languages, lack gender distinctions in personal pronouns entirely, as well as any system of grammatical gender. In languages with pronominal gender, problems
A third-person pronoun is a pronoun that refers to an entity other than the speaker or listener. Some languages, such as Slavic ones, with gender-specific pronouns have them as part of a grammatical gender system, a system of agreement where most or all nouns have a value for this grammatical category. A few languages with gender-specific pronouns, such as English, Afrikaans, Defaka, Khmu, Malayal
A third-person pronoun is a pronoun that refers to an entity other than the speaker or listener. Some languages, such as Slavic ones, with gender-specific pronouns have them as part of a grammatical gender system, a system of agreement where most or all nouns have a value for this grammatical category. A few languages with gender-specific pronouns, such as English, Afrikaans, Defaka, Khmu, Malayalam, Tamil, and Yazgulyam, lack grammatical gender; in such languages, gender usually adheres to "natural gender", which is often based on biological sex. Other languages, including most Austronesian languages, lack gender distinctions in personal pronouns entirely, as well as any system of grammatical gender.
In languages with pronominal gender, problems of usage may arise in contexts where a person of unspecified or unknown social gender is being referred to but commonly available pronouns are gender-specific. Different solutions to this issue have been proposed and used in various languages.
Many languages of the world (including most Austronesian languages, many East Asian languages, the Quechuan languages, and the Uralic languages) do not have gender distinctions in personal pronouns, just as most of them lack any system of grammatical gender. In others, such as many of the Niger–Congo languages, there is a system of grammatical gender (or noun classes), but the divisions are based on classifications other than sex, such as animacy, rationality, or countability. In Swahili, for example, the independent third person pronoun yeye 'she/he' can be used to refer to a female or male being. What matters in this case is that the referent belongs to the animate class (i.e humans or non-human animals) as opposed to an inanimate class. Since pronouns do not distinguish the social gender of the referent, they are considered neutral in this kind of system.
It cannot be said to be an advantage to the languages which possess it, while languages which, like English, have dropped it except for an occasional metaphor, suffer no loss. Nor is the problem confined to the history of gender in the substantive. Even more perplexing is the introduction of gender into the adjective. The pronouns of the first and second persons, which are certainly very old, show no trace of gender; the pronouns of the third person, which are more of the nature of deictic adjectives, generally possess it. To the question how grammatical gender arose in the substantive, the answer was till comparatively recently supposed to be that primitive man was given greatly to personification, endowing inanimate things with life and attributing to them influences benign or the reverse upon his own existence. The answer is not quite sufficient, for though this tendency to personification, which philologists have perhaps unduly decried or altogether denied, might account for life being attributed to inanimate objects, it hardly explains why some should be treated as masculine and others as feminine.
Everything we examined (3) — 2 independent sources
This check searched the claim as stated. It did not run a separate search for evidence against it.