6 Responses to “Datapoint for feature 30A and language wals_code_eng”

1. Werner Voigt Says:
   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

2. Mark Dallas Says:
   October 5th, 2013 at 3:01 am

   English hasn’t had genders (except in 3rd-person singular personal pronouns) for about a millennium

3. Alexis Wilke Says:
   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.

4. Mark Dallas Says:
   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).

5. beneficii Says:
   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.

6. Mick Robertson Says:
   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?

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