A Grammatical Gender And Ergativity Linguistics Refresher

Grammatical gender rules are not a feature that is shared by all Indo-European languages, or even a feature shared by all languages in the Germanic language family. 

Ergativity is is a grammatical feature with more uniformity, but is not uniform within the Indo-European or the Berber language family within the Afro-Asiatic language family.

Grammatical gender

Some of the Germanic languages (Icelandic, Norwegian, German, and Yiddish), the Slavic languages, and Greek have three grammatical genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter).

The subset of Germanic languages made up of Swedish, Danish, Dutch, and Flemish have a "common" and a neuter grammatical gender (the masculine grammatical gender and the feminine grammatical gender are merged relative to the three gender system).

The Celtic languages of the British Isles, the Romance languages, the Baltic languages (Lithuanian and Latvian), the Northern Kurdish languages, and the non-Indo-European Afro-Asiatic languages of Europe and the Mediterranean and the Middle East (Arabic including Maltese, Hebrew, Aramaic, the Berber languages, Coptic) have two grammatical genders (masculine and feminine). But, they don't have a neuter grammatical gender.

English (a Germanic language), the Central Kurdish languages, the non-Indo-European Uralic languages (Saami, Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian), and the non-Indo-European Turkish languages do not have grammatical gender. Modern English, in common with Icelandic, Norwegian, and German does, however, have a masculine, feminine, and neuter third person singular pronoun (he, she, it), and Central Kurdish has a masculine and feminine but not neuter third person pronoun.

The Non-Indo-European Basque language has an animate noun class and an inanimate noun class that is called a grammatical gender, rather than an actually gender based grammatical gender system.

All of these languages are Indo-European language, except Basque, Turkish, the Uralic languages, the Afro-Asiatic languages (Arabic including Maltese, the Berber languages, and Hebrew).

Ergativity

Ergativity is another grammatical feature that doesn't strictly follow language family lines (probably due to substrate influences). Basque is ergative, as is Kurdish (which is spoken in an area where extinct ergative languages were once spoken), as are some Berber languages.

What is ergativity?

I'll quote the Wikipedia link above to make sure that I get it right:

In linguistic typology, ergative–absolutive alignment is a type of morphosyntactic alignment in which the subject of an intransitive verb behaves like the object of a transitive verb, and differently from the subject of a transitive verb. All known ergative languages show ergativity in their morphology, and a small portion also show ergativity in their syntax.

The ergative-absolutive alignment is in contrast to nominative–accusative alignment, which is observed in English, where the single argument of an intransitive verb behaves grammatically like the agent (subject) of a transitive verb but different from the object of a transitive verb. In ergative–absolutive languages with grammatical case, the case for the single argument of an intransitive verb and the object of a transitive verb is called the absolutive, and the case used for the agent of a transitive verb is called the ergative.

By one measure, 17% the world's languages use an ergative alignment in the marking of noun phrases. Examples of ergative-absolutive languages include Basque, Georgian, Mayan, Tibetan, Sumerian, and certain Indo-European languages such as Pashto, the Kurdish languages and many others.