Wikidata:Property proposal/semantic gender

semantic gender

Originally proposed at Wikidata:Property proposal/Lexemes

   Done: semantic gender (P10339) (Talk and documentation)

Description	used when a word is only used to refer to people of this gender or to animals of this sex, independent of the grammatical gender
Represents	natural gender (Q2275697)
Data type	Item
Domain	senses on nouns and pronouns
Allowed values	mainly male (Q6581097), female (Q6581072), male organism (Q44148), female organism (Q43445), novalue
Example 1	mother (en) → female (Q6581072)
Example 2	Enterich (de) → male organism (Q44148)
Example 3	Mädchen (de) → female (Q6581072)
Example 4	han (sv) → male (Q6581097)
Example 5	doe (en) → female organism (Q43445)
Example 6	Person (de) → novalue
See also	grammatical gender (P5185), sex or gender (P21)

Motivation

Some words are only used to refer to people of a particular gender or animals of a particular sex. This is distinct from grammatical gender (grammatical gender (P5185)) because it is about the semantics of the word, not the grammatical behaviour of the word, although the two often match when a language has grammatical gender. A word's grammatical gender can be different from its semantic gender, e.g. "das Mädchen" in German is grammatically neuter but refers to a female person, while "die Person" is grammatically feminine but means a person of any gender. A word can have a semantic gender even if the language does not have grammatical gender, e.g. "mother" in English refers to a female person even though English does not have grammatical gender. In languages like German, where words for people almost always refer to a specific gender, it would be useful to explicitly mark those which are gender-neutral, like "Person", using novalue.

- Nikki (talk) 16:02, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

Discussion

•  Support However what about using unisex (Q76976) for gender neutral words? ArthurPSmith (talk) 18:02, 28 January 2022 (UTC)
•  Support --Lucas Werkmeister (talk) 18:23, 28 January 2022 (UTC)
•  Comment I'm leaning toward  Support but I have some questions. Is this proposal what we call "natural gender" natural gender (Q2275697) or is there a difference? I'm also wondering how we can setup checking with other properties (in particular, I'm thinking of item for this sense (P5137)). Cheers, VIGNERON (talk) 16:47, 29 January 2022 (UTC)

  natural gender (Q2275697) looks right - I've linked it from the proposal and added some aliases to the item. For checking using other properties, maybe Listeria or some complex constraints? - Nikki (talk) 18:21, 29 January 2022 (UTC)

  Thanks, so definitely  Support then. And Listeria or some complex constraints are both good and complementary tools, I just wanted to start a discussion on the principles. Cheers, VIGNERON (talk) 19:15, 29 January 2022 (UTC)

•  Support Mahir256 (talk) 13:16, 2 February 2022 (UTC)
•  Support —MasterRus21thCentury (talk) 21:44, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

@Nikki, ArthurPSmith, Lucas Werkmeister, VIGNERON, Mahir256, MasterRus21thCentury:  Done semantic gender (P10339) Pamputt (talk) 14:47, 6 February 2022 (UTC)