Common gender

In the Russian language, animate nouns referring to persons (often also animals) are referred to the general gender, depending on the gender of the person being designated, they are coordinated either by the female or by the male ^[1] .

In Russian, there are about 200 words of a general kind ^[1] . They belong to the female morphological genus. Semantically, most of these words are associated with negative characteristics (drunkard, lack of courage, badass, picky) or objective defects (orphan, cripple).

Words of a general kind can be formed by the suffixes -ak- (a) , -l- (a) , - (in) a , -yag (a) , -yg (a) , -uk (a) , -ul (i) , -ush (a) (and some others): bully , imagined , greedy , modest , squid , cruel , cruel .

A special class is made up of nouns nalo , sometimes attributed by researchers to the general gender.

In addition, truncated forms of personal names ( Valya , Zhenya , Lera ) and unchanged surnames ( Chernykh , Sagan , Dumbadze , Ozheshko ), as well as foreign words denoting persons of different sexes ( vis-a-vis , protégé , incognito ) are sometimes referred to the general genus ^{[2 ]} .

The grammatical general gender does not include words preserving the grammatical gender regardless of the person indicated. For example, words denoting professions are distributed by gender according to the type of graduation, regardless of the gender of the persons they designate. The doctor , lawyer , surgeon are male; manicurist , nanny , nurse - to the female.

Nouns denoting animals ( squirrel , rook ), and figurative nouns can refer to both female and male persons ( snake , hat , mattress ). The grammatical meaning of the gender of the noun remains unchanged ^[2] .

In Swedish (and in some other Scandinavian languages , as well as in Dutch ^[3] ), the male and female gender merged into one common gender. As a result, the language has only a middle and general gender ^[4] .

In the English language, nouns are sometimes referred to the common gender, which can mean animate objects of both sexes: friend , sheep , etc. ^[5]

• masculine , feminine and neuter .
• Gender linguistics
• Feminatives

• Alexander Isachenko. The grammatical structure of the Russian language in comparison with the Slovak. Morphology. . - ISBN 5457483932 , 9785457483934.