GENDER (OF. gendre, genre, Fr. genre, from Lat. genus, race, from gignere, to beget, Gk. mufti, gignesthai, Skt. jan, to be born). A grammatical category, commonly regarded as in dicating the sex of a noun. Gender is either grammatical or natural. In the former case there is no necessary coincidence of sex and gender. Thus Latin femina, woman, is both naturally and grammatically feminine, but Latin mensa, table, is naturally sexless and grammati cally feminine. In natural gender, on the other band, sex and gender must agree, as in English man (masculine) , woman (feminine) , thing (neuter). In the Indo-Germanic languages (q.v.) the inflectional group, as Greek, Russian, or German, have grammatical gender, while the analytic group, as English or Persian, have only natural gender, except in a few apparent in stances, as English ship. Gender in all Indo Germanic tongues is divided into three classes, masculine, feminine, and neuter. It was long supposed, according to a theory promulgated by Jakob Grimm (q.v.), that grammatical gender depended upon personification; that, in other words, a noun had sex ascribed to it on account of some attribute either real or fancied. Thus Latin sol, sun, was masculine because of its burning rays and the energy which it imparts to all human activity; Luna, moon, was feminine as being gentle and calmly beneficent; mare, sea, was neuter from its obvious sexlessness. The
faults of this theory in a wider study of lan guage, for instance, the fact that Sonne, sun, is feminine in German, while Mond, moon, is mascu line, led to. a rejection of Grimm's theory, and the substitution of entirely new hypotheses. A study of gender, however, as of all primary linguistic categories, is incomplete if the Indo Germanic languages alone are considered. Nat ural gender, the application of which is too obvious to require exemplification, is found in practically all languages, even the most primi tive, many of which have no grammatical gender, as in Dinka Negro (tine &onkor, female horse, muor adfid, bull fowl), Melanesian and Poly nesian (as in the dialect of the island of Viti, a toa tainanq, of fowl male, a toe detect, of fowl female), 'or Annamese son-child, kon gai, daughter-child). Other languages have a division into animate and inanimate, as Algon quin, Iroquois, and Cherokee, or the Dravidian high-caste and low-caste genders. More elaborate schemes are also found, as in certain languages of the North Caucasian group, which have six genders—for animate and inanimate, rational and irrational, masculine and feminine. (See GEOR