Editing Grammatical gender (section)

=== Related linguistic concepts ===
==== Noun classes ====
{{Main|Noun classes}}
A noun may belong to a given class because of characteristic features of its [[referent]], such as sex, animacy, shape, although in some instances a noun can be placed in a particular class based purely on its grammatical behavior. Some authors use the term ''grammatical gender'' as a synonym of ''noun class'', but others use different definitions for each.

Many authors prefer the term ''noun class'' when none of the inflections in a language relate to sex, such as when an [[Animacy|animate]]–inanimate distinction is made. However, the word ''gender'' derives from Latin {{lang|la|[[genus]]}} (also the root of ''genre'') which originally meant 'kind, type', so it does not necessarily have a sexual meaning.

==== Noun classifiers ====
{{Main|Noun classifier}}
A classifier, or [[measure word]], is a [[word]] or [[morpheme]] used in some languages together with a noun, principally to enable numbers and certain other [[determiner]]s to be applied to the noun. They are not regularly used in English or other European languages, although they parallel the use of words such as ''piece(s)'' and ''head'' in phrases like "three pieces of paper" or "thirty head of cattle". They are a prominent feature of [[East Asian languages]], where it is common for all nouns to require a classifier when being quantified—for example, the equivalent of "three people" is often "three {{var|classifier}} people". A more general type of classifier ([[classifier handshape]]s) can be found in [[sign language]]s.

Classifiers can be considered similar to genders or noun classes, in that a language which uses classifiers normally has a number of different ones, used with different sets of nouns. These sets depend largely on properties of the things that the nouns denote (for example, a particular classifier may be used for long thin objects, another for flat objects, another for people, another for abstracts, etc.), although sometimes a noun is associated with a particular classifier more by convention than for any obvious reason. However it is also possible for a given noun to be usable with any of several classifiers; for example, the [[Mandarin Chinese|Mandarin]] [[Chinese classifier]] {{lang|cmn|个}} ({{lang|cmn|個}}) {{transliteration|cmn|gè}} is frequently used as an alternative to various more specific classifiers.