Katarina Katavić, Department of Indology and Far Eastern Studies, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, Croatia

Hindi Gender System

One of the hardest parts of language learning is mastering the gender oppositions. Hindi has two grammatical genders, masculine and feminine, which are partly semantic, partly phonological and partly arbitrarily assigned. The Hindi gender system has been researched to some extent, but only a few assignment rules have been extracted and most Hindi students still learn gender of nouns by heart. Using the Tlex dictionary software and a wordlist containing more than 7000 nouns, I will try to extract as many assignment rules as possible, taking into account both phonology and etymology of words at stake.