Gender Agreement in Romance and Germanic Languages

In general, there is a clear tendency for Romance languages—those that derive from Latin such as Spanish, Italian, French, or Portuguese—to clearly show gender agreement between the article, the noun, and the adjective. This is not as clear in Germanic languages like English or German. Such agreement is carried out through the addition of morphemes indicating gender and number (inflection).

On the contrary, English does not show gender agreement and, in order to express contrast between the feminine and the masculine, it resorts to lexical choice; that is, we find a different noun for each gender (a more analytical procedure). Such features could indicate that Romance languages tend to be more synthetic than Germanic ones. In spite of its Germanic origin, German presents both mechanisms: on the one hand, inflection and gender agreement, as shown by the articles Das (neuter gender, singular number, nominative case) and Der (masculine gender, singular number, nominative case), and also analytical procedures such as changing nouns to change gender reference.

Structuralist Perspectives on Linguistic Units

The relations existing among the words hermano, hermana, sibling, brother, and sister can be analyzed according to structuralist linguistics. Structuralist linguists like Saussure understand language as a system where language units (phonemes, words, semes, and the like) gain their linguistic value by opposition to other units which exist within the system. For instance, the phonemes /b/ and /p/ differ in just one feature, "voicing," which distinguishes them as separate units.

Neutralization and Inclusion in Language Systems

As regards the Spanish words hermano and hermana, they might be interpreted differently depending on the context. If the word hermano refers to the male descendant of a couple, as opposed to hermana, these two words or language units bear a relation of opposition since the feature "gender" distinguishes them from one another. However, if hermano is used as a generic masculine—that is to say, to refer to both genders (as in los hermanos deben cuidarse mucho)—their relation would be labeled as neutralization (following the structuralist model), since the masculine noun has the capacity to absorb or comprise both the masculine and the feminine genders and thus eliminate the opposition.

The English examples also present two possibilities. The masculine noun brother does not have the capacity to neutralize the feminine in English as in Spanish (it cannot be used to refer to the female descendants of a couple). However, there is another word which refers to both: siblings. Therefore, brother and sister are opposed to each other while the term sibling includes them both; this is called inclusion.