Most languages indicate gender in nouns and pronouns. English is a major exception to this.
Then again, gender is, at least technically, an aspect of language. And in Russian, the suffix -ina or -inova denotes a feminine member of a given family, and -ich or -evich denotes a male member of a given family.
Or at least it did, when I studied Russian, ~40 years ago. . .
Grammatical gender is present in many modern languages descended from Indo-European [wikipedia.org]. The original Indo-European had three genders (masculine, feminine and neuter). Some modern child languages (many Slavic ones for example), have retained all three, others have only kept two (most Romance languages, with the exception of Romanian and Asturian which kept the three genders of Latin), and others have lost even that. English in particular barely has any remains of grammatical gender, mainly in pronouns.
Huh, I wonder if the loss of the gendered words has led to the situation where the United States as a majority-English-speaking locale is trying to remove gender from everything?
Gagarin's daughter, Galina Gagarina (Score:2)
Re:Gagarin's daughter, Galina Gagarina (Score:4, Informative)
Most languages indicate gender in nouns and pronouns. English is a major exception to this.
Then again, gender is, at least technically, an aspect of language. And in Russian, the suffix -ina or -inova denotes a feminine member of a given family, and -ich or -evich denotes a male member of a given family.
Or at least it did, when I studied Russian, ~40 years ago. . .
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Gender is pervasive in Slavic languages
Grammatical gender is present in many modern languages descended from Indo-European [wikipedia.org]. The original Indo-European had three genders (masculine, feminine and neuter). Some modern child languages (many Slavic ones for example), have retained all three, others have only kept two (most Romance languages, with the exception of Romanian and Asturian which kept the three genders of Latin), and others have lost even that. English in particular barely has any remains of grammatical gender, mainly in pronouns.
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They have three genders. Male, Female, and Neuter.