Does the English words have specific a gender??

I know that might be a silly and weird question, but I just realized that some concepts of portuguese and english are completely opposed to each other. One of then is that, apparently your words don't have a specific gender (like male or female) which confuses me sometimes.

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TheProphet · M Best Comment

English words have no gender. That occurs mostly in the Romance languages.

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TheProphet · M

@Arthur14 Yes and Italian are the ones I remember the most.

Arthur14 · 26-30, M

@TheProphet basically, all languages derived from latin??

TheProphet · M

@Arthur14 European ones did.

CopperCicada · M

English nouns do not have a gender in the context of grammar. The use of words is not based on the gender of those words. The extent to which English gives gender to words is through their meaning. "woman" refers to a female. And so on.

AMeeklittleboy · 22-25, M

No. Words do not have genders, you may notice such an occurrence in Spanish as well. However, if you are speaking about words being male or female in order to addresss a gender, you use words such as "she is.. he is..." and then just the word

WelshLovely · 46-50, F

No, English words don't have genders. In Spanish for example you would have el and la, in English we just have "the" which is neutral as are the words following it.

Arthur14 · 26-30, M

@WelshLovely I not gonna lie to you, sometimes this blow my mind. I catch myself using a ''female pronoun'' to describe a bird for example, because I always knew that a bird is a female word.

SW-User

Something I don't recall being taught in English class. So I'll say I don't recall such a thing and hope the linguists here have a better answer.

SW-User

He/she. His/her to address gender. Words are genderless.

madbroom · 22-25, T

Not really like Portuguese having different articles for each noun (o/a and um/una), but we do have words like waiter/waitress and actor/actress.

bijouxbroussard · F

I understand, because French is that way too; each word has a gender, the article used is feminine or masculine, depending. English doesn't other than actual pronouns describing people, they're gender neutral.

Arthur14 · 26-30, M

@bijouxbroussard curiouser and curiouser... 🤔

bijouxbroussard · F

@Arthur14 One of the few simple rules, "the" covers just about all nouns---singular and plural.

Arthur14 · 26-30, M

@bijouxbroussard yes, that kinda gotta sometimes. But since is way simpler than use o or a, and os or as, I will not complain. I just love these cultural shock sometimes!

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Arthur14 · 26-30, M

@LvChris yes, which is way easier depending of the situation. I notice myself that, for at least two words in portuguese (the male article o and the female article a), the english only uses the article ''the''. But one thing that we don't have is a ''neutral'' pronoun like you guys have the ''it''.

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Arthur14 · 26-30, M

@LvChris curiouser and curiouser. Oh, how I just love these shock of cultures

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