# Gender of words



## Schrodinger's_Cat

What's the theory behind it? Why do words have genders in Indo-European languages, but not in English?

Consider the following:

a female friend is *un'amica*
a group of female friends is *amiche*
If one male joins the group it becomes then *amici*.

AND

English --- Italian ------------------------------------------------ French
vagina --- La vagina (feminin singular) ---------------------------- Le vagin (masculin singular)
ovaries -- L'ovaia (fem. sing.) Le ovaie (fem. plur.) ----------------- L'ovaire (masc. sing.)
breasts -- Il seno (masc. sing.) ----------------------------------- Le sein (masc. sing.)
beard ---- La barba (fem. sing.) ----------------------------------- La barbe (fem. sing.)

One would expect *vagina, ovaries,* and *breats* to be feminine, but they are masculine in the grammatical sense in French.
Whereas vagina and ovaries are feminine in Italian, but breasts are masculine.
Again I would expect a *beard* to be masculine, but it is feminine in both Italian and French.

I'm writing a paper for my philosophy class, and I was asked to write something on the philosophy of language. So here I am stuck with Freud, Jung and Lacan. 

Jacques Lacan’s view that the unconscious, and our perception of ourselves, is shaped in the “symbolic” order of language rather than in the “imaginary” order of prelinguistic thought.

Feminist philosophy states that patriarchal social structures have marginalized women and male authors have exploited women in their portrayal of them.

Have Indo-European languages marginalized women more than the English language?

Why can't we gender-neutralize words? Is it a good thing?
Does sexist language matter?

Queer theory (1980s–present): A “constructivist” (as opposed to “essentialist”) approach to gender and sexuality that asserts that gender roles and sexual identity are social constructions rather than an essential, inescapable part of our nature.

I'll appreciate any insights you could offer.


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## Frank06

Hi,


BenVitale said:


> What's the theory behind it? Why do words have genders in Indo-European languages, but not in English?


Even a cursory look at the history of English shows that the question is ill-formulated. English, like quite a few other IE languages, _lost_ the gender distinctions (apart from some relics) over the (not so women-friendly) ages. 



> One would expect *vagina, ovaries,* and *breats* to be feminine, but they are masculine in the grammatical sense in French.


*Why* would anyone _expect_ those words to be either feminine (or masculine)? Because women happen to have a vagina and ovaries? 
I think you're mixing up grammatical gender with biological gender and add the aspect of association: women have ovaries (men don't), so the gender of the word ovary must be female. Sorry, won't do. By the way, don't men have breasts? 
And what are you going to do with other parts of the body both women and men have, like arms, legs and heads? So, otherwise asked: Why your _very selective_ choice of (biologically) gender specific body parts?



> I'm writing a paper for my philosophy class, and I was asked to write something on the philosophy of language. So here I am stuck with Freud, Jung and Lacan.


Of course you're stuck with these three clowns, I mean authors, since they cannot offer you anything but (material for) airy _post hoc_ arguments and rationalisations. 
QED:


> Jacques Lacan’s view that the unconscious, and our perception of ourselves, is shaped in the “symbolic” order of language rather than in the “imaginary” order of prelinguistic thought.


(Lacan's views in 2008?)



> Feminist philosophy states that patriarchal social structures have marginalized women and male authors have exploited women in their portrayal of them.


(And what does that have to do with grammatical gender?)

My not so humble advice: Tell your tutor that philosophy is not going to help you to say something sensible about the development (and loss) of grammatical gender over a period of +/- 7.000 to 5000 years until now in an area ranging from Europe to India + the Americas and Oceania. 
Tell him or her that biological gender has little to do with grammatical gender and that hence Lacanian, Freudian, Jungian and feminist theories aren't of any use here.

And here a real piece of advice: Though the wiki-article on grammatical gender might serve as a good but _very_ basic introduction, there is quite a substantial literature on gender in language(s). I am thinking about Greville Corbett's _Gender_ (CUP). It must be easy to find this or any similar work in any (academic) library.
(And as for Lacan, try Sokal and Bricmont).



> Have Indo-European languages marginalized women more than the English language?


As said above, English lost the aspect of gender over the ages. So your question above is a bit absurd. 

(Modern) Persian, spoken in Iran and Afghanistan, doesn't have the feature of grammatical gender (anymore), just as English. I wonder what one who would follow the logic expressed in the quote above would conclude from this with regards to marginalisation of women?


