Wikipedia:Featured picture candidates/Cats and grammatical gender

Cats and grammatical gender

Voting period is over. Please don't add any new votes. Voting period ends on 20 Jan 2013 at 13:07:06 (UTC)

**Original** – In languages with grammatical gender, the gender of a noun affects the form of other words related to it. For example, in Spanish, determiners, adjectives, and pronouns change their form depending on the noun they refer to. Spanish has two genders: Masculine and feminine.

**ALT1** - Improved image quality. Now with examples of humans and objects (both having grammatical gender).

Reason: Good resolution. It's a diagram showing how grammatical gender works in general. I would be useful for people learning foreign languages, since many of them (Spanish, French, German, Russian...) have this characteristic, wich most anglophones find rather bizarre.
Articles in which this image appears: Grammatical gender
FP category for this image: Wikipedia:Featured pictures/Diagrams, drawings, and maps/Diagrams
Creator: Fauban

Support as nominator --Fauban 13:07, 11 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Comment: Regardless of everything else, this should really be an SVG. J Milburn (talk) 13:29, 11 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose Unfortunately, at full resolution, the cats look terrible. Pixellated and with bits cut off. While a pretty good diagram (a little children's-textbook-ish, perhaps, though that may actually be a strength); I don't think it can pass the image quality requirement. Another potential issue is that "gato" isn't just "he-cat", it's "generic cat" as well; indeed, part of the major confusion people have with grammatical gender is that it doesn't generally have anything to do with the gender of the actual thing being discussed. Adam Cuerden ^(talk) 16:50, 11 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose. It's not bad, but I don't think it represents our best work. The cartoon cats with color to represent gender distinction isn't ideal (blue and pink don't universally mean male and female). Would it be possible to use a photo of a male lion and a female lion instead? Just an idea. Kaldari (talk) 21:46, 11 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose. Adam is quite correct; "gato" does not refer to a male cat; furthermore, in general, the relationship between grammatical gender and biological sex in romance languages is rather abstract and indeterminate, so I don't think this is the best way to represent it. Chick Bowen 01:39, 12 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

OK, maybe using examples of animals was not a good idea, because the gender divisions are not clear-cut. Now I've put unambiguous examples.--Fauban 13:46, 12 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Alt1 is much better, thank you. I doubt that the FP regulars will want to feature it, because they'll want it as an SVG instead of JPEG, but it's a great improvement for the article. Chick Bowen 15:58, 12 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I really hate to be picky, but is Moto - a feminine noun ending in -o - too unusual of an example? Other than that, it's much improved. Adam Cuerden ^(talk) 15:59, 12 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Good point, but not a killer I don't think. My Spanish isn't too great, but in Italian it's actually more common than one might think: la mano, il pianista (and lots of similarly constructed occupations--e.g. il barista), etc. The distinction is much more rigid for adjectives. I love it that we're discussing comparative grammar on this page; I don't think that's happened before. Chick Bowen 16:10, 12 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Well, first, I've figured out how to convert this into SVG (Photoshop didn't recognize it)!! Second, those Italian examples you've put are identical in Spanish. What the article comes to say is that gender is an inherent (kind of "invisible") property of nouns, that only manifests itself in other parts of speech, like adjectives. Explicit gender marking in nouns (like -o, -a) is only optional, and in languages like German, somewhat uncommon. Thanks!--Fauban 17:12, 12 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I think something went horribly wrong with the conversion to SVG. Also, while I agree for most languages that's true, Spanish is rather more commonly explicitly marked; and if we weren't using Spanish, we'd probably need to bring in the neuter gender. On the other hand, it doesn't hurt the educational value, so maybe I'm overthinking. Adam Cuerden ^(talk) 17:25, 12 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Fauban, you should download Inkscape. It's free! Chick Bowen 01:35, 13 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I really wanted to put "moto" to stress the inherent quality of gender. In that part of the article, gender marking is not discussed at all, just gender agreement (that's what the black arrows represent). But is so many people object, I can put "motocicleta" instead. Oh, and is the SVG still displayed wrong? It looks fine inmy laptop.--Fauban 19:02, 13 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Comment: Regarding the alt, I'd prefer a less pathological example than moto, i.e. a feminine noun should end in an "a." -- King of ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ 06:37, 13 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

It may be best to withdraw and restart this nom. Adam Cuerden ^(talk) 01:15, 15 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Not Promoted --Armbrust ^{The Homunculus} 13:10, 20 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]