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Pronoun

Pronoun

In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun is a pro-form that substitutes for a noun or noun phrase with or without a determiner, such as you and they in English. The replaced phrase is the antecedent of the pronoun. A pronoun used for the item questioned in a question is called an interrogative pronoun, such as who. For example, consider the sentence "John gave the coat to Alice." All three nouns in the sentence can be replaced by pronouns to give: "He gave it to her." If the coat, John, and Alice have been previously mentioned, the listener can deduce what the pronouns he, it and her refer to and understand the meaning of the sentence.

Distinctions made in pronouns

Pronouns usually show the basic distinctions of person and number (the most common system distinguishing between first, second and third person, and singular and plural number), but they may also feature other categories such as case (nominative we vs. objective us in English), gender (masculine he vs. feminine she in English), and animacy or humanness (human who vs. nonhuman what in English). These can of course vary greatly. The English dialect spoken in Dorset uses ee for animates and er for inanimates. Some languages distinguish inclusive and exclusive first-person pronouns, letting a listener know whether the person addressed is or is not included in "we". For example, Tok Pisin has seven first-person pronouns according to number (singular, dual, trial, plural) and inclusiveness/exclusiveness, such as mitripela (they two and I) and yumitripela (you two and I). Slavic languages have two different third-person genitive pronouns (one non-reflexive, one reflexive). For example (in Serbian): :Ana je dala Mariji njenu knjigu. = "Ana gave Maria her book." (non-reflexive, that is, Maria's book) :Ana je dala Mariji svoju knjigu. = "Ana gave Maria her book." (reflexive, i.e. Ana's own book) The pronoun may encode politeness and formality. Many languages have different pronouns for informal use or use among friends, and for formal use or use about/towards superiors, especially in the second person. A common pattern in European languages is the so-called T-V distinction (named after the use of pronouns beginning in t- and v- in Romance languages, as in French tu and vous). It is very common for pronouns to show more grammatical distinctions than nouns. The Romance languages have lost the Latin grammatical case for nouns, but preserve the distinction in the pronouns. The same holds for English with respect to its Germanic ancestor. It is also not uncommon for languages not to have third-person pronouns. In those cases the usual way to refer to third persons is by using demonstratives or full noun phrases. Latin made do without third-person pronouns, replacing them by demonstratives (which are in fact the source of personal pronouns in all Romance languages). Some languages lack the grammatical category pronoun entirely. Both Japanese and Korean are such languages. In these languages, instead of pronouns, there is a small set of nouns that reference the discourse participants (as pronouns do in other languages). Most often, these referential nouns are not used, and proper personal names, some deictics and titles are used instead. Usually, once the subject is understood, no explicit reference is made at all. In Japanese sentences, subjects are not obligatory, so the speaker chooses which word to use depending on the rank, job, age, gender, etc. of the speaker and the addressee. For instance, in formal situations, adults usually refer to themselves as watashi or the even more polite watakushi, while young men may use the student-like boku and police officers may use honkan ("this officer"). In informal situations, women may use the colloquial atashi, and men may use the rougher ore.

Pro-drop languages

In some languages, a pronoun is required whenever a noun or noun phrase needs to be referenced, and sometimes even when no such antecedent exists (cf English it rains). In many other languages, however, pronouns can be omitted when unnecessary or when context makes it clear who or what is being talked about. Such languages are called pro-drop languages. In some cases the information about the antecedent is preserved in the verb (through person/number inflection).

English personal pronouns

The English personal pronouns including nonstandard ones and related pronouns and determiners are shown below. Reflexive pronouns are used as the object of a sentence when the subject and object match. Possessive pronouns are used to show ownership. The possessive determiners are more commonly treated as the genitive pronouns, but that analysis doesn't reflect real usage, since his, her, etc. don't substitute a noun or noun phrase. # Ourself is used when we is actually singular as in the royal we, the editorial we, and the nurse's we, e.g. "We seem a bit displeased with ourself, don't we?" # Sometime between 1600 and 1800, the various forms of thou began to pass out of common usage in most places, except in poetry, archaic-style literature, and descriptions of other languages' pronouns. Thou refers to one person who is familiar, though as in other European languages, it is also used of God. Thou still exists in northern England and Scotland, and in some Christian religious communities. See also thou. # The only common distinction between singular and plural you is in the reflexive and emphatic forms. # In Scotland, yous is often used for the second person plural (particularly in the Central Belt area). However, in some parts of the country, ye is used for the plural you. In older times and in some other places today, ye is the nominative case and you is the accusative case. Some English dialects generalised ye, while standard English generalised you. Some dialects use ye as a clipped or clitic form of you. # Although using singular they when sex is not known or is not important is often condemned by traditionalists, it is often found in informal speech. In fact, it is a revival of an earlier usage and may one day become standard usage because it is so common; it also avoids awkward constructions like "he or she". This usage is authorised and preferred by the Australian Government Manual of Style for official usage in government documents. English regional dialects sometimes use variant pronouns.

Relative pronouns

:Main article: Relative pronoun

It is me

In some languages, a personal pronoun has a form called a disjunctive pronoun, which is used when it stands on its own, or with only a copula, such as in answering to the question "Who wrote this page?" English pronouns used in this way have caused some dispute. The natural answer for most English speakers in this context would be "me" (or "it's me"), parallel to "moi" (or "c'est moi") in French. Some grammarians have argued, and persuaded some educators, that the correct answer should be "I" or "it is I" because the full sentence would be "It is I who wrote this page." However, since English has lost noun inflection and relies on word order, using the accusative me after the verb be like other verbs seems very natural to modern speakers. The phrase "it is I" historically came from the Middle English "it am I" and the change from am to is was also a step to the fixed word order of SVO.

Pronouns of other languages

- Chinese pronouns
- Dutch pronouns
- Esperanto pronouns
- French pronouns
- German pronouns
- Ido pronouns
- Italian pronouns
- Portuguese pronouns
- Spanish pronouns
- Vietnamese pronouns

Pro-form

A pro-form is a function word that substitutes a word, phrase, clause, or sentence whose meaning is recoverable from the context, and it is used to avoid redundant expressions. A pro-form is also used for the item questioned in a question, and such a pro-form is called an interrogative pro-form. Pro-forms are divided into several categories according to which part of speech they substitute:
- A pronoun substitutes a noun or a noun phrase with or without a determiner.
- A pro-adjective substitutes an adjective or a phrase functioning as an adjective.
- A pro-adverb substitutes an adverb or a phrase functioning as an adverb.
- A pro-verb substitutes a verb or a verb phrase.
- A pro-sentence substitutes an entire sentence or subsentence. One of the most salient features of modern Indo-European languages is that relative pro-forms and interrogative pro-forms, as well as demonstrative pro-forms in some languages, have identical forms. Consider the two different functions of who in "Who's the criminal who did this?" or the meanings of that in "That's the man that you saw back home." Most other language families don't have this ambiguity, nor do several ancient Indo-European languages. For example, both Latin and Ancient Greek distinguish the relative pro-forms from the interrogative pro-forms.

Table of correlatives

L. L. Zamenhof, the inventor of Esperanto, called a table of systematic interrogative, demonstrative, and quantifier pro-forms and determiners in a language a table of correlatives. The table of correlatives for English follows. Note that while some categories are highly irregular, others (like quantifiers) are not. Some languages may have more categories. For example, while English demonstratives only distinguish proximal (close to the speaker: this, here) and distal (far from the speaker: that, there), Japanese makes a three-way distinction between proximal (close to the speaker: kore, koko), medial (close to the addressee: sore, soko), and distal (far from both: are, asoko). Early Modern English made a similar distinction between this/here, that/there, and yon/yonder. Spanish and other Romance languages show this same three-way distinction, which dates back to Latin.