As for Proto-Indo-European and the IE languages: Some linguists believe PIE didn't have gender at all, and that gender creeped in because the structure of the language changed. It's also believed that the first gender distinctions where based upon the distinction animate - inanimate (see Cyril Babaev's Gender category in Indo-European here).

Groetjes,

Frank


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## Flaminius

Hello Ben,



> Why do words have genders in Indo-European languages, but not in English?


The loss of genders from English may be accounted for by shift of accents, change in possible syllable types, weakening of word-final morphemes, confusion of gender-markers and other regular linguistic concepts.  This may not, however, be what you are pleased with for a report in philosophy classes.

Grammatical gender is but one of linguistic categories that may or may not have an influence of the way we think.  An answer from linguistics can be found in George Lakoff's _Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things_.


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## Schrodinger's_Cat

Thanks to both of you for the feedback. I'm interested in philosophy and my goal is to write an essay on this topic.

Language is a social construct. Who decided of their features? Who made the rules?
Men did them.
So the point of views of the feminists are valid. I think.

Freud, Jung and Lacan have contributed greatly to the discussion of identity -- our identity.

They all believe that linguistic features are culturally determined, and that linguistic features affect how we recognize in the other.

Lacan believes that human beings cannot aim at wholeness, that there's a relation between the phallus and language and desire.

I don't understand Lacan's argument.


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## Athaulf

BenVitale said:


> Thanks to both of you for the feedback. I'm interested in philosophy and my goal is to write an essay on this topic.


 
But with all due respect, why do you assume that expertise in philosophy combined with a single internet forum discussion makes you (or anyone else) competent to make insights into this topic? Would you feel equally competent to write an essay on issues of biochemistry or computer science in a similar way, without first spending some serious time familiarizing yourself with some serious literature in the area? 



> Language is a social construct. Who decided of their features? Who made the rules?
> Men did them.
> So the point of views of the feminists are valid. I think.


You may think so, but that doesn't mean it's true. Can you cite any actual linguistic literature in support of your claim that "men made the rules" of language (whatever that actually is supposed to mean)? Thought not.  You are making sweeping conclusions  based on a simplistic, ideologically colored caricature of reality.

Which leads us to the next point:



> Freud, Jung and Lacan have contributed greatly to the discussion of identity -- our identity.
> 
> They all believe that linguistic features are culturally determined, and that linguistic features affect how we recognize in the other.


To be blunt, Freud, Jung, and Lacan had zero competence to comment on the issues of linguistics, or any other science for that matter (except perhaps for some medicine that they learned in undergrad). Frankly -- and I'm saying this as an honest advice for the benefit of your own intellectual well-being -- if you're making conclusions on any topic based on the works of these people without first familiarizing yourself thoroughly with what actual science has to say about it, you're going to end up making no more sense than the run-of-the-mill tinfoil hat crackpot crowd. This goes despite the fact that crackpottery of this sort often manages to pass for serious academic work. (Names omitted to protect the guilty.)



> Lacan believes that human beings cannot aim at wholeness, that there's a relation between the phallus and language and desire.
> 
> I don't understand Lacan's argument.


If it's any consolation, for the most of the time he didn't know what he was talking about either.


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## Frank06

Hi,



BenVitale said:


> Language is a social construct. Who decided of their features? Who made the rules? Men did them.


What exactly do you mean by 'deciding of the features' and 'making the rules'? Could you please elaborate? And do you have some back up for your assertion that 'men did them', whatever you mean by 'did them'?



> So the point of views of the feminists are valid. I think.


Reducing the whole issue of _grammatical_ gender to a male-female issue... isn't that a bit too simplistic?



> Freud, Jung and Lacan have contributed greatly to the discussion of identity -- our identity. They all believe that linguistic features are culturally determined, and that linguistic features affect how we recognize in the other.


And what does this have to do with _grammatical_ gender?
Needless to say I agree with Athaulf ("To be blunt, Freud, Jung, and Lacan had zero competence to comment on the issues of linguistics"). 



> Lacan believes that human beings cannot aim at wholeness, that there's a relation between the phallus and language and desire.
> I don't understand Lacan's argument.


Jacques Lacan's work is often summarised with the following phrase:  mental masturbation. I don't think it is meant to be understood. Anyway, Sokal and Bricmont's book _Intellectual Impostures_ — _Fashionable Nonsense _(in which they discuss Lacan, Kristeva, Deleuze etc.) might be an eye-opener. In case that's too difficult to find, try Erasmus' _Laus Stultitiae_.

