[Multilingual Monday] Grammatical Gender

[aadroma]

Today the topic is grammatical gender. If you've ever studied a language like German, Russian, or Spanish, you know about grammatical gender. While, in English, we think of everything as "it" except for living beings (which then become "he" or "she"), in several languages like Spanish your only choices are é and ella, or "he" and "she". This

Comments

[paterson_si]

Slovenian is painfully gendered for those who want to learn in.

And there are no articles of Slovene at all, so you just have to:
-learn it all by heart
-develops some feeling
-give it up.

Oh... and three genders. And singular, dual and plural. So also verbs are very, very gendered. :)

[aadroma]

The VERBS are gendered? How so? Can I have some examples, please?

[paterson_si]

I drew an apple - in all forms.

Narisal sem jabolko. - 1st person, singular M
Narisala sem jabolko. - 1st person, singular F

Narisala sva jabolko. - 1st person, dual M
Narisali sva jabolko. - 1st person, dual F

Narisali smo jabolko. - 1st person, plural M
Narisale smo jabolko. - 1st person, plural F

2nd person, singular...
Narisal si... M
Narisala si... F

dual
Narisala sta...
Narisali sta...

plural
Narisali ste...
Narisale ste...

3rd person, singular
Narisal je...
Narisala je...

dual
Narisala sta...
Narisali sta...

plural
Narisali so...
Narisale so...

Oh, Neutral... 3rd person

Narisalo je... singular
Narisali sta... dual
Narisalo so... plural

[aadroma]

Ah, and this goes to show that I know so little about Slovenian!! I assumed that the same basic verb conjugations would exist in Russian and Slovenian, but obviously that's not true!