genderless languages

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.

Click to expand...

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).

http://www.splammer.com/?req=grammatical_gender#languages_without_gender_marking_on_nouns

List of languages that do not use grammatical genders/noun classes

Armenian
Basque
Bengali
Bugis
Burmese
Cebuano
Central Yup'ik
Chinese ; * Chinese has class-specific measure words
Chol
English English has a vestigial natural gender system (on pronouns) but no grammatical gender
Estonian
Esperanto
Finnish
Georgian
Hawaiian
Hungarian
Ido
Ilocano
Indonesian
Interlingua
Japanese *
Kannada
Khmer
Korean *
Lao
Lojban
Malagasy
Malay
Malayalam
Makasar
Mandar
Nahuatl
Pirahã
Quechua
Sinhala
Sami languages
Tagalog
Tamil
Telugu
Thai *
Tok Pisin
Toki Pona
Tulu
Turkish
Tzotzil
Tzeltal
Vietnamese
Yoruba
* These languages have measure words : nouns are classified but the classes are shown only by counting modifiers, not by other adjectives or articles.


List of languages using grammatical genders/noun classes
please help fill in!
Ancient Greek
Arabic
Bosnian
Bulgarian
Catalan
Cornish
Croatian
Czech
Danish
Dari-Persian
Dutch
Faroese
French
German
Greek
Gujarati
Hebrew
Hindi
Icelandic
Irish
Italian
Klingon
Latin
Latvian
Lithuanian
Marathi
Manx Gaelic
Norwegian
Occitan
Old Prussian
Pashto
Polish
Portuguese
Punjabi
Romanian
Russian
Sanskrit
Scottish Gaelic
Serbian
Slovak
Slovenian
Sorbian
Spanish
Swahili
Swedish
Tajiki Persian
Ukrainian
Urdu
Welsh

Two genders/noun classes

Masculine and feminine
Arabic
Bengali
Catalan
French
Hebrew
Hindi
Irish
Italian
Latvian
Lithuanian
Occitan
Punjabi
Portuguese
Scottish Gaelic
Spanish
Urdu
Welsh

Common and neuter
Danish
Dutch
Norwegian ( Riksmål )
Swedish

Animate and inanimate
Many Native American languages, e.g. Navajo


Three grammatical genders/noun classes

Masculine, feminine, and neuter
Ancient Greek
Belarusian
Bosnian
Bulgarian
Croatian
Czech
Faroese
German
Greek
Gujarati
Icelandic
Latin
Marathi
Norwegian ( Bokmål and Nynorsk )
Old Prussian
Polish
Romanian
Russian
Sanskrit
Serbian
Slovak
Slovenian
Sorbian
Ukrainian

More than three grammatical genders/noun classes
Swahili
Zulu
Dyirbal
Bats
all Bantu languages
some Slavic languages , including Russian and Czech, make certain grammatical distinctions between animate and inanimate nouns, but only in the masculine gender.

More than three noun classes counting measure words
Japanese language
Ainu language
Korean language
Thai language
Chinese language

Armenian
Basque
Bengali
Bugis
Burmese
Cebuano
Central Yup'ik
Chinese ; * Chinese has class-specific measure words
Chol
English English has a vestigial natural gender system (on pronouns) but no grammatical gender
Estonian
Esperanto
Finnish
Georgian
Hawaiian
Hungarian
Ido
Ilocano
Indonesian
Interlingua
Japanese *
Kannada
Khmer
Korean *
Lao
Lojban
Malagasy
Malay
Malayalam
Makasar
Mandar
Nahuatl
Pirahã
Quechua
Sinhala
Sami languages
Tagalog
Tamil
Telugu
Thai *
Tok Pisin
Toki Pona
Tulu
Turkish
Tzotzil
Tzeltal
Vietnamese
Yoruba

These are the languages to learn !:blush:

Half the battle won !

Regards,

?W????

for me, that's just the abberation of babel.

for others, these are valid rules.

But...how do you make other people know that you are talking about a girl/guy then?

Er, I think it's just grammatical genders that these languages don't have. There are probably still he/she differentiation, just not male tables and female houses.

sgt. Pepper said:

But...how do you make other people know that you are talking about a girl/guy then?

Click to expand...

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 consonant 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/brother)
Ang lalaking kapatid (male sibling/brother)

Maganda Si Megan (Megan is beautiful)
Magandang babae si Megan (She is a beautiful woman)
babaeng maganda si Megan (She is a beautiful woman)