Useful Roles of Grammatical Gender
Ibrihim identified three possible useful roles of grammatical gender:
- In a language with explicit inflections for gender, it is easy to express the natural gender of animate beings.
- Grammatical gender "can be a valuable tool of disambiguation", rendering clarity about antecedents.
- In literature, gender can be used to "animate and personify inanimate nouns".
Read more about this topic: Grammatical Gender
Famous quotes containing the words roles, grammatical and/or gender:
“It was always the work that was the gyroscope in my life. I dont know who could have lived with me. As an architect youre absolutely devoured. A womans cast in a lot of roles and a man isnt. I couldnt be an architect and be a wife and mother.”
—Eleanore Kendall Pettersen (b. 1916)
“Evil is simply
a grammatical error:
a failure to leap
the precipice
between he
and I.”
—Linda Pastan (b. 1932)
“Most women of [the WW II] generation have but one image of good motherhoodthe one their mothers embodied. . . . Anything done for the sake of the children justified, even ennobled the mothers role. Motherhood was tantamount to martyrdom during that unique era when children were gods. Those who appeared to put their own needs first were castigated and shunnedthe ultimate damnation for a gender trained to be wholly dependent on the acceptance and praise of others.”
—Melinda M. Marshall (20th century)