Any which way, I'd like to see your philosophical ponderings applied to both English and Persian, two IE languages which almost have no grammatical gender...

Groetjes,

Frank


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## Fred_C

Beware that grammatical gender is absolutely not related to the sex of people. It is therefore absolutely no wonder that "barbe" is feminine, and "vagin" is masculine.

For the discrepancy between Italian and French, please note that there was a third gender in Latin, neutre, that has to boil down to either the feminine or the masculine when it disappeared.
Also, compare words that have *exactly* the same origin, because different endings like "tion" or "ure" or "age" can compel the words to have different genders, even if the radical is the same.


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## Outsider

Hi.

There are various -- and often conflicting -- opinions on why grammatical gender exists in some languages, how it arose, how it was eventually lost in others (like English, for most practical purposes), and what, _if anything_, the presence of grammatical gender in a language says about the mentality of its speakers.

This has been discussed many times here in the forums, in some cases heatedly, so I invite you to peruse some of the previous threads:

Gender in languages - why?
Language and the male rule
pc gender eradication
Grammatical Gender in English Words (English vs. Spanish)
Are Spanish seamen bisexual?
Changing articles for gender (concerning Spanish)
Gender and People (concerning French)
Separate words for he/she, but no grammatical gender
hermaphrodite
Relation between case and gender

I hope you'll find them informative and inspiring.


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## Outsider

BenVitale said:


> Language is a social construct. Who decided of their features? Who made the rules?
> Men did them.


I think that neither men nor women decided much about language, when it first arose. Language must have developed organically, at a time before men and women were true men and women (I mean, of the same species as us).

And most of the time I would say that historical attempts to control and direct language were either very localized (like inventing a couple of new words), or not very successful. I cannot imagine how a grammatical feature like grammatical gender could have ever been consciously designed and imposed. I do not believe that any one social class would be able to have any significant influence on the basic grammatical structure of a language. (Manipulating the _content_ of language is another matter, of course.)

A different question is whether the features of a language reflect the characteristics of the societies where it's spoken in a largely _unconscious and involuntary_ way. This seems more plausible to me, but I think there's a tendency for people who are not very familiar with language or linguistics to overstate this possibility. For example, the commonly repeated claim that eskimo languages have an unusually large number of words for snow is a myth (see here, here and here).

I found also a reference to this book at the Language Log, which may be interesting.


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## Fred_C

May I suggest that noun gender is just a categorisation of nouns into two or three categories ?
Later, much later, when the first grammars appeared, someone came up with the fancy idea to name these categories "masculine" "feminine" and "neutre", and they were therefore called "genders".

The idea of calling these categories "masculine" and "feminine" comes from the fact that females are usually called with names that belong to only one category, and the feminine pronoun "elle" is used for them, as well as for nouns of this same category.
The same goes for males with the other category.

To me, things evoluted like that, and not (as many people not familiar with the concept of gender might think) in the other way.
Maybe historical facts will prove that I am wrong, though.
But what I describe is actually the way that many speakers of gender languages feel.
(Children with no notion of grammar do not know that the French word "table" is feminine. They only know that it must be said "la table", and not "le table".)


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## trance0

Fred_C said:


> I am afraid that this fact will puzzle only the English...



What exactly do you mean by that?


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## Outsider

BenVitale said:


> Have Indo-European languages marginalized women more than the English language?


A technical note, in case the previous posts have not made this clear enough: English _is_ an Indo-European language. 
Not all Indo-European languages have active grammatical genders. Afrikaans is another one in which gender is practically extinct. Several other Germanic languages have a distinct neuter gender, but do not generally distinguish the masculine gender and the feminine gender from each other.


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## Athaulf

Outsider said:


> A different question is whether the features of a language reflect the characteristics of the societies where it's spoken in a largely _unconscious and involuntary_ way. This seems more plausible to me, but I think there's a tendency for people who are not very familiar with language or linguistics to overstate this possibility.


I would say that the usual examples offered to illustrate this theory are flawed one way or another. On the other hand, all the valid examples I can think of along these lines are too trivial to make any significant point. For example, it's easy to see why languages spoken in some societies include extraordinarily large and complex vocabulary for family relations, or why the same (i.e. literally translated) utterances are sometimes taboo in some languages but thrown around casually in others, etc. In such cases, speakers of a language may be unaware of these reasons, but they will themselves understand the cultural issues at hand as soon as you point it out to them, and they will probably even notice these differences themselves if they have contact with members of other cultures. 

