3 ms·

Although 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 guidi

• sph 3y ago
  Is 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 ago
    There 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.