Ancestors

Written by Nigel on 2024-12-04 at 08:22

As a kid trying (failing dismally) to learn French, I never got my head around the gendering of nouns. Coming from a language that doesn't have that it just seemed rather bizarre. However it seems to be a very common practice in languages and I wonder if anyone can tell me if 'most' languages have gendered nouns or whether (like English) they don't?

[#]linguistics #askfedi

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Written by Ergative Absolutive on 2024-12-04 at 11:36

@nigelharpur Of the 257 languages surveyed in the World Atlas of Language Structures, 145 have no noun gender, 53 have a gender system that can be described according to semantic feature, and 59 have some degree of arbitrariness in assigning nouns to gender categories.

https://wals.info/feature/32A#2/26.7/149.2

https://wals.info/chapter/32

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Toot

Written by Nigel on 2024-12-04 at 12:38

@ergative thanks! Fascinating stuff.

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Descendants