Gender of Russian Nouns and Its Translation into Persian

Abstract

The case of grammatical gender is one of the important topics studied in the Russian morphology. Nouns are considered to have four different genders in Russian: masculine, feminine, neutral and common. Two of them, i.e. masculine and feminine (animate nouns), are closely related to natural or real gender. The gender of nouns determines that of their modifiers, such as adjectives, quantifiers, pronouns, etc. Taking a translational view, this paper attempts to categorize the grammatical gender of nouns in Russian based on the animate-inanimate category and compare them with their corresponding nouns in Persian. Since there is a great difference between these notions in Russian and Persian, and Iranian learners of Russian face problems in utilizing and translating such words, this paper surveys and suggests different methods of recognizing the natural gender of nouns and translating them into Persian.