Gender agreement in English

[clawgrip]

Fiancé vs. fiancée just resembles French gender agreement patterns, which is confusing the issue. Having words for both fiancé and fiancée is no more gender agreement than having words for husband and wife, man and woman, etc., i.e. in none of these cases is there any grammatical agreement of any kind taking place.

Except, "husband" and "wife" are not masculine and feminine forms of the same root word. The two words for "betrothed" in French are, and they come from an adjective form as far as I know, which puts them in the blond/blonde category of genuine gender agreement.

As I said before, their etymological origin is of no consequence. The fact that we have both "general" and "generalissimo" in English is not evidence that English has some sort of military rank gender system. It's true that this example does not reflect the gender system of Italian either, but the point stands that simply borrowing a few words from a gendered language does not mean English now has a gender system.

And it seems that clarification is required here: nouns "agreeing" with the gender of their referent is not grammatical agreement; "bloodhound" and "foxhound" do not agree with the breed of their referents, they're just different words with different but similar meanings. Grammatical agreement is when one word changes form based on the qualities of a completely different word.

So far, Latino/Latina is the only true, and consistently maintained English gender agreement we've seen in this thread

[zompist]

So far, Latino/Latina is the only true, and consistently maintained English gender agreement we've seen in this thread

And I'm not sure about that one. Doing some Googling, there's a definite preference for "she's Latina" or "Latina woman", but "she's Latino" and "Latino woman" do come up respectably often. More surprisingly, perhaps, "Latina man" is not uncommon. Surely if it were true gender agreement mistakes would be rare? I'm guessing that people are imitating Hispanics, with some confusion.

Chicano/Chicana occur in similar contexts, but are a good deal rarer. And gringo/gringa are rarer still.

[clawgrip]

There's also Filipino and Filipina. I suppose you're right in that the less familiar people are with these things, the more likely they are to default to the masculine -o form. Still, this is definitely an unusual phonemenon: gender agreement that only occurs on a couple words in the entire language, and is limited to certain sociolects but also among people familiar with that usage.

As an aside, I notice that Firefox red-underlines Filipina and gringa but not Filipino or gringo, showing a clear preference for only the masculine form.

[linguoboy]

There's also Filipino and Filipina.

And their clipped forms Pinoy and Pinay. But now we're talking about real in-group usage.