gizmo2012 Groupie United Kingdom Joined 5095 days ago 49 posts - 49 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, French
| Message 1 of 23 07 January 2011 at 8:21pm | IP Logged |
Hi,
I was just thinking, how many languages are there which do not have masculine, feminine or neuter nouns, like English? Also, if there are any, what are they.
Why does English have no genders for nouns?
Thanks
James
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indiana83 Groupie United States ipracticecanto.wordp Joined 5491 days ago 92 posts - 121 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Cantonese, Italian
| Message 2 of 23 07 January 2011 at 8:30pm | IP Logged |
Chinese has no gendered nouns.
You can even use the same pronoun to represent both he and she, though there is a more specific character for when needed:
他 - he/she
她 - she
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sjheiss Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5685 days ago 100 posts - 174 votes Speaks: English*, Basque
| Message 3 of 23 07 January 2011 at 8:30pm | IP Logged |
Here is a big list of some. :)
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gizmo2012 Groupie United Kingdom Joined 5095 days ago 49 posts - 49 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, French
| Message 4 of 23 07 January 2011 at 8:36pm | IP Logged |
Wow! That's a lot more than I first thought!It's interesting that in Chinese you can use the same pronoun for he and she.
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Fasulye Heptaglot Winner TAC 2012 Moderator Germany fasulyespolyglotblog Joined 5848 days ago 5460 posts - 6006 votes 1 sounds Speaks: German*, DutchC1, EnglishB2, French, Italian, Spanish, Esperanto Studies: Latin, Danish, Norwegian, Turkish Personal Language Map
| Message 5 of 23 07 January 2011 at 8:46pm | IP Logged |
Turkish nouns have absolutely no genders. The nouns have no articles and he / she / it for example means "o" in Turkish. Like in English you learn Turkish nouns without the article. To give some examples:
masa - table
kadin - woman
erkek, adam - man
sekreter - secretary
ev - house
araba - car
Fasulye
Edited by Fasulye on 07 January 2011 at 8:50pm
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Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5382 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian
| Message 7 of 23 07 January 2011 at 9:28pm | IP Logged |
You are refering to grammatical gender. English doesn't have it because it lost it down the road; other Germanic languages still do.
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karaipyhare Tetraglot Groupie Paraguay Joined 5586 days ago 74 posts - 150 votes Speaks: Portuguese, Spanish*, English, Guarani Studies: German, Italian, French, Mandarin, Japanese
| Message 8 of 23 07 January 2011 at 9:28pm | IP Logged |
please follow this amazing link http://wals.info/feature/31?tg_format=map
There you have a world map with the location of languages colored accordingly to the fact
of having sex-based genders, non-sex-based gender or being genderless.
There's is also a plethora of other languages features you can select
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