Re: Indo-European Languages and Gramatical Gender Loss

Peter T. Daniels <grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

How does a language loose it's gramatical gender?

A language loses its grammatical gender when the functions performed
by gender-distinction are assumed by other grammatical devices.

The last few times the "purpose" of gender was discussed in this
group, there was much uncertainty about its function. It sure helps
with matching antecedants to relative clauses and such, but English
is notably lacking other grammatical devices for this, rendering
elaborate sentence construction more difficult.

--
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber naddy@xxxxxxxxxxxx
.

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