6 ms·
Why are ships always female?
- PaulHoule 3y agoOn a ship you are surrounded in a salty fluid. In fact, amniotic fluid is said to "smell like the sea" and I can confirm that it does.
- sshine 3y agoYour field report has been recorded. Thank you for your brave service.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- sph 3y agotl;dr: The English language, and thus its culture, derives from languages where the word "ship" is female, so it's natural to refer to one as such. All languages in some form derive from one other, but is there an ancient/root language that doesn't have gendered nouns? English seems to me to be an exception, especially in the context of Latin and European languages. Maybe the question exists in the first place because English is such an anomaly.
- lordnacho 3y agoSeems likely English actually just lost its genders, maybe because it was being mixed up a lot during the middle ages with French and Latin. Flattening the genders would make it easier to speak for people on both sides of the channel.
- sph 3y agoI don't know, maybe gendered nouns still exist but are assimilated as part of the culture. A shared set of assumptions about what gender things are. I'm pretty sure if I were to ask a native English speaker to assign a gender to the Sun and the Moon, the first would be male and the second female, like it is in any Latin language. How is this possible?
- trimethylpurine 3y agoI'm a native speaker and this doesn't apply to me.
- CoastalCoder 3y agoYeah, me either. I don't have any intuition that inanimate objects have an affinity to human sexes.
- sph 3y agoI know, I'm not asking if it applies to you, but if you had to choose, which would you. But with the other responses the experiment is falsified. My theory was that if an English speaker had to choose, the choice would not be random, so gendered nouns somehow exist in culture as kind of a silent agreement, if you will. But if you have to really think about it, you can rationalise any choice as being valid, so this thought experiment becomes moot.
- ghaff 3y agoI don't know how universally people would answer the question that way but the Greek/Roman gods were male and female respectively.
- xdennis 3y agoI think those are ingrained culturally as many cultures associate the sun with kingship. But the thing about gender is that it is a property of a word, not the thing it is referencing. So synonyms could have different genders.
- taeric 3y agoI thought English was pretty heavy in the non-gendered side? There are some words that we remember the gender of, of course. But we don't have the hard separation of verbs and such that apply based on the gender. Consider the French "verb gender agreement" idea. Do we have anything like that in English? I also confess I didn't think of a gender for the sun. The moon brings to mind some characters named Luna, but I wouldn't think of the moon itself being female. And then there are some words that are becoming more directly gendered in the modern world. "Guys," as the easy example. It is also interesting to me that different animals are seen as gendered in odd ways. "Cats" being one that feels more feminine to me. Despite all of our cats being male. My entire family also always refers to the chickens as "he" and "him." Such that we just don't seem to care about the animal sex/gender. (That makes me realize, has gender moved on from something that is applicable to animals?)
- jmclnx 3y agoI thought I read somewhere, Mandarin also do not have genders. But I could be miss-informed.
- DonaldFisk 3y agoAFAIK the only languages which have genders are Indo-European (except English and Farsi, which lost theirs) and Afro-Asiatic. Some other langauges, such as Basque and possibly Etruscan have/had an animate/inanimate distinction.
- anonymous_sorry 3y ago>tl;dr: The English language, and thus its culture, derives from languages where the word "ship" is female, so it's natural to refer to one as such. This is not a sufficient explanation, as the same thing must apply to many or most nouns in the English language, which we don't use gendered pronouns for now. It's also not a summary of the answer linked to, which says it's more likely due to a tradition of male mariners naming ships for important women in their lives
- CWuestefeld 3y agoThe politically correct language police have got us so confused about sex and gender that we don't understand our own language anymore. Ships aren't female to English speakers. Rather, they're tagged with the feminine gender. Linguistic gender is separate from sex; it just happens that in English, although gender is almost completely dead in the language we still happen to tag females as "feminine gender" and males as "masculine gender". The reason for the associations are more or less random. They vary from language to language, and don't seem to have much to do with whether you'd think of something as "manly" or "related to pursuits of the fairer sex". In French and Spanish, the gender assignments of some random words: pencil m m truck m m house f f building m m store m f fortress f f navy f f military f f castle m m shoe f m boot f f hat m m So in both French and Spanish, fortress, navy, and military are all feminine, while pencil or hat are masculine? While other words like store and shoe change their gender from language to language. There's really just two coincidences together that cause all this confusion: 1) For what little gender English has, it happens that there are two genders. That's not true for other languages. Lots of languages have many genders. 2) Many other languages have gender but don't even concern themselves with "masculine" or "feminine". According to wikipedia, The Bantu language Ganda has "10 classes called simply Class I to Class X and containing all sorts of arbitrary groupings but often characterised as people, long objects, animals, miscellaneous objects, large objects and liquids, small objects, languages, pejoratives, infinitives, mass nouns". No confusion about females being feminine here, and so forth.
