Gender in Words Borrowed From One Language By Another
Ibrihim identifies several processes by which a language assigns a gender to a newly borrowed word; these processes follow patterns by which even children, through their subconscious recognition of patterns, can often correctly predict a noun's gender.
- If the noun is animate, natural gender tends to dictate grammatical gender.
- The borrowed word tends to take the gender of the native word it replaces.
- If the borrowed word happens to have a suffix that the borrowing language uses as a gender marker, the suffix tends to dictate gender.
- If the borrowed word rhymes with one or more native words, the latter tend to dictate gender.
- The default assignment is the borrowing language's unmarked gender.
- Rarely, the word retains the gender it had in the donor language.
Read more about this topic: Grammatical Gender
Famous quotes containing the words gender in, gender, words, borrowed and/or language:
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Where either I must live or bear no life;
The fountain from the which my current runs
Or else dries up: to be discarded thence,
Or keep it as a cistern for foul toads
To knot and gender in!”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
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—Paula Giddings (b. 1948)
“Even if society dictates that men and women should behave in certain ways, it is fathers and mothers who teach those ways to children—not just in the words they say, but in the lives they lead.”
—Augustus Y. Napier (20th century)
“The bugle-call to arms again sounded in my war-trained ear, the bayonets gleamed, the sabres clashed, and the Prussian helmets and the eagles of France stood face to face on the borders of the Rhine.... I remembered our own armies, my own war-stricken country and its dead, its widows and orphans, and it nerved me to action for which the physical strength had long ceased to exist, and on the borrowed force of love and memory, I strove with might and main.”
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—Cyril Connolly (1903–1974)