Education of the republic of uzbekistan termez state university foreign philology faculty the department of english language and literature

Gender in Old English

Old English had a system of grammatical gender similar to that of modern German, with three genders: masculine, feminine, neuter. Determiners and attributive adjectives showed gender inflection in agreement with the noun they modified. Also the nouns themselves followed different declension patterns depending on their gender. Moreover, the third-person personal pronouns, as well as interrogative and relative pronouns, were chosen according to the grammatical gender of their antecedent.
Old English grammatical gender was, as in other Germanic languages, remarkably opaque, that is, one often could not know the gender of a noun by its meaning or by the form of the word; this was especially true for nouns referencing inanimate objects. Learners would have had to simply memorize which word goes with which gender.^[2]: 10 Though nouns referring to human males were generally masculine and for the most part the masculine went with human males and the feminine went with human females, as Charles Jones noted, "it is with those nouns which show explicit female reference that the sex specifying function of the gender classification system appears to break down,..." Most words referencing human females were feminine, but there was a sizable number of words that were either neuter or even masculine.^[2]: 6–7 Here are the discrepant nouns referring specifically to human females as listed by Jones
In short, even inanimate objects are frequently referred to by gendered pronouns, whereas there exist nouns referring to people have a grammatical gender that does not match their natural gender; nonetheless, in Old English, pronouns may also follow natural gender rather than grammatical gender in some cases. For details of the declension patterns and pronoun systems, see Old English grammar.

Decline of grammatical gender

While inflectional reduction seems to have been incipient in the English language itself, some theories suggest that it was accelerated by contact with Old Norse, especially in northern and midland dialects.^[3] This correlates with the geographical extent of the Viking Danelaw in the late 9th and early 10th centuries; for almost a century Norse constituted a prestige language with regard to the southern Northumbrian and east Mercian dialects of Old English.
By the 11th century, the role of grammatical gender in Old English was beginning to decline.^[4] The Middle English of the 13th century was in transition to the loss of a gender system.^[5][6] One element of this process was the change in the functions of the words the and that (then spelt þe and þat; see also Old English determiners): previously these had been non-neuter and neuter forms respectively of a single determiner, but in this period the came to be used generally as a definite article and that as a demonstrative; both thus ceased to manifest any gender differentiation.^[7] The loss of gender classes was part of a general decay of inflectional endings and declensional classes by the end of the 14th century.^[8]
Gender loss began in the north of England; the south-east and the south-west Midlands were the most linguistically conservative regions, and Kent retained traces of gender in the 1340s.^[5] Late 14th-century London English had almost completed the shift away from grammatical gender,^[5] and Modern English retains no morphological agreement of words with grammatical gender.