I'd just like to clear up a few points:
On 8/30/05, Valentina Faussone <valentina_faussone(a)yahoo.it> wrote:
Answering to:
" "In most languages" is not true. The majority of the
world's languages do not have gender.
This includes:
Chinese, Japanese, Korean, English, ..."
Most languages have grammar genders or similar.
You can find more in:
http://www.ielanguages.com/eurolang.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender
By "or similar" you obviosly mean the noun classes used in
many African and Australian languages and perhaps the counters
used in East Asian and Southeast Asian languages. These
are really quite distinct from gender as you can also read on
Wikipedia. They can probably be handled to a certain extent in a
similar fashion in a dictionary though.
The most part of Indo-European languages have
genders.
Af far as for what i've found those languages have
numbers and (2 or 3) genders:
Italian (2)
French (2)
German (3)
Spanish (2)
Greek (3)
Portguese (2 in Portugal, 3 in Brazil)
Both have only 2 genders.
Dutch (less used)
Not true. Greatly used is the 2-gender system "de" vs "het", less
used is the 3-gender system surviving only in pronouns and only
in certain parts of the Netherlands not including Amsterdam.
Belgian
There is no such language. Belgium has a French-speaking part
and a Flemish-speaking part. Flemish is a dialect of Dutch which
I'm told preserves the 3-gender system to a greater degree and
also has a small number of nouns with genders different than in
Netherlands Dutch.
Danish (2)
Norwegian (3)
It seems that sometimes one of the Norwegian varieties can be
used with only 2 genders but this has never been totally clear
to me.
Bulgarian (3)
Polish (3)
Czech (4)
Czech has 3 genders.
Russian (3)
Yiddish (2)
I was fairly sure Yiddish had the same 3 genders as German but
I'd like to be corrected if I'm wrong.
Plus
Australian Aborigenal and many african language.
These are not genders, it is a different linguistic
phenomenon.
I don't know enough for others not indo-european
languages.
All Romance language have genders. All germanic
languages have genders, but english. All slavich
languages have ganders.
Some people might count Esperanto and Interlingua
as Romance languages without gender. The obvious
Germanic language without gender besides English
is Afrikaans.
The 10 most spoken language in the wolrd are
Chinese* (937,132,000)
Spanish (332,000,000)
English (322,000,000)
Bengali (189,000,000)
Hindi/Urdu (182,000,000)
Arabic* (174,950,000)
Portuguese (170,000,000)
Russian (170,000,000)
Japanese (125,000,000)
German (98,000,000)
French* (79,572,000)
Spanish, Bengali, Hindi, Arabic, Portuguese, Russian,
French, German have genders. Italian too.
I think it's enough to consider this could be a
problem for many wikipedians. Creating redirects for
different forms of a word is a concern for most
languages.
Also there are a very large number of instances where one
gender of a word has an extra sense that does not apply to
the other genders, at least when taking all of these languages
into account.
Andrew Dunbar (hippietrail)
Regards,
Valentina Faussone
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