Noun phrase

In grammatical theory, a noun phrase (abbreviated NP) is a phrase whose head is a noun or a pronoun, optionally accompanied by a set of modifiers. These modifiers may be:
- Determiners: Articles (the, a), demonstratives (this, that), numerals (two, five, etc.), possessives (my, their, etc.), and quantifiers (some, many, etc.) In English determiners are usually placed before the noun.
- Adjectives (the red ball)
- Complements, in the form of an adpositional phrase (the man with a black hat), or a relative clause (the books that I bought yesterday). In English, for some purposes noun phrases can be treated as single grammatical units. This is most noticeable in the syntax of the English genitive case. In a phrase such as The King of Sparta's wife, the possessive clitic s is not added to the King who actually owns the wife, but instead to Sparta, to which the wife only remotely belongs. The clitic modifies the entire phrase King of Sparta. Category:Syntax

Determiner

Determiners are words which quantify or identify nouns. These include articles, quantifiers, demonstratives, and possessive pronouns. (Note that many languages lack one or more of these types of determiners.) In most Indo-European languages, determiners are either independent words or clitics that precede the rest of the noun phrase. In other languages, determiners are prefixed or suffixed to the noun, or even change the noun's form. For example, in Swedish bok "book", when definite, becomes boken "the book" (suffixed definite articles are common in Scandinavian languages). In some constructions, such as those which use the names of school subjects ("Physics uses mathematics"), a determiner is not used. This condition is called the "zero determiner" instance. X-bar theory contends that every noun has a corresponding determiner. In a case where a noun does not have a pronounced determiner, X-bar theory hypothesizes the presence of a zero article.

English determiners

- Articles: a, an, the
- Quantifiers: all, few, many, several, some, every
- Possessive pronouns: her, his, its, my, our, their, your
- Demonstratives: this, that, these, those See also: English grammar Category:Parts of speech ja:決定詞

English language

English is a West Germanic language that is spoken in the United Kingdom, United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, South Africa, and many other countries. English is now the third-most spoken native language worldwide (after Chinese and Hindi), with some 380 million speakers. It has lingua franca status in many parts of the world, due to the military, economic, scientific, political and cultural influence of the British Empire in the 18th and 19th centuries and that of the United States from the 20th century to the present. Through the global influence of native English speakers in cinema, airlines, broadcasting, science, and the Internet in recent decades, English is now the most widely learned second language in the world. Many students worldwide are required to learn some English, and a working knowledge of English is required in many fields and occupations.

History

English is a West Germanic language that originated from the Old Saxon language brought to Britain by Germanic settlers from various parts of northwest Germany. The original Old English language was subsequently influenced by two successive waves of invasion. The first was by speakers of languages in the Scandinavian branch of the Germanic family, who colonised parts of Britain in the 8th and 9th centuries. The second wave was of the Normans in the 11th century, who spoke a variety of French. These two invasions caused English to become "creolised" to some degree (though it was never a full creole in the linguistic sense of the word); creolisation arises from the cohabitation of speakers of different languages, who develop a hybrid tongue for basic communication. Cohabitation with the Scandinavians resulted in a significant grammatical simplification and lexical enrichment of the Anglo-Friesian core of English; the later Norman occupation led to the grafting onto that Germanic core a more elaborate layer of words from the Romance branch of European languages; this new layer entered English through use in the courts and government. Thus, English developed into a "borrowing" language of considerable suppleness and huge vocabulary. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, around the year 449, Vortigern, King of the British Isles, invited the "Angle kin" (Angles led by Hengest and Horsa) to help him against the Picts. In return, the Angles were granted lands in the south-east. Further aid was sought, and in response "came men of Ald Seaxum of Anglum of Iotum" (Saxons, Angles, and Jutes). The Chronicle talks of a subsequent influx of settlers who eventually established seven kingdoms, known as the heptarchy. Modern scholarship considers most of this story to be legendary and politically motivated. These Germanic invaders dominated the original Celtic-speaking inhabitants, whose languages survived largely in Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, and Ireland. The dialects spoken by the invaders formed what would be called Old English, which resembled some coastal dialects in what are now the Netherlands and north-west Germany. Later, it was strongly influenced by the North Germanic language Norse, spoken by the Vikings who settled mainly in the north-east (see Jorvik). The new and the earlier settlers spoke languages from different branches of the Germanic family; many of their lexical roots were the same or similar, although their grammars were more distant, including the prefixes, suffixes and inflections of many of their words. The Germanic language of these Old English inhabitants of Britain would be partly creolised by the contact with Norse invaders. This resulted in a stripping away of much of the grammar of Old English, including gender and case, with the notable exception of the pronouns; thus, the language became simpler and plainer. The most famous work from the Old English period is the epic poem "Beowulf", by an unknown poet. For the 300 years following the Norman Conquest in 1066, the Norman kings and the high nobility spoke only a variety of French. A large number of Norman words were assimilated into Old English, with some words doubling for Old English words (for instance, ox/beef, sheep/mutton). The Norman influence reinforced the continual evolution of the language over the following centuries, resulting in what is now referred to as Middle English. Among the changes was a broadening in the use of a unique aspect of English grammar, the "continuous" tenses, with the suffix "-ing". During the 15th century, Middle English was transformed by the Great Vowel Shift, the spread of a standardised London-based dialect in government and administration, and the standardising effect of printing. Modern English can be traced back to around the time of William Shakespeare. The most well-known work from the Middle English period is Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales.

Classification and related languages

The English language belongs to the western subbranch of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European family of languages. The closest living relative of English is Scots (Lallans), a West Germanic language spoken mostly in Scotland and parts of Northern Ireland. Like English, Scots is a direct descendant of Old English, also known as Anglo-Saxon. After Scots, the next closest relative is Frisian—spoken in the Netherlands and Germany. Other less closely related living languages include Dutch, Afrikaans, German, Plattdüütsch and the Scandinavian languages. Many French words are also intelligible to an English speaker (pronunciations are not always identical, of course), because English absorbed a tremendous amount of vocabulary from French, via the Norman language after the Norman conquest and directly from French in further centuries; as a result, a substantial share of English vocabulary is quite close to the French, with some minor spelling differences (word endings, use of old French spellings, etc.), as well as occasional differences in meaning.

Geographic distribution

Norman conquest English is the second or third most widely spoken language in the world today; a total of 600–700 million people use English regularly. About 377 million people use English as their mother tongue, and an equal number of people use it as their second or foreign language. It is used widely in either the public or private sphere in more than 100 countries all over the world. In addition, the language has occupied a primary place in international academic and business communities. The current status of the English language compares with that of Latin in the past. English is the primary language in Antigua and Barbuda, Australia (Australian English), the Bahamas, Barbados (Caribbean English), Bermuda, Belize, Canada (Canadian English), the Cayman Islands, Dominica, the Falkland Islands, Gibraltar, Grenada, Guernsey, Guyana, Ireland (Irish English), Isle of Man, Jamaica (Jamaican English), Jersey, Montserrat, New Zealand (New Zealand English), Saint Helena, Saint Lucia, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Trinidad and Tobago, the Turks and Caicos Islands, the United Kingdom (various forms of British English), the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the United States. English is also an important minority language of South Africa (South African English), and in several other former colonies and current dependent territories of the United Kingdom and the United States, for example Guam and Mauritius. In Hong Kong, English is an official language and is widely used in business activities. It is taught from kindergarten, and is the medium of instruction for a few primary schools, many secondary schools and all universities. Substantial numbers of students acquire native-speaker level. It is so widely used and spoken that it is inadequate to say it is merely a second or foreign language, though there are still many people in Hong Kong with poor or no command of English. The majority of English native speakers (67 to 70 per cent) live in the United States. Although the U.S. federal government has no official languages, it has been given official status by 27 of the 50 state governments, most of which have declared English their sole official language. Hawaii, Louisiana, and New Mexico have also designated Hawaiian, French, and Spanish, respectively, as official languages in conjunction with English. In many other countries where English is not a major first language, it is an official language; these countries include Cameroon, Fiji, the Federated States of Micronesia, Ghana, Gambia, India, Kiribati, Lesotho, Liberia, Kenya, Namibia, Nigeria, Malta, the Marshall Islands, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, Rwanda, the Solomon Islands, Samoa, Sierra Leone, Swaziland, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe. English is the most widely learned and used foreign language in the world, and as such, many linguists believe it is no longer the exclusive cultural emblem of "native English speakers", but rather a language that is absorbing aspects of cultures worldwide as it grows in use. Others believe that there are limits to how far English can go in suiting everyone for communication purposes. It is the language most often studied as a foreign language in Europe (32.6 per cent), followed by French, German, and Spanish. It is also the most studied in Japan, South Korea and in the Republic of China (Taiwan), where it is compulsory for most high school students. See English as an additional language.