In contrast, I have never seen a shred of valid evidence for theories that postulate social influences on language and the influences of language on us that supposedly grip us in a way so deviously subconscious that we may fail to see them even if they are pointed out to us clearly.


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## Outsider

Athaulf, I was thinking of reflections of culture like the ones evident in the various etymologies of the Romance word _puta_. The precise origin of this word is not clear, but most of the suggested etymologies reflect the very negative social attitude towards prostitutes which prevailed in the Roman society (as well as in other, later societies).


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## Athaulf

Outsider said:


> Athaulf, I was thinking of reflections of culture like the ones evident in the various etymologies of the Romance word _puta_. The precise origin of this word is not clear, but most of the suggested etymologies reflect the very negative social attitude towards prostitutes which prevailed in the Roman society (as well as in other, later societies).



But etymologies reflect past, not present meanings. The fact that a word originated one way or another, even if it happened relatively recently, doesn't tell us anything about the attitudes of the present speakers who are using it. At most, it will tell us something about the social and cultural conditions at the time when the words first appeared. 

Furthermore, even when it comes to the past attitudes, how many etymologies can be considered as _unconscious and involuntary_ reflections of the characteristics of the societies in question? In your example, was there anything  unconscious and involuntary about the  negative attitude of ancient Latin and Romance speakers towards prostitutes? I would bet that they were in fact quite open about their attitudes. I would say that whenever people start using words and expressions in novel ways, they are usually well aware of what they want to express with these innovations, and there isn't much point in trying to find additional, supposedly unconscious influences there.


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## Outsider

What was unconscious was the fact that that particular word was the one that came to be adopted for this meaning.

I don't know if I'm making myself clear. For example, in English the verb _to fare_ is rarely used with the sense of "to travel" nowadays. Yet its German cognate, the word _fahren_, is still widely used with that sense. I believe the two are cognates; at one time they were the same word. So how come in Germany the word remained popular, while in England it became progressively obscure as a word for "travel"? Was this divergence by conscious design of English or German speakers? 

No, it was simply due to historical contingencies of the two languages. In other words, this was not the conscious doing of any individual or group of individuals, but rather the unconscious, cumulative result of several generations of incremental language change in a certain society.

Going back to _puta_, what made it become the preferred popular word for "prostitute", as opposed to the many alternative names that must have existed for the same concept? Because somehow a significant portion of the speakers of Late Latin thought this was a good description of the concept of "prostitute". Since most etymologies that have been proposed for it suggest that it started out as a metaphor (as opposed to being a loanword, or a word coined anew), then that metaphor probably tells us something about how a substantial proportion of Latin speakers in that period viewed prostitutes: _redolent, smells bad, stinks, crumbling, decayed, flabby, loose, putrid, putrid, rotten_, etc.

(Since this is just to explain a point, I left aside the alternative etymology which proposes that this word originally meant "girl".)


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## Sepia

On top of all that has been said so far, there really does not seem to be any real logic behind the gender assigned to the words what sociologic, psychologic or grammatical factors are concerned - maybe it is only an intuitive thing based on the phonetics? 
But not even that explains why brands of motorcycles are generally F and brands of cars are generally M in German. You can't even say "always" because there are strange exceptions.
And nobody seems to be able to explain why CD is F although the word hidden in the acronym actually indicates that it should be M.

I am pretty sure that political factors have speeded up the simplification of languages, down to a two or no-gender noun system, but that is a different story. The discussion where this would have fit in was kicked out of the forum yesterday. If somebody wants to know exactly what I am after, PM me.


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## Fred_C

Sepia said:


> And nobody seems to be able to explain why CD is F although the word hidden in the acronym actually indicates that it should be M.


 
Hallo, Vielleicht weil eine CD nur _eine_ kleine moderne Platte ist.
A CD is just a small modern record.


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## Sepia

Fred_C said:


> Hallo, Vielleicht weil eine CD nur _eine_ kleine moderne Platte ist.
> A CD is just a small modern record.



Perhaps. But normally it is argued that "BGB" (Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch - the civil code) is N because "Buch" is N and LKW (LastKraftWagen) is M because "Wagen" is M.

By this logic CD should be M.


