What is the genus of nouns? How is it determined?

The genus of nouns is a grammatical category, manifested in the possibility of nouns being combined with specific forms of words to be agreed. The category of the genus can be expressed semantically (that is, in meaning, only in animate nouns), grammatically and syntactically. Semantically, all nouns are masculine, feminine and average. Words indicating animals and males refer to the masculine gender (brother, grandfather, student, goose, rooster, horse); Nouns that call animals and females (sister, grandmother, student, goose, chicken, horse) - to feminine gender; Animals and persons irrespective of sex (a monster, a monster, a person (a person), a child) - to the middle genus.

The genus of nouns is grammatically expressed by means of ending in the nominative case. This category of the genus is inherent in both animate and inanimate inclined noun. In this case, in addition to the 3 main genera, a common genus is also distinguished. The differences between them are presented in the table:

Syntactically determine the genus of nouns can be in the form of a compatible word, which depends on the noun. So, participles, adjectives, ordinal numbers, consistent with masculine nouns, end in -y, -y, -y (beautiful garden, singing boy, combat soldier); With nouns of the feminine gender - na-ay, -yaya (beautiful street, summer season); With nouns of the middle genus - on-her, -e (beautiful sky, winter morning). Also the kind of nouns is determined by the end of the predicate expressed by the verb in the past tense in the subjunctive or indicative mood, or participle or short adjective. Male gender - the predicate has a zero ending (rain has passed, the plan is executed); The female gender - the ending -a (the work is finished, the moon has risen); The middle genus is the ending -o (the letter is received, the sun has risen).

There are also indeclinable nouns. Most of them belong to the middle genus (depot, interviews and all substantivized indeclinable nouns such as "hello", "hurray", "yes", "tomorrow", "do not want"). The following are the exceptions:

- hectare, coffee, poppies, suluguni, sirocco, ecu, tornado, shimmy, as well as the names of languages (Bengali, Urdu, Suomi, Pashto, Hindi) - masculine;

- avenue, birch, salami, kohlrabi - female.

The genus of indeclinable nouns, such as geographical names, names of newspapers and magazines, can be determined by the genus of the noun with the meaning of the generic concept ( Ontario, Lake), Japanese (city) Tokyo, wide (river) Mississippi, published (The Times) . The genus of abbreviations should be defined by the genus of the main word (MSU - male genus - Moscow State University, UN - feminine - United Nations, CIS - middle class - Commonwealth of Independent States). To establish the kind of nouns that are not used in the singular, but only in the plural, is impossible, since they have no category of genus (pants, forks, macaroni, nursery).