English as a global language

See also: English on the Internet Because English is so widely spoken, it has been referred to as a "global language". While English is not the official language in many countries, it is the language most often taught as a second language around the world. It is also, by international treaty, the official language for aircraft/airport communication. Its widespread acceptance as a first or second language is the main indication of its global status. There are numerous arguments for and against English as a global language. On one hand, having a global language aids in communication and in pooling information (for example, in the scientific community). On the other hand, it excludes those who, for one reason or another, are not fluent. It can also marginalise populations whose first language is not the global language, and lead to a cultural hegemony of the populations speaking the global language as a first language. Most of these arguments hold for any candidate for a global language, though the last two counter-arguments do not hold for languages not belonging to any ethnic group (like Esperanto). A secondary concern with respect to the spread of global languages (English, Spanish, etc.) is the resulting disappearance of minority languages, often along with the cultures and religions that are primarily transmitted in those languages. English has been implicated in a number of historical and ongoing so-called "language deaths" and "linguicides" around the world, many of which have also led to the loss of cultural heritage. In the Americas, Native American nations have been most strongly affected by this phenomenon.

Dialects and regional variants

The expansiveness of the British and the Americans has spread English throughout the globe. Because of its global spread, it has bred a variety of English dialects and English-based creoles and pidgins. The major varieties of English in most cases contain several subvarieties, such as Cockney within British English, Newfoundland English within Canadian English, and African American Vernacular English ("Ebonics") within American English. English is considered a pluricentric language, with no variety being clearly considered the only standard. Some consider Scots as an English dialect. Pronunciation, grammar and lexis differ, sometimes substantially. The Scottish dialect retains many German aspects including guttural pronunciations. Because of English's wide use as a second language, English speakers can have many different accents, which may identify the speaker's native dialect or language. For more distinctive characteristics of regional accents, see Regional accents of English speakers. For more distinctive characteristics of regional dialects, see List of dialects of the English language. Many countries around the world have blended English words and phrases into their everyday speech and refer to the result by a colloquial name that implies its bilingual origins, which parallels the English language's own addiction to loan words and borrowings. Named examples of these ad-hoc constructions, distinct from pidgin and creole languages, include Engrish, Wasei-eigo, Franglais and Spanglish. (See List of dialects of the English language for a complete list.) Europanto combines many languages but has an English core.

Constructed variants of English

- Basic English is simplified for easy international use. It is used by some aircraft manufacturers and other international businesses to write manuals and communicate. Some English schools in the Far East teach it as an initial practical subset of English.
- Special English is a simplified version of English used by the Voice of America. It uses a vocabulary of 1500 words.
- English reform is an attempt to improve collectively upon the English language.
- Seaspeak and the related Airspeak and Policespeak, all based on restricted vocabularies, were designed by Edward Johnson in the 1980s to aid international co-operation and communication in specific areas.
- European English is a new variant of the English language created to become the common language in Europe.

Sounds

Vowels

Notes: It is the vowels that differ most from region to region. Where symbols appear in pairs, the first corresponds to the sounds used in North American English, the second corresponds to English spoken elsewhere. #North American English lacks this sound; words with this sound are pronounced with or . According to The Canadian Oxford Dictionary (1998), this sound is present in Standard Canadian English. #Many dialects of North American English do not have this vowel. See cot-caught merger. #The North American variation of this sound is a rhotic vowel. #Many speakers of North American English do not distinguish between these two unstressed vowels. For them, roses and Rosa's are pronounced the same, and the symbol usually used is schwa . #This sound is often transcribed with or with . #The letter U can represent either /u/ or the iotated vowel /ju/.

Consonants

This is the English Consonantal System using symbols from the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). #The velar nasal is a non-phonemic allophone of /n/ in some northerly British accents, appearing only before /g/. In all other dialects it is a separate phoneme, although it only occurs in syllable codas. #The alveolar flap is an allophone of /t/ and /d/ in unstressed syllables in North American English and increasingly in Australian English. This is the sound of "tt" or "dd" in the words latter and ladder, which are homophones in North American English. This is the same sound represented by single "r" in some varieties of Spanish. #In some dialects, such as Cockney, the interdentals /θ/ and /ð/ are usually merged with /f/ and /v/, and in others, like African American Vernacular English, /ð/ is merged with /d/. In some Irish varieties, /θ/ and /ð/ become the corresponding dental plosives, which then contrast with the usual alveolar plosives. #The sounds are labialised in some dialects. Labialisation is never contrastive in initial position and therefore is sometimes not transcribed. #The voiceless velar fricative /x/ is used only by Scottish or Welsh speakers of English for Scots/Gaelic words such as loch or by some speakers for loanwords from German and Hebrew like Bach or Chanukah /xanuka/, or in some dialects such as Scouse (Liverpool) where the affricate [kx] is used instead of /k/ in words such as docker . Most native speakers have a great deal of trouble pronouncing it correctly when learning a foreign language. Most speakers use the sounds [k] and [h] instead. #Voiceless w is found in Scottish, Irish, some upper-class British, some eastern United States, and New Zealand accents. In all other dialects it is merged with /w/.

Voicing and Aspiration

Voicing and aspiration of stop consonants in English depend on dialect and context, but a few general rules can be given:
- Voiceless plosives and affricates (//, //, //, and //) are aspirated when they are word-initial or begin a stressed syllable and are not part of a consonant cluster—compare pin [] and spin [].
- In some dialects, aspiration extends to unstressed syllables as well.
- In other dialects, such as Indian English, most or all voiceless stops may remain unaspirated.
- Word-initial voiced plosives may be devoiced in some dialects.
- Word-terminal voiceless plosives may be unreleased or accompanied by a glottal stop in some dialects (e.g. many varieties of American English)—examples: tap [], sack [].
- Word-terminal voiced plosives may be devoiced in some dialects (e.g. some varieties of American English)—examples: sad [], bag []. In other dialects they are fully voiced in final position, but only partially voiced in initial position.

Intonation

Tone groups

English is an Intonation language. This means that the pitch of the voice is used syntactically, for example, to convey surprise and irony, or to change a statement into a question. In English, intonation patterns are on groups of words, which are called tone groups, tone units, intonation groups or sense groups. Tone groups are said on a single breath and, as a consequence, are of limited length, more often being on average five words long or lasting roughly two seconds. The structure of tone groups can have a crucial impact on the meaning of what is said. For example: :- :- :-

Characteristics of intonation

Each tone group can be subdivided into syllables, which can either be stressed (strong) or unstressed (weak). There is always a strong syllable, which is stressed more than the others. This is called the nuclear syllable. For example: :That | was | the | best | thing | you | could | have | done! Here, all syllables are unstressed, except the syllables/words "best" and "done", which are stressed. "Best" is stressed harder and, therefore, is the nuclear syllable. The nuclear syllable carries the main point the speaker wishes to make. For example: :John had stolen that money. (... not I) :John had stolen that money. (... you said he hadn't) :John had stolen that money. (... he wasn't given it) :John had stolen that money. (... not this money) :John had stolen that money. (... not something else) The nuclear syllable is spoken louder than all the others and has a characteristic change of pitch. The changes of pitch most commonly encountered in English are the rising pitch and the falling pitch, although the fall-rising pitch and/or the rise-falling pitch are sometimes used. For example: :When do you want to be paid? :Nów? (rising pitch. In this case, it denotes a question: can I be paid now?) :Nòw (falling pitch. In this case, it denotes a statement: I choose to be paid now)

Grammar

English grammar is based on its Germanic roots, though some scholars during the 1700s and 1800s attempted to impose Latin grammar upon it, with little success. English is just slightly inflected, much less so than most Indo-European languages. It compensates for this by placing more grammatical information in auxiliary words and word order. Unlike most other Indo-European languages, modern nominal groups (nouns) in English do not carry gender, although an archaic form of gender is technically assigned as either masculine, feminine, neuter or common. Engendered nouns are only apparent in special cases, such as "I loved that ship as if she were my own", where the noun "ship" is referred to by its feminine pronoun.

