Re: Gender agreement in English
Posted: Sun Sep 11, 2016 8:41 pm
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.gmalivuk wrote: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.clawgrip wrote: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.
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