On classification of common gender nouns in the Russian language and their translation into the Persian language

With respect to the concept of grammatical gender and considering the characteristics of common gender nouns in the Russian language, the paper provides their classification and analyzes the peculiarities of their translation into the Persian language. The concept of grammatical gender in the Russian language is first of all related to nouns, i.e. words representing objects and phenomena. According to the ways of expressing them, the variety of nouns is generally divided into three groups: so-called masculine, feminine and gender-neutral nouns. Furthermore, apart from nouns having particular gender, there are nouns that can be equally applied to male or female persons. These occupy a special place in the grammatical system of the Russian language, being called common gender nouns. The purpose of this article is to discuss these nouns, classify them according to their gender and also demonstrate the peculiarities of their translation into the Persian language. In contemporary linguistics, there are two approaches regarding gender: the first one emphasizes the differences in the speech style typical of men and women, while the other approach focuses on the method of expressing gender in language. Using the material of educational and teaching books, encyclopedias, dictionaries and based on the viewpoints of many researchers regarding gender, the author of the paper considers the category of common gender, provides examples of nouns demonstrating both feminine and masculine meanings, with the corresponding translation into Persian. While in the Russian language grammatical gender is expressed by morphological and syntactic means, in the Persian language there are particular lexemes and special terms to express the gender distinction. Following the analysis of common gender nouns discussed, their classification in the Russian language and their translation into the Persian language are presented. The classification is based on the type of the common gender nouns. The first group consists of indeclinable non-Russian family names ending with vowels; the second group consists of indeclinable common nouns denoting nationality; the third group includes declinable proper nouns; the fourth group consists of common nouns ending with ‘а/я’. Attention is paid to the way of expressing common gender nouns in the Persian language through words - lexemes expressing the masculine gender and also lexemes expressing the feminine gender that are added at the beginning or the end of words.