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• neuter (neut): ENGLISH it, its DANISH: den/det,
dens/dets
However, there are a few other areas where English makes a distinction
between masculine and feminine gender. One of these involves the suffix –ess,
which marks a noun as feminine (contrast e.g. lion and lioness; steward and
stewardess; prince and princess). Sometimes the distinction is built into
contrasting members of word pairs. This is particularly true within the animal
kingdom: bull (masc), cow (fem); stallion (masc), mare (fem) – but it is not
restricted to this part of the vocabulary: Contrast, for example, king vs. queen.
As already noted (under the section on the article), Danish uses the articles to
make a very regular and extensive distinction between common gender
(en/den) and neuter gender (et/det):
• en/den + kjole, ske, arm, næse, mand, kvinde, banan, dør, seng, kat,
hund, so, hest, kanin
• et/det + hus, glas, ben, ansigt, barn, æble, vindue, egern, firben, får,
svin, føl, næsehorn
As the Danish examples clearly demonstrate, grammatical gender is not to be
confused with real world reference to the sexes. Although the connection is
clear enough in the case of such pairs as prince and princess, and in the case
of the English personal pronouns (where e.g. he typically refers to males, she
to females, and it to “neuter” items such as book and water), it is difficult to
see why, in Danish, a word like vindue should be neuter gender while dør is
common gender.
The following tables summarize the data for this group of pronouns in English
and Danish, respectively.
page 49
John M. Dienhart