- zabzonk 3y ago> Ships aren't female to English speakers. I would say they are - they are the thing that stands between you and all sorts of very unpleasant outcomes - very like your mother.
- CWuestefeld 3y agoOh yeah, I forgot about the fact that my father never stood between me and many unpleasant outcomes. I guess the only weird thing is that I don't refer to my seatbelt and bike helmet as "she".
- dustypotato 3y agoDravidian languages like Tamil and Malayalam don't have gendered nouns. One theory about how english lost genders is that it mixed too many gendered languages : Germanic + Latin + French + Danish
- prox 3y agoEnglish is ultimately derived from Indo-European. The earliest surviving language of that language tree is actually vedic Sanskrit. It has 3 numbers (single, dual, plural) and 3 genders (male, female, neuter) So you need to look at languages not derived from Indo European.
- FeteCommuniste 3y agoCurrent theory is that Proto-Indo-European had two genders: animate and inanimate. Wonder how its child languages developed three.
- prox 3y agoInteresting! From wiki: In Northern Kurdish language (Kurmanji), the same word can have two genders according to the context. For example, if the word dar (meaning 'wood' or 'tree') is feminine, it means that it is a living tree (e.g., dara sêvê means 'apple tree'), but if it is masculine, it means that it is dead, no longer living (e.g., darê sêvê means 'apple wood'). So if one wants to refer to a certain table that is made of wood from an apple tree, one cannot use the word dar with a feminine gender, and if one wants to refer to an apple tree in a garden, one cannot use dar with a masculine gender.
- sigzero 3y agoAlthough it may sound strange referring to an inanimate object as 'she', this tradition relates to the idea of a female figure such as a mother or goddess guiding and protecting a ship and crew. https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/why-do-ships-have-a-gender https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/why-do-ships-have-a-gender
- sph 3y agoIs this not a chicken-or-egg kind of problem? Are ships associated to goddesses because they have a female noun, or is the "ship" word female in many languages because it's associated to goddesses? I think it's the former, you say it's the latter. Usually we give something a name, deciding its gender in gendered languages (which to me is the interesting part), then we make any connection between the objects and other people/Gods based on the gender we felt was more appropriate for an inanimate object.
- giraffe_lady 3y agoThere are a lot of languages where ships aren't intrinsically feminine, like for example old english where they were neuter. You should be able to test your hypothesis by seeing whether those languages still associate ships with goddesses? Though IMO the goddess connection itself needs validation. For the second part, about assigning connections after the fact, something I always found weird and interesting is french ship gender conventions. The ship has the gender associated with the name it carries, but the name itself is chosen to match the gender of the underlying form. eg a fuel carrier is masculine and so will get a male name and pronoun, a frigate is feminine and will get a female name and pronoun.
- localplume 3y ago[dead]
- ethbr0 3y agoAn interesting question tagged as duplicate with two unrelated references. Who would have guessed?
- sph 3y agoJannies deserve their name, often used as an insult. Whether they are Reddit mods or StackOverflow admins, the majority are people that love putting things into neat little boxes and creating rules out of chaos. They get a small release of dopamine every time they can catch someone breaking one of their infinite and arbitrary impositions. To this day I still don't have a StackOverflow account.
