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A Detail Compare And Contrast Study Of Gender And Number Systems Of English And Bangla

In English language, number and gender are the major elements of secondary category. They have some individual character traits and features of their own, which make them different than the number and gender systems of other languages. Therefore automatically there comes the issue of compare and contrast them with other languages. In this assignment paper, I will present a detail compare and contrast study of gender and number systems of English and Bangla. In addition, for the better understanding, I would like to present the features of each system first.

Gender

English gender system:

Gender is important as a grammatical category. There is a claim that English doesn’t have any proper gender system. That’s why; gender and sex are often associated together.

English has its biological gender, not grammatical gender, because it depends on the division of sexes. In other languages, there is grammatical gender, that is, they have grammatical feature, refers to, all types of words unlike English, that refers to nouns or inanimate objects.

David Crystal (1995) said,
Gender is a grammatical category used for the analysis of word classes’ displays, such contrasts as masculine or feminine or neuter or animated or inanimate etc.
Furthermore he added,
In linguistics the discussion of this concept focuses upon the need to distinguish natural and grammatical gender.

Grammatical gender has nothing to do with biological gender, but it has an important role in signaling grammatical relationships between words in a sentence.

For example, we can present French gender system. In French language, adjective agrees with the noun. But in English, we don’t find this feature.
Example:
Bon homme       – good man
Bonne femme - good woman  

Even we find article-adjective-noun agreement in French language.
Example:
Un beau garcon – a beautiful boy
Une belle fille   -   a beautiful girl

Characteristics of English gender system:

In...