Languages with no gender?

Jonne   Monday, January 03, 2005, 20:36 GMT
I can't think of many languages without genders.. Except Finnish. Here
Hän means both 'he' and 'she'. Same might be with hungarian but not sure..
Brennus   Monday, January 03, 2005, 22:13 GMT

Jonee,

Some of the Creole and Pidgin Englishes have no gender and use the same personal pronoun for both "he and she". Analytical type languages like, Chinese, Vietnamese and to some extent Modern English seem to be lacking in them for the most part.

I've heard that no language is totally without traces of gender distinction. So "genderless" languages is a relative term to some extent.

Dutch is kind of strange in that it doesn't have the masculine-feminine-neuter scheme of Old English, German and Russian but instead a neuter gender and a non-neuter gender.
Adam   Tuesday, January 04, 2005, 04:09 GMT
Mandarin Chinese has no gender, 'ta' means both he, him, she and her.
Ed   Tuesday, January 04, 2005, 06:01 GMT
Armenian too!
Easterner   Tuesday, January 04, 2005, 07:34 GMT
Jonne: <<Same might be with hungarian but not sure.. >>

Yes, Hungarian is exactly the same. The only third person singular pronoun is "ö", written with a double acute accent which I cannot reproduce here, and pronounced long. The plural is "ök", pronounced as "öök".

Brennus: <<Analytical type languages like, Chinese, Vietnamese and to some extent Modern English seem to be lacking in them for the most part.>>

I think the same goes for most agglutinative languages as well, as I know, Turkish and Japanese have no genders either. Sometimes it seems that gender distinction is peculiar to Indo-European and Semitic languages only, of course I cannot be sure about this last point, it is just an assumption based on languages I know of. Some languages, like Georgian, have no genders but "grammatical classes" or categories, and traces of this can also be seen in Mandarin and Japanese, e.g. in "category" words being used with numbers.
Jonne   Tuesday, January 04, 2005, 11:11 GMT
In "formal" Finnish the gender exists in some jobs.. and with word "friend".. Anyhow, there's really nobody who uses it.
MALE--------FEMALE-------ENGLISH
Ystävä-------ystävätär------Friend
Kuljettaja----Kuljettajatar---Driver
Laulaja-------Laulajatar------Singer.

And the "DOuble acute accent mark thing".. is it something like õ .. but more like two ´ instead of ~ ?
And what's the difference between ö and õ?
Easterner   Tuesday, January 04, 2005, 14:17 GMT
We also use a suffix to distinguish some nouns according to gender, for example, we have "barát" and "barátnö", the former means "friend" (in general), the latter a female friend or a man's girlfriend. Also, this is used with some occupations, and even as a polite term of address for a female member of a profession, e.g. "doktornö" is a female doctor, "bírónö" a female judge, etc.

<<And the "DOuble acute accent mark thing".. is it something like õ .. but more like two ´ instead of ~ ? And what's the difference between ö and õ?>>

That is completely right, my explanation for the double acent may have been a little awkward, but as I know, that type of accent is not used in any other language. As for pronunciation, "ö" is short and a little more open, similar to the short "ö" in Finnish, while the "ö" with double accent is a little more closed and definitely longer. The two are separate phonemes, since they can form minimal pairs.

Curiously, the set of codes at Antimoon does not support the double accent. Or is it possible to write it here? Let's give it a try, and see what happens. Here it goes: "&#337;".
Easterner   Tuesday, January 04, 2005, 14:19 GMT
Yes, unfortunately I was right. :-( And of course it is "accent".
Jonne   Tuesday, January 04, 2005, 17:18 GMT
Ok now I have also heard how ö and õ sounds like. Ö sounds more like a mix of ö and e (now I'm talking about finnish phonemes).
Ved   Tuesday, January 04, 2005, 22:10 GMT
Basque has no gender either.
John Hopkins   Tuesday, January 04, 2005, 22:41 GMT


> Mandarin Chinese has no gender, 'ta' means both he, him, she and her.

That's not quite true. They are two different characters but they have the same pronunciation.
Xatufan   Wednesday, January 05, 2005, 02:02 GMT
The double accute accent in Hungarian is something like this: o´´, but with the ´´ over the o. It's an exciting letter.

Asking about gender in Hungarian: Is that dog an "ö" or an "ö"?
Adam   Wednesday, January 05, 2005, 03:50 GMT
John Hopkins,

I was referring to the spoken language, in which, there is only one, genderless word. If you are referring to the written language,then yes, there is one character for male and another for female, but they still each represent the same spoken word. Unless written in 'pinyin', there is no differentiation betwen the sexes there either.
Easterner   Wednesday, January 05, 2005, 08:33 GMT
<<Asking about gender in Hungarian: Is that dog an "ö" or an "ö"?>>

Sorry??? Could you repeat that question please? :)
Xatufan   Wednesday, January 05, 2005, 23:39 GMT
Is that dog a "he" or a "she"? In Hungarian.