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Day: May 18, 2016

Why do some languages assign a gender to each noun (e.g., table is feminine in French)?

By: | Post date: 2016-05-18 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: General Language, Linguistics

Originally Answered: Why do Greek, Latin, French, German, Russian etc. have masculine and feminine gender for inanimate objects? The history of Indo-European gender, like the history of any language feature, is messy. The mainstream theory is that the feminine, in fact, was originally not animate at all, but came from the abstract and collective suffix […]