Vocabulary

Almost without exception, Germanic words (which include all the basics such as pronouns and conjunctions) are shorter and more informal. Latinate words are often regarded as more elegant or educated. However, the excessive use of Latinate words is often mistaken for either pretentiousness (as in the stereotypical policeman's talk of "apprehending the suspect") or obfuscation (as in a military document which says "neutralise" when it means "kill"). George Orwell's essay Politics and the English Language gives a thorough treatment of this feature of English. An English speaker is often able to choose between Germanic and Latinate synonyms: "come" or "arrive"; "sight" or "vision"; "freedom" or "liberty"—and sometimes also between a word inherited through French and a borrowing direct from Latin of the same root word: "oversee", "survey" or "supervise". The richness of the language is that such synonyms have slightly different meanings, enabling the language to be used in a very flexible way to express fine variations or shades of thought. List of Germanic and Latinate equivalents In everyday speech the majority of words will normally be Germanic. If a speaker wishes to make a forceful point in an argument in a very blunt way, Germanic words will usually be chosen. A majority of Latinate words (or at least a majority of content words) will normally be used in more formal speech and writing, such as a courtroom or an encyclopedia article. English is noted for the vast size of its active vocabulary and its fluidity. English easily accepts technical terms into common usage and imports new words which often come into common usage. In addition, slang provides new meanings for old words. In fact this fluidity is so pronounced that a distinction often needs to be made between formal forms of English and contemporary usage. See also sociolinguistics.

Number of words in English

As the General Explanations at the beginning of the Oxford English Dictionary state: :The Vocabulary of a widely diffused and highly cultivated living language is not a fixed quantity circumscribed by definite limits.... there is absolutely no defining line in any direction: the circle of the English language has a well-defined centre but no discernible circumference. The vocabulary of English is undoubtedly vast, but assigning a specific number to its size is more a matter of definition than of calculation. Unlike other languages, there is no Academy to define officially accepted words. Neologisms are coined regularly in medicine, science and technology—some enter wide usage; others remain restricted to small circles. Foreign words used in immigrant communities often make their way into wider English usage. Archaic, dialectal, and regional words might be considered "English" or not. The Oxford English Dictionary (2nd edition) includes over 500,000 headwords, following a rather inclusive policy: :It embraces not only the standard language of literature and conversation, whether current at the moment, or obsolete, or archaic, but also the main technical vocabulary, and a large measure of dialectal usage and slang (Supplement to the OED, 1933). The difficulty of defining the number of words is compounded by the emergence of new versions of English, such as Asian English.

Word origins

One of the consequences of the French influence is that the vocabulary of English is, to a certain extent, divided between those words which are Germanic (mostly Old English) and those which are "Latinate" (Latin-derived, mostly from Norman French but some borrowed directly from Latin). A computerised survey of about 80,000 words in the old Shorter Oxford Dictionary (3rd ed.) was published in Ordered Profusion by Thomas Finkenstaedt and Dieter Wolff (1973) which estimated the origin of English words as follows:
- French, including Old French and early Anglo-French: 28.3%
- Latin, including modern scientific and technical Latin: 28.24%
- Old and Middle English, Old Norse, and Dutch: 25%
- Greek: 5.32%
- No etymology given: 4.03%
- Derived from proper names: 3.28%
- All other languages contributed less than 1% James D. Nicoll made the oft-quoted observation: "The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and riffle their pockets for new vocabulary." [http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=1990May15.155309.8892%40watdragon.waterloo.edu&oe=UTF-8&output=gplain]

Writing system

English is written using the Latin alphabet. The spelling system or orthography of English is historical, not phonological. The spelling of words often diverges considerably from how they are spoken, and English spelling is often considered to be one of the most difficult to learn of any language that uses an alphabet. See English orthography.

Basic sound-letter correspondence

Written accents

English includes some words which can be written with accent marks. These words have mostly been imported from other languages, usually French. But it is increasingly rare for writers of English to actually use the accent marks for common words, even in very formal writing, to the point where actually writing the accent may be interpreted as a sign of pretension—though this view is counterbalanced by the view that fine typography should preserve accents, especially where it makes a distinction in pronunciation (compare façade vs. facade which would rhyme with cascade). The strongest tendency to retain the accent is in words that are atypical of English morphology and therefore still perceived as slightly foreign. For example, café has a pronounced final e, which would be silent by the normal English pronunciation rules. Some examples: ångström, appliqué, attaché, blasé, bric-à-brac, café, cliché, crème, crêpe, façade, fiancé(e), flambé, naïve, né(e), papier-mâché, passé, piñata, protégé, raison d'être, résumé, risqué, über-, vis-à-vis, voilà. For a more complete list, see List of English words with diacritics. Some words such as rôle and hôtel were first seen with accents when they were borrowed into English, but now the accent is almost never used. The words were considered very French borrowings when first used in English, even accused by some of being foreign phrases used where English alternatives would suffice, but today their French origin is largely forgotten. The accent on "élite" has disappeared from most publications today, but Time magazine still uses it. For some words such as "soupçon" however, the only spelling found in English dictionaries (the OED and others) uses the diacritic. Italics, with appropriate accents, are generally applied to foreign terms that are uncommonly used in or have not been assimilated into English: for example, adiós, coup d'état, crème brûlée, pièce de résistance, raison d'être, über (übermensch), vis-à-vis. It is also possible to use a diaeresis to indicate a syllable break, but again this is often left out or a hyphen used instead. Examples: coöperate (or co-operate), daïs, naïve, noël, reëlect (or re-elect). One publication that still uses a diaeresis to indicate a syllable break is the New Yorker magazine. Written accents are also used occasionally in poetry and scripts for dramatic performances to indicate that a certain normally unstressed syllable in a word should be stressed for dramatic effect, or to keep with the meter of the poetry. This use is frequently seen in archaic and pseudoarchaic writings with the "-ed" suffix, to indicate that the "e" should be fully pronounced, as with cursèd. In certain older texts (typically in Commonwealth English), the use of ligatures is common in words such as archæology, œsophagus, and encyclopædia. Such words have Latin or Greek origin. Nowadays, the ligatures have been generally replaced in Commonwealth English by the separated letters "ae" and "oe" ("archaeology", "oesophagus") and in American English by "e" ("archeology", "esophagus"). However, the spellings "oeconomy" and "oecology" are now generally replaced by "economy" and "ecology" in Commonwealth English, making these spellings the same as in American English.
See also

- English literature
- Formal written English - regional differences
- List of languages
- Common phrases in various languages
Dialects

- American and British English differences
- English speaking Europe
- General American
- List of dialects of the English language
Pronunciation

- General American
- International Phonetic Alphabet for English
- List of words of disputed pronunciation
- Non-native pronunciations of English
- Phonemic differentiation in English
- Received Pronunciation
- Regional accents of English speakers
- Rhotic and non-rhotic accents
Social, cultural or political