- causi 3y agoI do not understand why, as many answers as they received, none of them pointed out that almost all inanimate objects in English are referred to as female when given a gender. An English speaker would say "oh yeah that old table saw, she's gonna give you some problems" but never "he's going to give you some problems". "This is my new hunting rifle, isn't she a beauty?" never "isn't he a beauty".
- moffkalast 3y agoWhy would they be given a gender anyway? If it's not some kind of self replicating dimorphous being that reproduces sexually it makes literally no sense.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- DoughnutHole 3y agoHalf of the world's languages have grammatical gender for inanimate objects. English is one of only a handful of Indo-European languages that don't. Giving inanimate objects gender doesn't have to make sense with regards to what maleness and femaleness mean in terms of human sexual dimorphism, it's just a part of how some languages developed. In French everything is male or female. In German things can be male, female, or neutral, but a table is always male. What's a bit unusual is that in English nouns don't require gendered pronouns generally because we have a neutral impersonal pronoun "it" for things that don't have literal gender, and generally don't require gendered pronouns - except we sometimes gender them anyways, and that gendering generally follows some convention.
- timmb 3y agoPretty sure I’ve heard people use “he” more than “she” in parts of England, especially for tools and, I think, furniture (“see that table - squeeze him in there”). I would guess there is a gender role being attributed to the object.
- kayodelycaon 3y agoAlmost all can be referred to as female. I most often hear "it" rather than "she". The difference seems to be related to personal connection. If you think a device has a personality, you'll use she, otherwise you would use it.
- himinlomax 3y agoIn French it's always male. Eg "le Marion Dufresne."
- DonaldFisk 3y agoMaybe because the French words for ship (bateau, navire, vaisseau) are all masculine?
- marcandre 3y agoThere's also "embarcation", "barque", and old types of boats like "caravelle", "carafe", "flute", "trirème", all feminine. Not all boat names in french are masculine. Some famous ones that are feminine: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Dauphine_(vaisseau) https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Dauphine_(vaisseau) https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grande_Hermine_(Nef) https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grande_Hermine_(Nef) https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Cordeli%C3%A8re https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Cordeli%C3%A8re
- c-cube 3y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_frigate_Belle_Poule_(1834) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_frigate_Belle_Poule_(... :p
- flangola7 3y agoBecause they are always wet.
- yboris 3y agoIn Russian all nouns are gendered (he / she / it), and "ship" is "корабль" which is a he.
- zabzonk 3y ago> In Russian all nouns are gendered (he / she / it) isn't "it" non-gendered? like most nouns in english?
- schroeding 3y agoThe same is true in German, most words for "ship" are not female ("she"), but neuter ("Das Schiff", "Das Boot" => the ship / the boat, neuter like in "it") or male ("Der Kreuzer", "Der Schoner", "Der Zerstörer" => the cruiser / the schooner / the destroyer, male like in "he") with very few exceptions ("Die Fähre" => the ferry, female). However ship names are still female in German, not only if named after "neuter things" like counties or numbers ("Die Bayern", "Die Cap San Diego", "Die U-96") but also if they are named after males ("Die Bismarck", "Die Otto Hahn", "Die Prinz Eugen", "Die Gorch Fock").
- acqbu 3y ago[flagged]
- kypro 3y agoI think (straight) guys find it easier to express affection and love for a "her". I mean think of it this way, you're a guy with a "beautiful" car. What feel's right – to think of this thing of beauty as a "it", a "he", or a "she"? Consider: "It's a beauty". "He's a beauty". "She's a beauty". "She" just sounds more correct to my heterosexual male head.
- rambojohnson 3y agois this digg.com? where am I...
- DueDilligence 3y ago[dead]
- jacknews 3y agoI thought this was the beginning of a joke - glad to see (most) of the rest of HN is more mature than I.
- anonyjoke 3y ago[flagged]
- smitty1e 3y ago"A ship is always referred to as 'she' because it costs so much to keep one in paint and powder." Adiral Chester W. Nimitz https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/chester_w_nimitz_126620 https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/chester_w_nimitz_126620