Comment on Real!
nikita@sh.itjust.works 9 months agoGood point. What I meant is that it’s different from grammatical gender typical of European languages as you defined it.
Grammatical gender is a bad name for such a general concept that goes beyond the social definition of gender. In fact, that term is a bit eurocentric.
Zagorath@aussie.zone 9 months ago
Yeah without a doubt it is. There are a few non-European languages that use a masculine/feminine grammatical split, including Arabic and Hebrew, but both masc/fem and masc/fem/neuter are hugely prevalent in European languages, and I doubt the term got its name from Arabic linguists.
I’ve just done some Googling and learnt that some people prefer the term “noun classes” rather than grammatical gender, especially when the classes are not based on human cultural genders. Other people make a distinction between what “noun classes” means and what “grammatical gender” is, using them for two different concepts. So apparently the term “grammatical gender” is not quite as uncontroversial within linguistics as I thought.