(By Greville Corbett): "The defining characteristic of gender is agreement: a language has a gender system only if we find different agreements ultimately dependent on nouns of different types. In other words, there must be evidence for gender outside the nouns themselves... It is equally important to be clear on definitions when we ask how many genders particular languages have. Our approach starts from Zaliznjak (1964). Basically, two nouns are in the same gender provided that, however we change the environment (treating both the same), then both will take the same agreements. ... The earlier Bantuist tradition treated nouns as being in different noun classes when singular and plural; we consider the total behaviour of a noun, including both its singular and its plural, with the result that a typical Bantu language may have 7-10 genders rather than around 20 noun classes. More generally, while in many languages there is no dispute as to the number of genders, there are a few where the question is far from straightforward. The analytical problem of determining the number of genders and the tests for deciding the gender of a given noun depend on separating out the classes into which nouns are divided (the controller genders) from the number of different genders marked on agreement targets (the target genders)..."