Re: [The Birds and the Bees of Gender]

Carlos Thompson wrote:
> Are in English the grammatical categories called gender becaus the biological
> 'gender'?  I've always thought it was that in English the biological sex is
> called 'gender' as an euphenism, based on the grammatical gender.
Gender originally meant "kind".  Gender is therefore used of various
classification systems throughout the world's langauges, provided that
it influence other words (e.g., adjective concord, verbal agreement,
pronoun choice).  There are two "kinds" of animals, including humans,
male and female.  Thus, both come from the same root meaning.  The use
of gender specifically for biological sex in English may have been
influenced by the fact that the European langs have gender based on
biological sex (at least nominally).

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