Combining those two features shows that there are no less than 5 languages which have no gender but still distinguish gender in pronouns. It that what you are referring to?jal wrote:You should do some research. Although there seems to be a positive correlation, these two maps show that English is far from the only one (and in fact, WALS clasifies English as having a sex-based gender system, although I'm not sure on what grounds).Chuma wrote:For one example, I'm still baffled by my discovery that English is one of very few languages (perhaps even the only one) which has words for "he" and "she", but does not have gender on nouns.
That's a little peculiar tho, since in chapter 30, they write
That is, a language which distinguishes gender in pronouns should, according to this definition, be said to have gender (which answers your question about why English is considered as having a sex-based gender system). With that in mind, I don't see how the aforementioned definition could be correct - it might just be that other contributors have seen things differently, and regarded systems similar to the English one as not having gender.Most scholars working on agreement include the control of anaphoric pronouns by their antecedent (the girl ... she ) as part of agreement. If this is accepted, as we do here, then languages in which free pronouns present the only evidence for gender will be counted as having a gender system. [...] Including them, however, makes little difference to the overall picture, since they are rare (the best known example is English, which is typologically unusual in this respect)
Although there are a few other languages which, like English, distinguish gender only in pronouns, I haven't found any other example where this is done in a purely sex-based system; they might for example have animate vs. inanimate pronouns.
The regular Amazon page for the print version isn't up yet, but the link above gets you the same thing.
