Animacy is reflected to varying degrees of importance in all the mIE languages from interrogatives, e.g., who / what to third person singular pronouns to alternations in inflectional endings. Characterizing nouns by grammatical gender is a handy way of indicating how they inflect, if the language has nouns that inflect. However, gender is central how determiners and adjectives interact with nouns through agreement. Some mIE languages boast three genders (masculine, feminine, neuter), most have two (masculine and feminine, or, common and neuter), and a few (English, Armenian and Sorani Persian) have lost all gender distinctions in nouns. The phrase “an old man” and “an old woman” are compound words in many mIE languages. Where these don’t indicate gender, we use “a good man, a good woman”, feminine or neuter gender.
Photo: Jules Germain Formel
Going whole hog
German, Icelandic, Romanian, all Slavic lgs (including showing gender in the past tense), Greek, and Gujurati (alone among the Indo-Aryan languages) have all three genders, allowing for a three-way agreement with modifiers. Romanian is a bit strange in that neuter nouns take masculine endings in the singular and feminine endings in the plural: unmasc exempluneut bunmasc‘a good example’ ~ exempleneut buneyfem ‘good examples’. The Slavic languages indicate gender in past tense forms as well, as in Russian byl. byla, bylo ‘was (masc, fem, neut)’. (Here and below we highlight just one word in each phrase that indicates gender.)
German
Romanian
Czech
Greek
Gujarati
Ein alter Mann
un bătrân [an old+man]
starý muž [old man]
énas kalós ánthrōpos
jūno māṇas [old man]
Eine alte Frau
o bătrână [an old+woman]
stará žena [old woman]
miá kalé gunaíka
jūnī strīstri [old woman]
Ein altes Haus
un pat bun [a good bed]
staré okno [old window]
éna kaló spíti
jūnū ghar [old house]
Two’s company.
The continental Scandinavian languages distinguish common gender (masculine and feminine) and neuter gender. Most of the modern IE languages have two-way masculine and feminine gender agreement, sometimes in unexpected ways. Unmodified nouns in the Celtic languages do not indicate gender. With modified nouns, gender (masculine or feminine) agreement occurs by means of a mutation of the first letter of a modifier or of the first letter of a feminine singular noun when preceded by a definite article (remind me not to learn any of the Celtic languages.) Pashto does not indicate gender in the third singular pronoun but, like Slavic, does show gender agreement in the past tense: hagha wo [he/she wasmasc] ‘he was’ ~ hagha wafem [he/she was] ‘she was’.
Norwegian
Portuguese
Irish
Lithuanian
Sindhi
Hindi
en gammel mann [an old man]
um velho [an old+man]
fear maith [man good]
senas vyras [old man]
hiku pōṛhō mardu
eka burha adami
en gammel kvinne1 [an old woman]
uma velha [an old+woman]
bean mhaith [woman good]
sena moteris [old woman]
hika pōṛhī aurata
eka burhi aurata
et gammelt hus [an old house]
an bhean [the woman]
1 cognate with English queen
Gender? What’s gender?
English, Armenian, Sorani, Persian, and Bengali no longer distinguish grammatical gender in nouns. Of these only English distinguishes gender in pronouns. This makes English unique among the modern IE languages in having gender-neutral nouns, but having gendered pronouns in the 3rd singular: he, she, it.
English an old man an old woman an old house
Armenian lav mard lav kin lav tun
Bengali br̥ddho lok br̥ddho mohilā purono1 bāṛi
1 ‘not new’, used with inanimate nouns
A Quora user asked, “Why does French (among other languages) still use masculine and feminine nouns, despite the fact that this seems entirely pointless?”
The response:
Gender isn’t pointless. Gender means agreement, agreement means redundance, and redundance is a feature, not a bug. It helps to parse sentences by narrowing down the possible interpretations of pronouns, noun-adjective relationships…The only reason why some English speakers focus on gender is that they don’t have any equivalent in their language, so they refuse a priori to believe that it can be meaningful to other people.
https://www.quora.com/Why-are-French-nouns-gendered-masculine-and-feminine-and-how-does-this-affect-sentence-structure
A reddit user commented, “I’m relatively new to learning English, and as a native Russian speaker who grew up with a gender-based language, I find it interesting that English works perfectly fine without them. I would like to know – how do English speakers distinguish between objects that are masculine (stol ‘table, dom ‘house’, ‘nož ‘iknife’) and feminine (krovat’ ‘bed’, kvartira ‘apartment’, ložka ‘spoon’)?
https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearningjerk/comments/1lnbamx/how_does_english_manage_without_genders/
GRAMMAR
Animacy A noun is grammatically animate if it refers to a living being. All the mIE languages express animacy in some way through grammar or the lexicon. For example, the interrogative pronouns differentiate humans vs. non-humans, e.g., who ~ what, Russian kto ~ čto, Persian ki ‘who’ ~ če ‘what’, etc. Animacy may be expressed in other ways as well.
Gender Words that refer to actual males, females, or objects are said be masculine, feminine or neuter gender. Most mIE languages also assign masculine or feminine gender to inanimate objects as well as to living beings. For example, French fille ‘girl, daughter’ is grammatically feminine, but so is lampe ‘lamp’ and image ‘image’.
Inflection The process of adding or removing endings from word stems in order to indicate how the word is used in a sentence: subject, object, direct object, etc.