Number of Genders
by Greville G. Corbett http://wals.info/feature/30
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Meta
April 24th, 2008 at 7:44 am
How does English have three genders? As far as I know modern English has no grammatical gender at all. Old English had genders, but the map just says “English”.
May 7th, 2008 at 4:31 am
According to the text, English is counted because of its pronominal gender system (he, she, it). Since there aren’t many other languages that have different pronouns for different genders without corresponding noun classes, counting or not counting this doesn’t make much difference to the map on the whole.