However, these are relatively insignificant features compared with a typical language with full grammatical gender. English nouns are not generally considered to belong to gender classes in the way that French, German or Russian nouns are. There is no gender agreement in English between nouns and their modifiers (articles, other determiners, or adjectives, with the occasional exception such as "blond/blonde", a spelling convention borrowed from French). Gender agreement applies in effect only to pronouns, and the choice of pronoun is determined based on semantics (perceived qualities of the thing being referred to) rather than on any conventional assignment of particular nouns to particular genders.