Re: Feminization of plurals?

On 2009-02-11 Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets wrote:
> Witness Dutch, which is in the process of completely
> losing its masculine/feminine/neuter tripartite gender
> system for a common/neuter system, due to the fact that
> except for personal pronouns (and their possessive forms)
> in the singular, masculine and feminine forms have become
>  identical (same article "de", same adjectival agreement,
> nouns that don't have distinctive forms for the masculine
> and the feminine gender). Other evidence of this
> phenomenon is the use of gendered personal pronouns on a
> purely semantic basis (so for instance masculine and
> feminine pronouns are only used with people or animals
> whose gender is known. syntactic agreement doesn't play a
> role anymore, so "het meisje": "the girl" will be
> referred to as "zij": "she", despite the noun "meisje"
> being neuter.

It has happened exactly the same in standard
Swedish and Danish.  The masculine forms of
the articles and demonstrative pronouns have
totally ousted the feminine forms, and the
personal pronouns are now used only for
animates.  Grammars talk about four genders,
viz. neuter, common, masculine and feminine,
but in reality the last three differ only in
which personal pronoun they take.  Moreover
it's the same form -- the old accusative
_den_ of the masculine demonstrative which
as non-neuter definite article, non-neuter
demonstrative and common personal pronoun,
the only difference being that it can be
stressed in the demonstrative function,
and "he" and "she" can only be used
in reference to animates.

However the only prominent animate neuter
_barn_ 'child' remains neuter.  Other
animate neuters like _fruntimmer_,
meaning the same as German _Weib_, and
_statsråd_ 'minister of state' are
falling out of use.

/BP 8^)>
--
Benct Philip Jonsson -- melroch atte melroch dotte se
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
  "C'est en vain que nos Josués littéraires crient
  à la langue de s'arrêter; les langues ni le soleil
  ne s'arrêtent plus. Le jour où elles se *fixent*,
  c'est qu'elles meurent."           (Victor Hugo)

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