Gender

GENDER is a grammatical category that tells the listener whether a noun is


 * male,


 * female, or


 * neutral.

Characteristics
GENDER is a grammatical category associated with nouns.

Some people call this grammatical category "NOUN CLASS". (See the section below called "GENDER in other Langauges" for more details.)

GENDER in English
English does not use GENDER often, but... GENDER information is added for third person personal pronouns.

You can see the details below. Because of information given by GENDER, this sentence is easy to understand:
 * John is a boy. (Male)
 * Mary is a girl. (Female)
 * The tree is not a boy and it is not a girl. (Neutral)


 * "He kissed her under it."

General Exceptions in English
Sometimes the gender of a noun is shown by adding an inflectional suffix like -ess, -er or -ette.

Strong Exceptions in English
Some words have "strong" female forms. This means the male and female forms do not look the same.

This might be because the word is very old, or maybe it was just very imporant to know whether the was a male or a female. (e.g. If you're a farmer, you would rather eat a bull than a cow, so that the females cows can be used for breeding.)

Here are some examples:

GENDER in other Languages
Many other European languages (like German, French, etc) use gender for all nouns. That means that you must learn


 * the word, AND


 * the gender of the word.

Here are some examples. See how the articles ('the', 'la' or 'le', 'der' or 'das') words match the noun.

As you can see, the GENDER of a word does not really have to do with whether the 'chair' is a man or a woman. (e.g. In French 'chair' is "female", but in German it is "male".) Instead, GENDER is just a way of grouping words that behave in the same way together.

For example, i n French:


 * all "male" nouns use the article 'le', and


 * all "female" nouns use the article 'la'.

The new (and better) word for GENDER is NOUN CLASS, which shows that words in the same "class" (or category) behave in the same way. In some African languages, they have more than 20 NOUN CLASSES!

So remember, even if English is not very easy, it is easier than many other languages. :D