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What's the point of gendered words in certain languages?
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this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2023
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Thank you, Today I learned that grammatical gender can in fact have purpose. Some questions though:
In that first example for Agreement, does this depend on the nouns in question coincidentally having different gender, or does the grammar enforce that? (Such as switching one if they would otherwise match - although that might conflict with the Derivation thing.) And can a sentence in those languages refer to 3 or more nouns? That would seem to break the disambiguation effect.
Yup - the example wouldn't work if both nouns had the same gender. And gender is intrinsic to the noun, you can't change it (you can change the noun though).
That's why, usually, languages with a productive gender system keep a comparable amount of nouns in each gender, since this maximises the odds that multiple nouns in the same sentence got different genders.
Yup, they can.
In both cases (same gender nouns, or 3+ nouns), the solution is typically the same as in a non-gendered language: you use the noun instead of a pronoun, or rely on context to disambiguate it.