- English as a lingua franca for Europe
- English as an additional language
- English on the Internet
- Foreign language influences in English
- Languages in the United States
- Lists of English words of international origin
- Anglosphere
- Anglo-Saxon
Grammar

- English declension
- English plural
- English verb conjugation
- Initial-stress-derived noun
- Present progressive tense
Usage

- Dictionary
- Like
- List of archaic English words and their modern equivalents
- List of unusual English words
- Longest word in English
- Misspelling
- Gender-neutral language
- Singular they
- Siamese twins (English language)
External links

- [http://www.abroadlanguages.com/al/english/ Learning English abroad] and online. With dictionaries, games, penpals, etc.
- [http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/routesofenglish/index.shtml BBC - Radio 4 - Routes of English]
- [http://www.englishtenseswithcartoons.com Short Discriptions of the English Tenses]
- [http://www.ego4u.com/ English Grammar Online] free exercises, explanations, games and teaching materials on English as a foreign language
- [http://www.eslbase.com/ TEFL] - Teaching English as a Foreign Language - information and advice
- http://www.teach-yourself-english.com/ Easy-going learning aid
- [http://www.englisch-hilfen.de/en Learning English Online] grammar, vocabulary, exercises, exams - English as a second language.
- [http://www.english.hb.pl Pako's English Page - Articles and advice on learning English]
- [http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=eng Ethnologue report for English]
- [http://www.LanguageMonitor.com LanguageMonitor] - Watchdog on contemporary English usage
- [http://www.vec.ca/english/1/english.cfm Development of English]
- [http://www.esu.org English Speaking Union]
- [http://www2.ignatius.edu/faculty/turner/languages.htm The World's Most Widely Spoken Languages]
- [http://www.antimoon.com/ Antimoon - How to learn English] - Advice and inspiration for learners of English.
- [http://www.zozanga.com/ Zozanga ESL - Learn Online English] How to learn English.
- [http://www.quiz-tree.com/English_Spelling_main.html Free English spelling quizzes]
- [http://inenglishofcourse.pl Conversation and Resource Point for Learners of English]
- [http://www.globalenglishsalon.com Global English Salon] - Listen to English online free.
- [http://www.loecsen.com/travel/discover_pop.php?lang=en&to_lang=2&learn-English/ Learn and listen to useful expressions in English] Each expression is presented with an audio recording and an illustration
- [http://www.whatdoesthatmean.com What Does That Mean?] A wiki based lexicon of English idioms from around the world
- [http://www1.ku-eichstaett.de/SLF/EngluVglSW/ELiX/bge.pdf Basic Global English]
Dictionaries

- [http://www.oed.com Oxford English Dictionary] The definitive record of the English language
- [http://dicts.info/dictlist1.php All free English dictionaries] Collection of many free English dictionaries.
- [http://dictionary.cambridge.org Cambridge Dictionary]
- [http://www.freelang.net/dictionary/french.html Freelang - French-English Dictionary made by Bertrand Cornu]
Further reading

- Baugh AC and Cable T. A history of the English language (5th ed), Rouledge, 2002 (ISBN 0415280990_
- Crystal, D. The Cambridge encyclopedia of the English language (2nd ed), Cambridge University Press, 2003 (ISBN 0521530334)
- Halliday, MAK. An introduction to functional grammar (2nd ed), London, Edward Arnold, 1994 (ISBN 0340557826)
- McArthur, T (ed). The Oxford Companion to the English Language, Oxford University Press, 1992 (ISBN 019214183X)
- Robinson, Orrin, "Old English and Its Closest Relatives", Stanford Univ Press, 1992 (ISBN 0-8047-2221-8) English language Category:Languages of Fiji Category:Languages of Guam Category:Languages of Hong Kong Category:Languages of Singapore Category:Languages of the Philippines Category:Languages of the United Kingdom Category:Languages of the United States Category:Languages of Canada Category:Languages of New Zealand Category:Languages of India als:Englische Sprache ko:영어 ms:Bahasa Inggeris zh-min-nan:Eng-gí ja:英語 nb:Engelsk språk simple:English language th:ภาษาอังกฤษ

Interrogative pronoun

An interrogative word (also known simply as an interrogative) is a function word used for the item questioned in a question. It is also called a wh-word in the field of linguistics because most of the interrogative words in English start with wh-. List of interrogative words in English:
- interrogative determiner
- which, what
- whose (interrogative possessive determiner)
- interrogative pro-form
- interrogative pronoun
- who, whom (human)
- what, which (nonhuman)
- interrogative pro-adverb
- where (location)
- whence (source)
- whither (goal)
- when (time)
- how (manner)
- why, wherefore (reason) Interrogative words can also be used as relative pro-forms in English.

Grammatical number

Number, in linguistics, is a grammatical category used to express the quantity of objects referred to by a noun. According to this definition, number is inherently expressed in nouns and pronouns, and secondarily, via agreement, in adjectives and verbs. The term number is also used to describe the distinction between certain grammatical aspects that indicate the number of times an event occurs (e.g. semelfactive aspect, iterative aspect, etc.). For that use, see Grammatical aspect. Most languages of the world have formal means to express differences of number. The most widespread distinction, as found in English and many other languages, involves a simple two-way number contrast between singular and plural (car / cars; child / children, etc.). Other more elaborate systems of number are described below. That said, there are some languages that express quantity only by lexical means, in such a way that we can say that they lack a category of number. For instance, in , neither nouns nor verbs carry any grammatical information concerning number: such information can only be conveyed by lexical items such as khlah 'some', pii-bey 'a few', and so on.

Types of number

As we have seen, in many languages number is limited to two categories: singular number, distinguishing between one referent and plural number, distinguishing more than one referent. However, other instances of number exist, including:
- Nullar number, for zero instances of the referent (e.g. in Latvian)
- Dual number, for two instances of the referent (e.g. in Arabic, Slovenian, Ancient Greek and others)
- Trial number, for three instances of the referent (e.g. in some Australian and Austronesian languages including Tolomako)
- Paucal number, for a few (as opposed to many) instances of the referent (e.g. in Hopi, Warlpiri and in Arabic for some nouns)
- Collective number, for many referents viewed as a single collection (e.g. in Breton, Japanese and others)
- Distributive plural number, for many instances viewed as independent individuals (e.g. in Navajo) Many currently spoken languages, and nearly all modern Indo-European languages, use only plural and singular number. Some languages, particularly analytic languages, completely lack instances of grammatical number (e.g. Mandarin) There is a hierarchy among the categories of number: No language distinguishes a trial unless having a dual, and no language has dual without a plural (Greenberg 1972). Some languages differentiate between a basic form (collective) which is indifferent in respect to number, and a more complicated derived form for single entities (singulative). For example, in Tlingit (a Native-American language spoken in Alaska), the plural of tɬingit ("man") is tɬingitq, which really refers to a unitary group of men, not to a random unconnected group of men. Similarly, the plural of q'aat ("island"), which is q'aat'q'i, really means something like "archipelago".

