Gender

Question

What is the difference between a word having "common gender" versus "dual gender"?Do words such as "stories" and "room" have a gender?

AlpheccaStars · Accepted Answer

LilyPhillyDo words such as "stories" and "room" have a gender?

English used to have grammatical gender, but very little of that remains in modern English.

Natural gender exists because we have words such as brother, sister, mother, father, cow, bull, lioness, queen, king, seamstress, hostess, etc., and we know by the word what pronouns we should use. The words tell us if the object referenced is male or female. That is natural gender.
The cow called to her calf. The king put on his coat.

Personal dual gender and common gender are words that refer to male or female, but you cannot tell the natural gender by looking at the word.

Parent, cousin and friend are personal dual gender words. The word "friend" or "cousin" does not tell you if they are male or female, and we would never refer to a friend or a cousin as "it".

eg. If you have a friend, bring him or her to the party.
X If you have a friend, bring it to the party.

Child is a common gender word.
When someone says "child", you don't know if it is a boy child or girl child; it could be either. If you have a pet cat or dog, you will use "he" or "she" because you know. If you see a picture of a kitty's face, you use "it" because you don't know! People sometimes will use "it" to refer to these words if they do not know if the object referenced is male or female. They words are not so personal as the "dual gender" nouns.
eg. If you have a pet, bring it to the party.

Inanimate objects are not male and female, so their natural gender is neuter, and we use "it" to reference them.

Anonymous · Answer

Thank you very much for this explanation, it's really helped me <img class='emoticon' style='Width:19px;Height:19px;' data-delaysrc='https://uat-englishforward-forums-backend.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/Emoticons/1.gif' src='https://uat-englishforward-forums-backend.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/Emoticons/1.gif' alt='Emotion: smile'/> Simona

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