Masculine virile

Masculine virile is an issue relating to verbs and/or nouns in some languages, such as Polish, which refer to male humans but not male animals.^[1] They are therefore not to be confused with mere animacy.

Polish language examples

In Polish, for the word Murzyn that can be translated into English as "Black man", the standard nominative plural is Murzyni, which is using the "personal masculine" suffix, while the impersonal suffix (that is: Murzyny) is pejorative, because it puts Black men in the same (grammatic) category as animals.^[2]^[3]

In Polish one would say to a group of animals, girls or adult women "Co zrobiłyście?" ("What did you do?"), but "Co zrobiliście?" to a group of boys or men.

References

^ "Slavic Languages".
^ Mills, Margaret H., ed. (1999). Slavic gender linguistics. John Benjamins. p. 210. ISBN 9027250758. Retrieved 2013-04-23.
^ Katamba, Francis (2004). Morphology: Morphology: Primes, phenomena and processes. Taylor & Francis. ISBN 9780415270809.

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[1] "Slavic Languages".

[SGL-2] Mills, Margaret H., ed. (1999). Slavic gender linguistics. John Benjamins. p. 210. ISBN 9027250758. Retrieved 2013-04-23.

[3] Katamba, Francis (2004). Morphology: Morphology: Primes, phenomena and processes. Taylor & Francis. ISBN 9780415270809.

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Masculine virile

Polish language examples

References

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