4 ms·
Irrelevant nitpick: "gender" in linguistics means "category". Objects in grammatically gendered languages are rarely/never categorized as "manly" or "effeminate
by exo-pla-net 4y ago
Irrelevant nitpick: "gender" in linguistics means "category". Objects in grammatically gendered languages are rarely/never categorized as "manly" or "effeminate"; they're, for example, categorized as "animate" or "inanimate". [1]
[1] https://blog.duolingo.com/what-is-grammatical-gender/ https://blog.duolingo.com/what-is-grammatical-gender/
- temporallobe 4y agoReciprocal nitpick: That explanation of category is pretty weak and cannot be applied universally anyway. In many cases, gender assignment is completely arbitrary, and the article pretty much admits that. For example, in Croatian, table (stol) is masculine, while chair (stolica) is feminine, which is completely arbitrary, and both are inanimate. There is no rule in Croatian (or other Slavic languages that I am aware of) that categorizes gendered nouns for any reason.