How to change the languages on my mobile?

In languages where possessive pronouns and verbs change their form according to the gender of the object in possession and subject of the verb respectively, how is the gender of inanimate objects decided?

• In the languages Hindi and Marathi (and many other I guess), the form of possessive pronoun changes depending on the gender of the object in possession. For example in Hindi, "my" becomes either "मेरा" or "मेरी" depending on whether the object is masculine or feminine. 1) My son  -> मेरा बेटा 2) My daughter -> मेरी बेटी Sounds nice and fine till we reach the murky area : Inanimate objects! What about things like table and chair? What is their gender. Many times gut feeling and "sounding the right way" guide us in these cases. मेरा कुर्सी (chair as masculine) just doesn't sound nice and we go ahead with  मेरी कुर्सी (chair as feminine). Works out fine. But what about words which do not ring any alarm bell with either gender? In Marathi language, across various places, I have heard people using the word "pen" with all the three genders (masculine, feminine and neutral) and none of those particularly sound right or wrong. 1) माझा पेन. (M) 2) माझं पेन. (N) 3) माझी पेन. (F) So I wonder how genders for inanimate objects are decided in general, whether there is some "standard reference" and how are new words (like pen, table etc) dealt with...

• Answer:

  The short answer is that it's largely arbitrary and that you just have to know it. That's why people who learn a new language have a hard time figuring out which word is what gender because, well, you mostly can't figure it out. I answered a similar question last year (). The distinction is mostly arbitrary. Sorry if that sounds unhelpful, but that's the way it is. The derivational morphology in many languages may have rules to determine the grammatical gender of a derived word, so in those cases it is systematic, but then there is really no reason why a particular suffix would be assigned the fem. or the masc. gender. So, it might be occasionally systematic, but no more or lesslogical, per se. Eg. in German, the suffixes -keit or -heit are used with many adjectives to make their corresponding nouns. These nouns are then feminine. möglich (possible) → möglichkeit (possibility) gelegen (opportune/located) → gelegenheit (opportunity) Or sample Hindi, where a similar function is carried out by the -ta suffix. saphal(successful) becomes saphalta (success), which is then grammatically feminine. However, I'll take this opportunity (especially since you've A2Aed me) to clarify a common misconception people have about grammatical gender. You need to keep in mind that the word gender in grammar has very little to do with biological sex. As I explained in another answer (), gender originally meant something like 'class' or category, while sex was used for the male-female distinction. However, as sex began to take on erotic and forbidden undertones, gender started being used regularly for this purpose (m/f distinction). Note that grammatical gender is still about categories rather than sexual organs.   In fact, not all languages have just a masculine-feminine distinction. Some have separate categories for animals and inanimate objects. In some languages, the distinction may be semantic, directly linked to the meaning or sense, but in most languages, it is arbitrary. Two words for the same concept can have different genders (मृत्यु हुई, but स्वर्गवास हुआ). The same word in two languages can have different genders (मृत्यु हुई in Hindi, but मृत्यु झाला in Marathi). And in some cases, it might be counter-intuitive. such as the German word for girl, mädchen, which has neutral gender. In some cases, cultural associations may affect the gender assigned to some inanimate objects. For instance, some cultures treat the Sun as feminine. But, in most languages, there is no real way of predicting the gender of inanimate objects. You just need to know it.