Expression of number

Synthetic languages typically distinguish grammatical number by inflection; in contrast, Analytic languages such as Chinese don't indicate number morphologically, but use contexts and quantifiers. Below are some examples of number affixes for nouns (where the inflecting morpheme is underlined):
- Suffixes
- English: cat (singular) ~ cats (plural) ; also ox ~ oxen
- French: chat ("cat"/singular) ~ chats ("cat"/plural) (but see comment below)
- Japanese: 私 watashi ("I"/general) ~ 私たち watashitachi ("I"/collective)
- Slovenian: lipa ("tree"/singular) ~ lipi ("tree/dual) ~ lipe ("tree/plural)
- Turkish: adam ("man"/singular) ~ adamlar ("man"/plural),
- Prefixes
- Swahili: mtoto ("child"/singular) ~ watoto ("child"/plural) (prefixes are also common in other Bantu languages)
- Simulfixes
- Arabic: كِتَاب kitāb ("book"/singular) ~ كُتُب kutub ("book"/plural)
- English: man (singular) ~ men (plural) ; also goose ~ geese
- German: Vater ("father"/singular) ~ Väter ("father"/plural)
- Reduplication (partial or full) :
- Indonesian: orang (person/singular) ~ orang-orang (person/plural)
- Japanese: 人 hito (person/general) ~ 人人 hito-bito (person/collective)
- Somali: buug (book/singular) ~ buug-ag (book/plural)
- Ilokano: ti balay (house/singular) ~ dagiti balbalay (house/plural) Plurality is sometimes marked by a specialized particle. This is frequent in Australian and Austronesian languages, such as Tagalog mga: bahay "house"; mga bahay "houses"). In Kapampangan, certain nouns optionally denote plurality by secondary stress, ing laláki (man/singular) & ing babái (woman/singular) become ding láláki (man/plural) & ding bábái (woman/plural). In most languages, the singular is formally unmarked, whereas the plural is marked in some way. Some languages (typically the Bantu languages) mark both the singular and the plural, for instance Swahili (see example above). The third logical possibility, rarely found in languages, is unmarked plural contrasting with marked singular. An alleged example of this situation is Desano, a Tucanoan language of Colombia. Cf. gasi "canoes" vs. gasiru "canoe"; yukü "trees" vs. yukügü "tree". Many languages employ number agreement, where the number must be marked similarly in all words referring to the same object. For example, in Finnish, we have Yöt ovat pimeitä "nights are dark" ("night-PL is-PL dark-PL-partitive"), where each word referring to the parent noun (yö "night") must be pluralized (PL), because the parent noun is pluralized (yöt "nights"). This can produce grammatical controversies with the T-V distinction, where the addressee is pluralized to show politeness.
Obligatority of number marking
In many languages, such as English, number is obligatorily expressed in every grammatical context; in other languages, however, number expression is limited to certain classes of nouns, such as animates (as with the suffix -men in Mandarin) or referentially prominent nouns (as with proximate forms in most Algonquian languages, opposed to referentially less prominent obviative forms). A very common situation is that plural number is not marked if there is any other overt indication of number (as for example in Hungarian: virág "flower"; virágok "flowers"; hat virág "six flowers").
Number in specific languages

Indo-European

English
English is typical of languages that have only singular and plural number. English does not distinguish among dual, trial, or paucal number. The plural form of a word is usually created by adding the suffix -s. Pronouns are irregular precisely because they are so common, such as the singular I and the plural we. See English plural for detail.
Slovene
Slovene, a Slavic language, is more complicated:
- Babarija (old wives tale) (singular), babariji (two old wives tales) (dual), babarije (three old wives tales), baberij (five or more old wives tales)
- Hiša (house) (singular), hiši (two houses) (dual), tri hiše (three houses) (plural), šest hiš (six houses) (plural)
- Miš (mouse) (singular), miši (two or three mice) (dual := plural)
- Jaz (I) (singular), midva/midve (we) (dual + [Masculine/Feminine gender]), mi/me (we) (plural [Ma/Fe gender])
- Vrata (one door) (singular), dvoje vrat (two doors) (dual), tri vrata (three doors) (plural), [plural noun with different or same form]
- Babine (afterbirth period) (archaic meaning) (singular), babini (two afterbirth periods) (dual), babine (three afterbirth periods), [plural noun with different or same form]
- Človeštvo (mankind) (singular), človeštvi (two mankind) (dual), človeštva (three mankind), [collective noun with different form]
- When a number reaches one hundred and one(two) (or several hundred or thousand), singular and dual are used again. (ena knjiga (one book) (singular),dve knjigi (two books) (dual), pet knjig (five books) (plural), sto ena knjiga (101 books) sto dve knjigi(102 books))
- These and similar examples are very often used incorrectly, even in published or electronic dictionaries.
French
In its written form, French, a Romance language, declines nouns for number (singular or plural). In terms of pronunciation, however, the majority of nouns (and adjectives) are not actually declined for number. This is because the -s suffix, which marks plural nouns and adjectives, is not generally pronounced (but see liaison for an exception), and thus does not really show anything; the plural article or determiner is the real indicator of plurality. However, plural nouns still exist in spoken French because some irregular nouns form plurals in a way that is pronounced differently: for example, cheval ("horse") is pronounced , while chevaux ("horses") is pronounced . Similarly, some irregular adjectives do decline for number in spoken French.
Afro-Asiatic

Hebrew
In Hebrew, a Semitic language, most nouns have only singular and plural forms, such as sefer/sfarim ("book/books"), but some have singular, dual, and plural forms, such as yom/yomaim/yamim ("day/two days/days"). Some words occur so often in pairs that what used to be the dual form is now the general plural, such as ayin/eynayim ("eye/eyes," used even in a sentence like, "The spider has eight eyes."). Adjectives, verbs, and pronouns have only singular and plural, with the plural forms of these being used with dual nouns.
Inverse number
The languages of the Kiowa-Tanoan family have three numbers — singular, dual, and plural — and exhibit an unusual system, called inverse number (or number toggling), of marking number. In this scheme, every countable noun has what might be called its "inherent" or "expected" numbers, and is unmarked for these numbers. When a noun appears in an inverse ("unexpected") number, it is inflected to mark this. For example, in Jemez, where nouns take the ending -sh to denote an inverse number, there are four noun classes, as follows: As can be seen, class-I nouns are inherently singular, class-II nouns are inherently plural, class-III nouns are inherently singular or plural. Class-IV nouns cannot be counted and are never marked with -sh. From (Sprott 1992, p. 53). A similar system is observed in (Kiowa is distantly related to Tanoan languages like Jemez):
Effect of number on verbs and other parts of speech
Not only nouns can be declined by number. In many languages, adjectives are declined according to the number of the noun they modify. For example, in French, one may say un arbre vert (a green tree), and des arbres verts ([some] green trees). The word vert (green), in the singular, becomes verts for the plural (unlike English green, which remains green). In many languages, verbs are conjugated by number as well. Using French as an example again, one says je vois (I see), but nous voyons (we see). The verb voir (to see) in the first person changes from vois in singular, to voyons in plural. In everyday English, this occurs in the third person (she runs, they run), but not first or second except with the verb to be in the first person. Normally verbs agree with their subject noun in number. But in Ancient Greek and Sanskrit neuter plurals took a singular verb. In English, or at least British English, singular nouns collectively referring to people may take plural verbs, as the committee are meeting; use of this varies by dialect and level of formality. Other qualifiers may also agree in number. The English article the does not, the demonstratives this, that do, becoming these, those, and the article a, an is omitted or changed to some in the plural. In French and German, the definite articles have gender distinctions in the singular but not the plural. In the Romance languages, including Portuguese, the indefinite article (um, uma) has plural forms (uns, umas).
See also

- Collective noun
- Grammar
- Mass noun
- Measure word
Bibliography

- Beard, R. (1992) "Number". En W. Bright (ed.) International Encyclopedia of Linguistics.
- Corbett, G. (2000) Number. Cambridge University Press.
- Greenberg, Joseph H. (1972) "Numeral classifiers and substantival number: Problems in the genesis of a linguistic type". Working Papers on Language Universals (Stanford University) 9. 1--39.
- Merrifield, William (1959). "Classification of Kiowa nouns." International Journal of American Linguistics, 25, 269-271.
- Mithun, Marianne (1999). The languages of native North America (pp. 81-82, 444-445). Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-23228-7.
- Sprott, Robert (1992). Jemez syntax. (Doctoral dissertation, University of Chicago, USA).
- Sten, Holgar (1949) Le nombre grammatical. (Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Copenhague, 4.) Copenhagen: Munksgaard.
- Watkins, Laurel J.; & McKenzie, Parker. (1984). A grammar of Kiowa. Studies in the anthropology of North American Indians. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. ISBN 0-8032-4727-3.
- Weigel, William F. (1993). Morphosyntactic toggles. Papers from the 29th Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society (Vol. 29, pp. 467-478). Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.
- Wiese, Heike (2003). Numbers, language, and the human mind. Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-83182-2.
- Wonderly, Gibson, and Kirk (1954). "Number in Kiowa: Nouns, demonstratives, and adjectives." International Journal of American Linguistics, 20, 1-7.
Notes
# See, for example, the Linguistic sketch in [http://www.lmp.ucla.edu/Profile.aspx?LangID=75 Khmer] article at [http://www.lmp.ucla.edu/ UCLA Language Materials project]. Category:Grammar
- ja:数 (文法)

