(By Greville Corbett): "We should ... ask whether [the gender classes] are arbitrary. The answer is that there is always a semantic “core” to the system. That is, there is an overlap between the nouns which take a particular set of agreements and some semantic feature... In the familiar systems such as French and German, and indeed in the majority, the link is to biological sex... There are various types of gender systems where biological sex is not the semantic core. These are all based on some notion of animacy. When required there is no problem about expressing distinctions based on sex in such languages, by the use of separate lexical items (whether based on different roots or derivationally linked) or by qualifying items with the meaning ‘male/female’. The use of the term gender is still fully appropriate for systems based on animacy, because structurally the systems are fully comparable..."