noun classes in English, the division between mass nouns ("stuff"; "ice cream") and count nouns ("things"; "ice cube"). This has effects in several areas of the grammar (e.g. mass nouns do not have plural forms), and it does have some agreement effects also (you could analyze many and much as the same word in agreement with a count noun (for many) or a mass noun (for much)), but this distinction for whatever reason usually wouldn't be thought of as a "gender". The people/nonpeople distinction, which is reflected only in agreement effects, is much more typical of the terminology "gender".