Nominative case

The nominative case is a grammatical case for a noun, which generally marks the subject of a verb (as opposed to its object or other verb arguments). The nominative case is the usual, natural form (more technically, the least marked) of certain parts of speech, such as nouns, adjectives, pronouns and less frequently numerals and participles, and sometimes does not indicate any special relationship with other parts of speech. Therefore, in some languages the nominative case is unmarked, that is, the nominative word is the base form or stem, with no inflection; alternatively, it may said to be marked by a null morpheme. Moreover, in most languages with a nominative case, the nominative form is the lemma; that is, it is the one used to cite a word, to list it as a dictionary entry, etc. Nominative cases are found in Latin and Old English, among other languages. English still retains some nominative pronouns, as opposed to the accusative case or oblique case: I (accusative, me), we (accusative, us), he (accusative, him), she (accusative, her) and they (accusative, them). An archaic usage is the singular second-person pronoun thou (accusative thee). A special case is the word you: Originally ye was its nominative form and you the accusative, but over time you has come to be used for the nominative as well. The term "nominative case" is most properly used in the discussion of nominative-accusative languages, such as Latin, , and most modern Western European languages. Some writers on English employ the term "subjective case" instead of nominative, in order to draw attention to the differences between the "standard" generic nominative and the way it is used in English. In active-stative languages there is a case sometimes called nominative which is the most marked case, and is used for the subject of a transitive verb or a voluntary subject of an intransitive verb, but not for an involuntary subject of an intransitive verb; since such languages are a relatively new field of study, there is no standard name for this case.

Grammatical gender

All languages can use different nouns to differentiate between people of different biological or social gender, e.g., male and female, man and woman, uncle and aunt, but not all have genders in the grammatical sense. Grammatical gender is a type of inflection. We say that a language has grammatical genders, or noun classes, when nouns are divided into groups according to natural characteristics of the concepts which they represent. This division can manifest itself in two ways: through morphological characteristics of the nouns themselves, and through morphological changes in other parts of speech that refer to nouns (gender agreement). For example, in Spanish, most nouns that end in -o are masculine and most nouns that end in -a are feminine. Thus, niño means “boy”, and niña means “girl”. This allows new nouns with a similar meaning to be readily created in a different class, by analogy: given the noun empresario (businessman), it was straightforward to make the new noun empresaria for “businesswoman”, when women reached the work market. This kind of class shift can also have more subtle uses, such as making a collective noun like fruta (group of fruits) from a singular noun like fruto (fruit). To understand gender agreement, consider the sentences "The man is tall" and "The woman is tall". In English, the only word that differs between them is the noun "man/woman", which has a direct semantic association with sexual identity. In Spanish, however, one says "El hombre es alto" and "La mujer es alta", respectively. Not only do the words for "man" and "woman" change, (hombre vs. mujer), but so do the article (el, la) and the adjective (alto, alta). When a noun belongs to a certain class, other parts of speech that refer to that noun must be inflected to be in the same class. This is similar to number agreement, whereby parts of speech that refer to a noun are inflected to agree with the grammatical number of that noun. Curzan illustrates gender agreement in Old English with a “highly contrived” example: : Seo brade line wæs tilu and ic hire lufod. : (Literal translation:) That broad shield was good and I loved her. The noun lind (shield) is grammatically feminine, which forces the pronoun seo (the, that) and the adjectives brade (broad) and tilu (good) to appear in their feminine forms, as well as the pronoun hire (her), referring back to lind, which adopts the grammatical gender of the referent. By comparison, in Modern English the sentence would be: : That broad shield was good and I loved it. Here, the shield is understood as a sexless object, and therefore designated by the neuter pronoun it. Old English had three genders, masculine, feminine and neuter, but gender inflections (as well as number inflections) were greatly simplified, and then merged with one another. The only trace of grammatical gender left in modern English are some pronouns, such as he, she, it, which tend to represent natural gender. Animals and plants, however, can be referred to as it, and sometimes the pronoun she is applied to countries, ships and machines, although this is not mandatory. Some languages do not have noun classes. Finnish, which never had any genders, has only one third person singular pronoun, hän (he/she). On the other hand, Niger-Congo languages can have ten or more noun classes. In Swahili, for instance, nouns that begin with m- in the singular and wa- in the plural denote persons, and nouns that begin with m- in the singular but mi- in the plural denote plants. In the sentence below, the class marker ki- (marking singular nouns in class number 7) shows up on both the adjective (-kubwa) and the verb (-anguka), to express their relation to the class 7 noun kitabu 'book': :kitabu kikubwa kinaanguka
(cl.7-book cl.7-big cl.7-PRESENT-fall)
:'The big book falls.' Common criteria for defining noun classes include:
- animate vs. inanimate (as with Ojibwe)
- rational vs. non-rational (as with Tamil)
- human vs. non-human
- male vs. other
- male human vs. other
- masculine vs. feminine (as with French and other Romance languages)
- masculine vs. feminine vs. neuter (as with Latin, Romanian, German, or most Slavic languages)
- strong vs. weak
- augmentative vs. diminutive The Algonquian languages have animate and inanimate noun classes, for example, and most Indo-European languages distinguish feminine, masculine and sometimes neuter noun classes. In other languages, masculine and feminine are subsumed in the category of person, either generally, or only in the plural, as in the North Caucasian languages and some Dravidian languages. In the Alamblak language oblong objects and animals are named using masculine nouns, and round ones using feminine nouns. A more or less discernible correlation between the noun gender and the shape of the respective object is found in some languages even in the Indo-European family. The overlap between grammatical gender and natural gender is not always perfect: the Spanish noun miembro (member) is always masculine, even if it refers to a woman, but persona (person) is always feminine, even when it refers to a man. Thus, grammatical gender is, to some extent, a matter of convention, even when it concerns human beings. Conversely, the correlation between grammatical gender and noun morphology may also have exceptions. Although in Spanish the suffix -o is characteristic of the masculine gender and the suffix -a is typical of the feminine, problema (problem) is masculine, and radio (radio station) is feminine. Gender assignment is often different for animals than it is for human beings. In Spanish, a cheetah is always un guepardo (masculine) and a zebra is always una cebra (feminine), regardless of their biological sex. If it becomes necessary to specify the sex of the animal, an adjective is added, as in un guepardo hembra (a female cheetah). Individualized names for the male and the female of a species are more frequent when they refer to common pets or farm animals. E.g., English horse and mare, French chat (male cat) and chatte (female cat).

Algonquian languages

The Ojibwe language and other members of the Algonquian languages distinguish between animate and inanimate classes. Some sources argue that the distinction is between things which are powerful and things which are not. All living things, as well as sacred things and things connected to the Earth are considered powerful and belong to the "animate" class. Still, the assignment is somewhat arbitrary, as "raspberry" is animate, but "strawberry" is inanimate.

Australian Aboriginal languages

The Dyirbal language is well known for its system of four noun classes, which tend to be divided along the following semantic lines:
- I — animate objects, men
- II — women, water, fire, violence
- III — edible fruit and vegetables
- IV — miscellaneous (includes things not classifiable in the first three) The class usually labeled "feminine", for instance, includes the word for fire and nouns relating to fire, as well as all dangerous creatures and phenomena. This inspired the title of the George Lakoff book Women, Fire and Dangerous Things (ISBN 0226468046). The Ngangikurrunggurr language has noun classes reserved for canines, and hunting weapons, and the Anindilyakwa language has a noun class for things that reflect light. The Diyari language distinguishes only between female and other objects. Perhaps the most noun classes in any Australian language are found in Yanyuwa, which has 16 noun classes.

