• amio@kbin.social
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    9 months ago

    A lot of languages including Germanic and Romance languages have “gendered” nouns, which is a weird term for “these are some arbitrary categories we put nouns into”. While that idea of noun classes is often called “gender” and they are also named “gender-y” things like masculine and feminine, the idea doesn’t have a lot to do with gender as in identity.

    Compare English irregular verbs - how come you don’t say “swimmed”? You “just don’t”, that particular verb is in a different class. Same thing applies to nouns in certain languages, and affects (among other things) how they’re conjugated.

    • zaphod@feddit.de
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      9 months ago

      Gender in the grammatical sense just means category, from French genre, Latin genus.