Noun classes may be expressed on
nouns and
pronouns alone, or in other parts of speech as well. An example of the former are the English words
actor and
actress, where the suffix
-or denotes a male person or a person of unknown gender (masculine), and the suffix
-ress (derived from French
-rice) denotes a female person (feminine). This type of noun inflection is very rare in
English, but quite common in other languages, including most of the
Indo-European family, to which English belongs. Modern English normally does not mark nouns for gender, but it does express it through the third person singular personal pronouns
he (male person),
she (female person), and
it (object, abstraction, or animal), and their other inflected forms.
When gender is expressed on other
parts of speech, besides nouns and pronouns, the language is said to have
grammatical gender. For example, in
French the sentences
Il est un grand acteur and
Elle est une grande actrice mean "He is a great actor" and "She is a great actress", respectively. Not only do the nouns (
acteur,
actrice) and the pronouns (
il,
elle) denote the gender of their
referent, but so do the articles (
un,
une) and the adjectives (
grand,
grande).
This never occurs in Modern English (with the exception of blond/blonde), which therefore does not have grammatical gender. Old English had grammatical gender (example below), but with time its gender inflections were simplified, began to be confused with one another, and eventually merged.