Caucasian languages

Of the Caucasian languages, some members of the Northwest Caucasian family, and almost all of the Northeast Caucasian languages, manifest noun class. In the Northeast Caucasian family, only Lezgi, Udi, and Aghul do not have noun classes. Some languages have only two classes, while the Bats language has eight. The most widespread system, however, has four classes: male, female, animate beings and certain objects, and finally a class for the remaining nouns. The Andi language has a noun class reserved for insects. Among Northwest Caucasian languages, Abkhaz shows a human male/human female/non-human distinction. Ubykh shows some inflections along the same lines, but only in some instances, and in some of these instances inflection for noun class is not even obligatory. In all Caucasian languages that manifest class, it is not marked on the noun itself but on the dependent verbs, adjectives, pronouns and prepositions. An entire [http://www.beautyinchaos.com/sex website] has been devoted to exploring the possibilities of inanimate genders in Caucasian languages.

Indo-European languages

In Indo-European languages, genders typically include feminine, masculine and neuter. Latin has these three, but in many of its modern descendants, such as French and Spanish, the neuter gender has all but disappeared, though a few words, especially pronouns with no clear gender such as "celà" in French, have been assigned by some grammarians to a neuter gender. In Spanish, there exists a "neuter singular" gender whose only nouns are adjectives used as abstract nouns. (eg "lo único" = "the only thing"; "lo mismo" = "the same thing"). Romanian has preserved all three genders from Latin, but the neuter gender is a combination of the other two, in the sense that neuter nouns in the singular behave like masculine nouns, while in the plural they behave like feminine nouns; as a consequence, adjectives, pronouns, and pronominal adjectives only have two forms, both in the singular and in the plural. In other languages, feminine and masculine have merged into a common gender with a neuter gender, for example, in Danish. English generally exhibits gender only in third-person singular pronouns (as with he, she, and it), with the masculine and feminine genders used only for persons or higher animals, sometimes objects in colloquial speech as in 'Isn't she a beauty?'. Other languages may group genders differently: Czech and, to a lesser degree, Russian further divide the masculine gender into animate and inanimate groups; The Spanish constructions for direct objects are different for humans and for objects, although its Latin-influenced grammar tradition doesn't usually count this as a noun class distinction; the Nostratic language, a theoretical language that gave rise to the Indo-European languages and other language families, is believed by its proponents to have had human, animal, and object as grammatical genders. In common nouns, grammatical gender is usually only peripherally related to sex. For example, in Spanish, the word hijo (son) is masculine and hija (daughter) is feminine, as one might expect. This is called natural gender, or sometimes logical gender. Other times, there are elaborate (and mostly incomplete) rules to define the gender of a word. For example, in German, nouns ending in -ung (corresponding to -ing in English) are feminine, and car brand names are masculine. Words with the -lein and -chen ending (meaning little, young) are neuter, thus the grammatical genders of Mädchen (girl) and Fräulein (young woman) are neuter. In some local dialects of German, all nouns for female persons have been shifted to the neuter gender, but the female gender remains for some words denoting objects. All this is language-specific. In Latin, the word Sol (Sun) was masculine and the word Luna (Moon) was feminine (as in French, Spanish, Italian), but in German (and Germanic languages in general), the opposite occurs. The learner of a language thus must regard the gender as part of the noun, and memorize accordingly to use the language correctly. A frequent recommendation is to memorize the definite article and the noun as a unit. In Indo-European languages that assign genders to all nouns, the genders often correspond roughly to declensions that govern the way the nouns are inflected. In Latin, for example, almost all of the -a stem nouns of the first declension are feminine; the main exceptions are a handful of nouns that identify typically male roles like nauta, "sailor," agricola, "farmer," and poeta, "poet". Likewise, almost all of the -o stem nouns of the second declension that end in -us in the nominative case are masculine; those ending in -um are neuter. Names of places and trees are feminine though, like ulmus, "elm," or Ægyptus, "Egypt." Most other Indo-European languages that have retained declensional systems have similar rules.

Athabaskan languages

In Navajo (Southern Athabaskan) nouns are classified according to their animacy, shape, and consistency. Morphologically, however, the distinctions are not expressed on the nouns themselves, but on the verbs of which the nouns are the subject or direct object. For example, in the sentence Shi’éé’ tsásk’eh bikáa’gi dah siłtsooz "My shirt is lying on the bed", the verb siłtsooz "lies" is used because the subject shi’éé’ "my shirt" is a flat, flexible object. In the sentence Siziiz tsásk’eh bikáa’gi dah silá "My belt is lying on the bed", the verb silá "lies" is used because the subject siziiz "my belt" is a slender, flexible object. See Navajo language#Classificatory Verbs for more discussion. Koyukon (Northern Athabaskan) has a more intricate system of classification. Like Navajo, it has classificatory verb stems that classify nouns according to animacy, shape, and consistency. However, in addition these verb stems, Koyukon verbs have what are called gender prefixes that further classify nouns. That is, Koyukon has two different systems that classify nouns: (a) a classificatory verb system and (b) a gender system. To illustrate, the verb stem -tonh is used for enclosed objects. When -tonh is combined with different gender prefixes, it can result in daaltonh which refers to objects enclosed in boxes or etltonh which refers to objects enclosed in bags.

Niger-Congo languages

Bantu languages

According to Carl Meinhof, the Bantu languages have a total of 22 noun classes. While no single language is known to express all of them, all of them have at least 10 noun classes. For example, by Meinhof's numbering, Swahili has 15 classes, and Sesotho has 18. However, Meinhof's numbering system counts singular and plural numbers of the same noun as belonging to separate classes (see Sesotho language for examples). This is inconsistent with the way other languages are traditionally considered, where number is orthogonal to gender (a Meinhof-style analysis would give Ancient Greek 9 genders!). If one follows broader linguistic tradition and counts singular and plural as belonging to the same class, then Swahili has 8 or 9 noun classes and Sesotho has 11. Often, certain noun classes are reserved for humans. The Fula language has a noun class reserved for liquids. According to Steven Pinker, the Kivunjo language has 16 genders including classes for precise locations and for general locales, classes for clusters or pairs of objects and classes for the objects that come in pairs or clusters, and classes for abstract qualities.

Zande

The Zande language distinguishes four noun classes:

Criterion	Example	Translation
human male	kumba	man
human female	dia	wife
animate	nya	beast
other	bambu	house

There are about 80 inanimate nouns which are in the animate class, including nouns denoting heavenly objects (moon, rainbow), metal objects (hammer, ring), edible plants (sweet potato, pea), and non-metallic objects (whistle, ball). Many of the exceptions have a round shape, and some can be explained by the role they play in Zande mythology.

Other

The Alamblak language, a Sepik Hill language spoken in Papua New Guinea, has a "masculine" noun class, which includes males, as well as things which are tall or long and slender, or narrow such as fish, crocodile, long snakes, arrows, spears and tall slender trees, and a "feminine" noun class, which includes females, as well as things which are short, squat or wide, such as turtles, frogs, houses, fighting shields and trees that are typically more round and squat than others.

Languages without gender marking on nouns

These languages can be divided into three subtypes. The first type still distinguishes gender, but the distinction is made on modifiers (adjectives, etc.), pronouns, and perhaps even verbs—but not on the noun. German would fall into this category, since most nouns give no clue as to their gender other than the forms of the article, determiner, and adjectives they must use. Japanese and Chinese may also fall into this category: they have elaborate systems of measure words which classify nouns into types based on shape and function, but are only used with counting modifiers. However, in these two languages, the classes of nouns are not generally distinguished in other contexts, and many if not most li