Gender Agreement
In the Spanish sentences Él es un buen actor "He is a good actor" and Ella es una buena actriz "She is a good actress", almost every word changes to match the gender of the subject. The noun actor inflects by replacing the masculine suffix -or with the feminine suffix -riz, the personal pronoun él "he" changes to ella "she", and the feminine suffix -a is added to the article (un → una) and to the adjective (buen → buena). Only the verb remains unchanged.
The following "highly contrived" Old English sentence serves as an example of gender agreement.
| Old English | Seo brade lind wæs tilu and ic hire lufode. |
| Modern English gloss | That broad shield was good and I her loved. |
| Modern English translation | That broad shield was good and I loved it. |
The word hire "her" refers to lind "shield". Since this noun was grammatically feminine, the adjectives brade "broad" and tilu "good", as well as the pronouns seo "the/that" and hire "her", which referred to lind, must also appear in their feminine forms. Old English had three genders, masculine, feminine and neuter, but gender inflections were greatly simplified by sound changes, and then completely lost (as well as number inflections, to a lesser extent).
In modern English, by contrast, the noun "shield" takes the neuter pronoun "it", since it designates a genderless object. In a sense, the neuter gender has grown to encompass most nouns, including many that were masculine or feminine in Old English. If one were to replace the phrase "broad shield" with "brave man" or "brave woman", the only change to the rest of the sentence would be in the pronoun at the end, which would become "him" or "her", respectively.
Read more about this topic: Grammatical Gender
Famous quotes containing the words gender and/or agreement:
“Most women of [the WW II] generation have but one image of good motherhood—the one their mothers embodied. . . . Anything done “for the sake of the children” justified, even ennobled the mother’s 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 shunned—the ultimate damnation for a gender trained to be wholly dependent on the acceptance and praise of others.”
—Melinda M. Marshall (20th century)
“Culture is the tacit agreement to let the means of subsistence disappear behind the purpose of existence. Civilization is the subordination of the latter to the former.”
—Karl Kraus (1874–1936)