Neuter plural subjects, singular verbs

How many people still speak Persian?

About 40 million Farsi speakers in the world, according to one source, 110 million per Wikipedia.

A non-trivial population.

Edited by: psw

Wow. Didn't realise that. It's not a language I've ever taken much notice of.
Thanks.

Moreover Dari (one of the two official languages of Afghanistan, spoken by about half the population) and Tajik are very similar to Farsi.

Although a lot of people, including the Teach Yourslef Persian book I was looking at, will say there is no gender in Persian, there are distinct third-person pronouns for people (same for male and female) and things.

Having distinct words for he and she (are there any languages that don't?) and it does not mean that the language has grammatical gender. Grammatical gender implies that you do something grammatically different according to the gender of the noun or pronoun you are dealing with. Thus English has no grammatical gender. Whilst grammatical gender is most frequently of the male/female/(optionally neuter) or animate/inanimate or common/neuter types, or simple variations thereon, there are some other kinds. I read once about a language that has edible/inedible gender.

Persian, Turkish, spoken Chinese, and Finnish don't have distinct pronouns for he and she, iviehoff. I guess I didn't make myself clear above. Persian has one pronoun that means either he or she, and another that means it. And it has one pronoun that means they (people) and another that means they (things). The pronoun that means they (people) takes a plural verb; the pronoun that means they (things) takes a singular verb. That lt bit is the phenomenon I was interested in.

Wikipedia, and many linguists including the author of my Teach Yourself Book, treat Farsi, Dari, and Tadzhik as dialects of the one language called Persian. That's probably the reason for the apparent discrepancy in psw's figures.

I would disagree with your definition of grammatical gender. I would say it remains in English only in the system of personal pronouns and possessive adjectives, more so than in Persian. I believe Chinese has no grammatical gender at all, not in verbs, nouns, adjectives, or pronouns. But this is an argument about how the term is most usefully defined, not about the phenomena of the languages.

Sincere thanks Vinny, for filling out my ignorance so gently. I feel a bit silly because re-reading your earlier post, I should have spotted the tiny residual bit of grammatical gender you were illustrating, as it was perfectly clear. Though the details you since added are very interesting.

Iviehoff (#4) wonders if there are languages with the same word for "he" and "she".
Yes - Georgian is such a langauge. The word "is" is the third person singular pronoun, for men and women.