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I don't know if this is the right place to ask this..

But when identifying pronouns, they are often given codes

1ms = 1st person masculine singular

and if a language, e.g. english and many others, don't specify gender in the first person, then C is (common?) gender..

1cs = (I guess) 1st person ("common?") singular

So "I" or "me" in English is given the pronoun abbreviation code 1cs

What about though, if the third letter in the abbreviation (the gender), is "common"? e.g. in English, in the second person "You" can be male or female, singular or plural. It's like 2cc (though i've not seen the abbreviation 2cc) What is the correct abbreviation to describe that neutral gender and neutral number?

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    Where did you get the 1ms notation from? I'm not familiar with it, and Google Books has no instances of those three characters in close proximity to either 1st or first person masculine singular. But you must have got it from *somewhere, so presumably that's the place to look for other forms.
    – FumbleFingers
    Commented Aug 23, 2015 at 14:54
  • @FumbleFingers 1ms, 1fs, 1mpl, 1fpl, etc., are fairly common ways to write this. Sometimes reversed as 1sm/1sf/1plm/1plf, etc.
    – Janus Bahs Jacquet
    Commented Aug 23, 2015 at 14:55
  • @FumbleFingers ah, was a book a while back on hebrew, but the pronoun abbreviations would apply to english too and I thought the abbreviations might be standard in english since they are english abbreviations biblicalhebrewmadeeasy.weebly.com/uploads/1/9/6/9/1969508/… should apply to English too e.g. 1cs(I/me) 1cp(we/us) Though it had nothing on neutral number.
    – barlop
    Commented Aug 23, 2015 at 14:56
  • @JanusBahsJacquet what about neutral number and neutral gender?
    – barlop
    Commented Aug 23, 2015 at 14:57
  • they seem to be morphology codes/abbreviations wiki.logos.com/morphology_codes
    – barlop
    Commented Aug 28, 2015 at 14:07

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There is a misconception in the basis of your question here: common gender is not the same as not specifying gender. The common gender is an actual gender, used in some languages (Danish, Swedish, Norwegian Bokmål, Hittite, etc.). I would not advise using that to refer to non-gendered forms.

In languages (or pronouns, or any other context) that does not specify gender at all, the most common practice is to simply leave out the gender-designating letter altogether. So where 1ms is ‘first person singular, masculine’, the most common way of writing ‘first person singular, any gender’ is simply 1s.

The same logic is sometimes applied to number as well; for example, the Lithuanian verb is always the same in the third person, whether singular or plural, and this is often noted as simply 3, with no extra letters at all. The same can be done for you in English.

If you wish to be more specific and reduce the risk of misunderstanding—a single number in running text is not necessarily very clear—you can include all the possible values instead of leaving them all out. In that way, the Lithuanian verb forms would be 3spl (or 3s/pl for enhanced readability), and you in English is 2splmf (or 2s/pl-m/f for readability). This is the approach usually taken when a particular form is relevant to multiple (but not all) cases in a given paradigm, like the Sanskrit ending -bhyām, which is idadu (instrumental, dative, and ablative dual).

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  • what is the difference between common gender, and gender not specified? like "you" in english is that common gender or gender not specified?
    – barlop
    Commented Aug 23, 2015 at 15:10
  • Common (or commune) gender is an actual gender, like masculine and feminine. English has no grammatical gender, so you (and everything else, except perhaps he and she.
    – Janus Bahs Jacquet
    Commented Aug 23, 2015 at 15:21
  • I'm asking if you can explain the difference between an actual common gender, and no gender.
    – barlop
    Commented Aug 23, 2015 at 15:24
  • @barlop: I'd have thought "singular they" in English represents an "actual" common gender use, where it implies "no gender". But IANAL (Linguist, in this case).
    – FumbleFingers
    Commented Aug 23, 2015 at 16:19
  • @barlop The difference is the same as the difference between masculine and no gender, for example. Pronouns are a bit of a special case, because they can refer to both grammatical and physical gender, not always overlapping. The Scandinavian languages, for instance, have deictic/personal pronouns for the third person singular for both physical sexes (e.g., Danish han ‘he’, hun ‘she’) as well as for both grammatical genders (e.g., Danish den ‘it [common]’, det ‘it [neuter]’). There is no 3s pronoun that does not encode information about gender, but one that encodes common gender.
    – Janus Bahs Jacquet
    Commented Aug 23, 2015 at 17:23

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