GENDER, in grammar, a difference in the forms of words to express distinction of sex, whether real or fictitious. Some languages are rich in such forms, others are altogether lack ing in them. In the strictly grammatical sense of the word the latter languages are without gender. Primarily there are only two genders, masculine and feminine, corresponding to the natural divisions of sex, male and female. In very early times man seems to have regarded all the world as animate, even the rivers and clouds, the sun, moon and stars, and the still more inanimate things such as earth, sticks stones, the atmosphere, sunshine, fire and water, light and darkness. Abstract qualities, too, were considered as living and very active beings. All nature being animate to the mind of primi tive man, there was no room in his world for more than two genders, masculine and feminine, corresponding to the male and female beings of his associations or of his imagination. As he never pictured anything as being inanimate he could have had no conception of or use for a neuter gender. It was only when man began to doubt that some of the forms of nature were endowed with life and volition that the neces sity arose for grammatical forms to express this difference. Many of the more primitive languages, notably those of the American con tinents, have never reached this latter stage. Most grammarians class these latter as having no gender; but they really form the best ex amples of primitive gender making. A language does not necessarily require to be primitive to be in this stage. But it is necessary that the people using it shall not have passed beyond a certain stage of development; for language is the reflection of the mind of thinking man. As the mind becomes more complex it invents grammatical forms to express this complexity of thought and relationship. Primitive gender was expressed in a very simple manner, gen erally by attaching to the common noun, the word "man' or "woman,' male" or "female' or their equivalents. Thus man-child, woman child, male-child, female-child, are true cases of gender, since they are grammatical distinc tions in the use of words. In this early stage
of a language a word might be of common gen der; but it was never neuter, in the sense that implies the absence of the distinction of gender or of the masculine or feminine qualities. The gender was simply expressed as common or more properly, disregarded on occasions when no necessity arose to assert the male or female attributes of the object designated. In the course of time, as man's conception of the true condition of inanimate nature changed, it is probable that the less active words became neuter, expressing the idea of no sex and, later still, no volition; while those expressing living beings who did not enter actively or seriously into man's life were expressed by the common word alone without the gender desig nation. But before this happened a long period of evolution had to take place. Even in such a highly developed and inflected language as Anglo-Saxon, not only are the primitive gender forms strongly in evidence, but also the forms by which the idea of neutrality in gender are expressed are plainly in evidence, The word mann was still of common gender; but it did not express the human race, since to convey this idea, the word cynn had to be added to it, thus forming the collective noun manncynn, mankind, a • strictly non-gender word, in its original conception. The wapenmann, the weapon being, was the male being, or man, in the modern sense of the word. Here we see how adjectives, which were expressive of activities of the nouns to which they were at tached, came, in some languages, to have masculine and femine forms. Wmpen being the symbol of militant man, came to have the adjective meaning of male or masculine ; and wrepenlic was manlike, or masculine. Wifa, in Anglo-Saxon signifies woman; but wife child is a female child or girl. A being that, while human or endowed with animal life, is yet neither male nor female, that is a her maphrodite, is called wmpenwifestre, that is an armed female or a male-female.