Thread: Why should a table have a gender?
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Old 16.12.2008, 11:14
canyaver canyaver is offline
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Re: Why should a table have a gender?
Quote:
Yopo
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Why not? That is common in Latin languages and you also have differentiation in other languages like Dutch (with "Het" and "De").
What it does not have is a sex: I understand that in languages, the term gender is not synonymous with the term sex. Probably by having a gender it would be less likely to use the noun again instead of using a pronoun.
Having said that, gender is assigned arbitrarily; As far as I am aware there are no set of concrete rules that dictate whether a noun should be feminine or masculine. You may recognize by the way the word ends whether is one gender or the other.
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The question was not about commonality among certain languages like Spanish or Italian. Plus this arbitrary assignment of gender implies the absence of a particular function.
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