Datapoint for feature 30A and language wals_code_eng
Discuss WALS Datapoint for feature 30A and language wals_code_eng.
Discuss WALS Datapoint for feature 30A and language wals_code_eng.
This entry was posted on Friday, May 20th, 2011 at 3:54 am by wals and is filed under English, Number of Genders. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
December 11th, 2012 at 3:22 pm
I agree that there are three genders in modern English, but only in pronouns they are visibly marked. I found the same description for English and German. There should be a difference in the symbols between languages with less and more differentiated gender markings
October 5th, 2013 at 3:01 am
English hasn’t had genders (except in 3rd-person singular personal pronouns) for about a millennium
March 24th, 2014 at 12:45 am
Mark, Not quiet. The genders remained in Middle English. It is around 1600 that they made it more of a rule to not use masculine and feminine. So it is only half a millennium.
June 4th, 2014 at 3:16 am
Alexis: As Werner explains, gender is only marked on personal pronouns in English. I believe the period you refer to is when he/she and his/her started to become outmoded when referring to inanimates, while ‘whose’ is still used.
I refer to gender understood as noun class, which would affect the determiner (there were 13 forms of ‘the’ in Old English).
February 24th, 2017 at 2:44 am
By 1350, all dialects of English had lost grammatical gender, with the Kent dialect the last to lose it.
December 30th, 2017 at 12:32 am
OK… who thought it was funny to say that English has three genders and no source even trying to make an argument for it?