Very few of class I.
28. Usually the gender words he and she are prefixed to neuter words; as he-goat—she-goat, cock sparrow—hen sparrow, he-bear—she-bear.
One feminine, woman, puts a prefix before the masculine man. Woman is a short way of writing wifeman.
II. Gender shown by Suffixes.
29. By far the largest number of gender words are those marked by suffixes. In this particular the native endings have been largely supplanted by foreign suffixes.
Native suffixes.
The native suffixes to indicate the feminine were -en and -ster. These remain in vixen and spinster, though both words have lost their original meanings.
The word vixen was once used as the feminine of fox by the Southern-English. For fox they said vox; for from they said vram; and for the older word fat they said vat, as in wine vat. Hence vixen is for fyxen, from the masculine fox.
Spinster is a relic of a large class of words that existed in Old and Middle English,[[1]] but have now lost their original force as feminines. The old masculine answering to spinster was spinner; but spinster has now no connection with it.
The foreign suffixes are of two kinds:—