Zauriel
The Angel of Justice
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From: GYORIGbtk.jpte.hu
This phenomenon is not just science fiction. Hungarian has no gender
specific pronouns, simply because it has no gender distinction at
all. Does anyone know about similar languages? (As far as I know this
goes for all Uralic and maybe also for the Turkic languages.)
Gabor Gyori
This not so; Hung. merely lacks masculine-feminine. It most definitly
distinguishes persons and things, and animals are made one or the other.
First of all, there are "ki" (who) and "mi" (what), bare "az" (that) is used
not of persons but only things and ideas, and there is a (partitiv?) construct
for a counted subject that is persons:
Ha'rman joettek.
Threely came-they.
Three (persons) came.
Ha'rom joett.
Three (things) came.
(An explicitly counted noun-phrase is always in the singular.)
As far as I know, gender that follows sex is restricted to IE and languages
akin to Arabic and Hebrew.
There are other gender-forms: Swahili distinguishes persons, animals, plants,
fruits, things, abstractions, and places.
There is another issu in the matter of gender, that is agreement and
declension. English and Hungarish hav only agreement, and declension is
independent of gender. In Polish there is a strong link between declension
and gender (and the link between gender and sex is weaker than in English).
In Latin, too, there is a strong link between declension and gender, but
weaker than in Polish. German is infamous for the weak, erratic link
between declension and gender, and gender and sex, even though there are.
http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/linguist/issues/6/6-777.html#2
There are a few genderless languages such as Tagalog.
In Tagalog, pronouns and nouns, even of family do not encode gender.
Siya- he/she/it
Tagalog- English
Bata- child/boy/girl
Kapatid- sibling/brother/sister
Anak- child/son/daughter
Pinsan- male cousin/female cousin
Asawa- spouse/husband/wife
Pamangki-nephew/niece
In order to specify the individual?fs gender, you simply say anak na lalaki (son) or anak na babae (daughter). You say pinsang lalaki (male cousin) or pinsang babae (female cousin), batang lalaki (boy) or batang babae (girl)
In Tagalog, lalaki means male and babae means female. ng and na are noun modifiers or linkers similar to the German modifiers. Ng connects with the noun that ends in a vowel or the onsonant of "n". Na links with a noun that ends with a consonant.
Lalaki ang kapatid (the sibling is male)
Ang kapatid na lalaki (male sibling)
Maganda Si Megan (Megan is beautiful)
Magandang babae si Megan (She is a beautiful woman)
babaeng maganda si Megan (She is a beautiful woman)
However, Tagalog does have gendered nouns like Kuya (older brother) and Ate (older sister). Both of them are similar to Japanese titles of "Onii-chan" and "Onee-san". Like English and Romance languages, Tagalog also uses gendered titles such as ginoo (sir) and ginang (ma'am).