On 30/08/05, Valentina Faussone <valentina_faussone(a)yahoo.it> wrote:
Answering to:
" "In most languages" is not true. The majority of the
world's languages do not have gender.
This includes:
Chinese, Japanese, Korean, English, ..."
Most languages have grammar genders or similar.
You can find more in:
http://www.ielanguages.com/eurolang.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender
Yes, the first one talks about Indo-European languages. Not all
Indo-European languages have gender.
I'm not entirely sure, but I think that the Indo-European languages of
India don't have gender -- that would include such widely-spoken
languages as Hindustani (ie, Hindi + Urdu), Bengali, Marathi...
The most part of Indo-European languages have
genders.
Af far as for what i've found those languages have
numbers and (2 or 3) genders:
Italian (2)
French (2)
German (3)
Spanish (2)
Greek (3)
Portguese (2 in Portugal, 3 in Brazil)
Dutch (less used)
Belgian
Danish (2)
Norwegian (3)
Bulgarian (3)
Polish (3)
Czech (4)
Russian (3)
Yiddish (2)
Do you realise that the vast majority of the examples you give are
Romance, Germanic, or Slavic? (besides the fact that there is no
Belgian language, and that Yiddish has 3 genders, masculine, feminine,
and neuter)
The majority of the Indo-European languages are in fact Indo-Iranian.
And, as far as I know, Indo-Iranian languages are genderless.
Plus
Australian Aborigenal and many african language. I
don't know enough for others not indo-european
languages.
Australian Aboriginal languages do not have gender. I don't know what
African languages you're talking about.
But grammatical gender is a phenomenon that is limited mostly to
Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic languages.
This excludes the huge and widely-spoken language families of
Austronesian and Sino-Tibetan, none of which have grammatical gender,
and only very few of which have regular grammatical number.
All Romance language have genders. All germanic
languages have genders, but english. All slavich
languages have ganders.
Pidgin and creole romance languages do not have gender: Haitian,
Papiamento, Saotomense... these may seem insignificant, but Haitian
Creole alone is spoken by millions of people around the world.
Not all Germanic languages have genders besides English. Afrikaans
doesn't have gender either, IIRC, and all pidgin and creoles don't
either, including Tok Pisin, Sranang Tongo, Berbice Creole Dutch...
The 10 most spoken language in the wolrd are
Chinese* (937,132,000)
Spanish (332,000,000)
English (322,000,000)
Bengali (189,000,000)
Hindi/Urdu (182,000,000)
Arabic* (174,950,000)
Portuguese (170,000,000)
Russian (170,000,000)
Japanese (125,000,000)
German (98,000,000)
French* (79,572,000)
Spanish, Bengali, Hindi, Arabic, Portuguese, Russian,
French, German have genders. Italian too.
I think it's enough to consider this could be a
problem for many wikipedians. Creating redirects for
different forms of a word is a concern for most
languages.
I wasn't aware that Bengali and Hindi/Urdu have genders. And surely
you realise that being a widely-spoken language doesn't make it a
major language of Wikipedia? The Bengali, Hindi, and Arabic Wikipedias
are all relatively small.
Greutens
Mark