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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. All languag

• lordnacho 3y ago
  Seems 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 ago
    I 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 ago
      I'm a native speaker and this doesn't apply to me.
      • CoastalCoder 3y ago
        Yeah, me either. I don't have any intuition that inanimate objects have an affinity to human sexes.
      • sph 3y ago
        I 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 ago
      I don't know how universally people would answer the question that way but the Greek/Roman gods were male and female respectively.
    • xdennis 3y ago
      I 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 ago
      I 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?)
      • ghaff 3y ago
        >And then there are some words that are becoming more directly gendered in the modern world. "Guys," as the easy example. I'm not sure it's so much words becoming more gendered as an increased sensitivity to casually applying male-gendered terms to everyone.
        • taeric 3y ago
          Right, that is why I said "more" gendered. I don't think many would argue that it wasn't at least somewhat gendered already. (I'm sure there is someone that would, of course.) I thought I had heard some push for words other than "captain" and such, but I can't find anything coherent behind that. None of this changes the rest of what I said, though? English is one of the few languages where I can change a "she" to a "he" or "they" and the rest of the words don't have to change for the sentence to remain coherent. Right?
          • ghaff 3y ago
            Well, singular "they" is historically ungrammatical but most people find that it's a reasonable choice to be gender-neutral for people.
    • bee_rider 3y ago
      Of course, since it is basically arbitrary and you've explained why you brought it up, I guess anyone who disagrees with your broader point can find a way to disagree with your assigned genders of the sun and moon. But, typically in the US the sort of “default” is that women take on the more nurturing parental role (of course, everybody’s family is different, I’m just talking about the default/stereotypical roles here). So, in that context the sun would be female, right?
    • lordnacho 3y ago
      But Mond in German is masculine? At least I think that's where Moon came from, Germanic. Seems closer than Lune. Sun is feminine, Sonne. Not sure whether English got it from Soleil. I think it's hard in English. If you want to do this gender-guessing experiment, pick a language with genders and ask for a speaker to place a neologism. I find in Danish I pick the same as everyone else, somehow. There's probably some rule that they don't tell you at school but it's in people's minds.
      • beedeebeedee 3y ago
        > Mond in German is masculine ... Sun is feminine, Sonne Those are derived from old Germanic deities (Sunna, Mani). I think the inversion of gender between German and Latin/Greek mythologies makes sense if you consider the latitude of the people. In the high latitudes, the sun is warm and gentle while the moon is present during cold nights that can kill you. Closer to the equator, the sun will kill you and the moon is gentle. I think they just gendered them based on the idea that women are gentle and men are hostile.
      • FeteCommuniste 3y ago
        In many languages gender is now associated with the form of a word (e.g. all "-ité" and "-tion" words are feminine in French) much more than with the word's meaning. The made-up but plausibly French words "ternigation" and "vivalité" would definitely be feminine.
      • ghaff 3y ago
        Online etymology sources say that Sun comes from Germanic Sonne by way of Old English. Latin was Solis so that's presumably where Soleil cane from. No idea if the beginning S from both Germanic and Romance sources is just coincidence or if they're both diverged from a common proto-Indo European source.
    • thorin 3y ago
      I'm English and I know a reasonable amount of French, Spanish, Italian and that would never have occurred to me from an English perspective despite knowing their latin genders.
• jmclnx 3y ago
  I thought I read somewhere, Mandarin also do not have genders. But I could be miss-informed.
  • DonaldFisk 3y ago
    AFAIK 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 ago
  The 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 ago
      Oh 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 ago
  Dravidian 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 ago
  English 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 ago
    Current theory is that Proto-Indo-European had two genders: animate and inanimate. Wonder how its child languages developed three.
    • prox 3y ago
      Interesting! 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.