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## Athaulf

Outsider said:


> What was unconscious was the fact that that particular word was the one that came to be adopted for this meaning.
> 
> I don't know if I'm making myself clear. For example, in English the verb _to fare_ is rarely used with the sense of "to travel" nowadays. Yet its German cognate, the word _fahren_, is still widely used with that sense. I believe the two are cognates; at one time they were the same word. So how come in Germany the word remained popular, while in England it became progressively obscure as a word for "travel"? Was this divergence by conscious design of English or German speakers?
> 
> No, it was simply due to historical contingencies of the two languages. In other words, this was not the conscious doing of any individual or group of individuals, but rather the unconscious, cumulative result of several generations of incremental language change in a certain society.



This is all true, but you'll probably agree that this example shows nothing but pure randomness of language change and semantic drift. What I doubt is whether we can ever use such data about language to derive some valid conclusions about the culture and mentality of its speakers that go beyond trivial observations. 

As for your example:



> Going back to _puta_, what made it become the preferred popular word for "prostitute", as opposed to the many alternative names that must have existed for the same concept? Because somehow a significant portion of the speakers of Late Latin thought this was a good description of the concept of "prostitute". Since most etymologies that have been proposed for it suggest that it started out as a metaphor (as opposed to being a loanword, or a word coined anew), then that metaphor probably tells us something about how a substantial proportion of Latin speakers in that period viewed prostitutes: _redolent, smells bad, stinks, crumbling, decayed, flabby, loose, putrid, putrid, rotten_, etc.


Sure, but my impression is that this example illustrates a quite _conscious_ mental process. I don't think any of these Latin speakers would deny that they viewed prostitutes with contempt and that they imagined typical prostitutes as dirty and low-class. In fact, I would bet that they consciously thought like that whenever they were first using these words. 

In contrast, theories that are pushed by many academics with highbrow credentials nowadays often claim  that their analysis of language reveals non-trivial insights into people's unconscious, or at least hidden thoughts. My impression is that analysis of language can offer only trivial insights into speakers' mentality and culture, which could be easily observed in other ways for any contemporary people. Obviously, if the only clue we have about an ancient culture is its language, then even such insights can be worthwhile. If we knew nothing about the culture of Late Latin speakers except for a sample of their language, then your example could offer an interesting data point about the status of prostitutes in their society.

In my opinion, any conclusions that go beyond trivial observations like these are unjustified, which is easily proven in many cases when we compare the conclusions of such speculation with well-known historical and linguistic facts, a prime example being the "sexist language" theories. (Needless to say, in the circles in which such theorizing is popular, most people lack even an elementary background in linguistics and history, and are also apt to build on some well-known intellectual traditions in which it's customary to invent the theory first and then select or invent facts to support it later.)


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## berndf

_The following quote is from a post which has been placed in the wrong branch of this split thread:_




BenVitale said:


> I read that in the old English "man" was neutral and there were a word for man and a word for woman, and that "man" became masculin. Why is that?


 
Many ancient legal systems did not recognize women as human beings and the distinction between man and human being was immaterial. Therefore some ancient languages neglected the difference between the concepts of a male human being and a human being in general.

According to Grimm (http://germazope.uni-trier.de/Projects/DWB, look up "Mann"; the text is unfortunately in German) this is the explanation of the development of "man" and its cognates in all Germanic languages, not just English.

Another example of a language where this difference was sometimes neglected is ancient Hebrew: While the first of the two accounts of the history of creation in the book of Genesis uses the word "Adam" (human being, person) to refer to both, man and woman, the second uses "Adam" only for the man and speaks of "Adam and his wife".


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## Outsider

> I read that in the old English "man" was neutral and there were a word for man and a word for woman, and that "man" became masculin. Why is that?


Here's a different explanation: in Old English, the word _man_ really meant "human being". It could be applied to women as well as to men. In this sense, I guess you could say that it was "neutral" (valid for both sexes). Grammatically, however (Old English had three grammatical genders), I believe _man_ was masculine.

As to why this happened... at the risk of provoking Athaulf's distaste of these kinds of _ad hoc_ explanations, I guess it could have been because, in a society dominated by men, people tend to think of men when they think of human beings. 

The same thing happened in the transition from Latin to the Romance languages, with the word _homo_.


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## Kevin Beach

There's a contradictory retention of grammatical gender in one English usage.

The pronoun for a ship is still "she". Yet the old term for a battleship was a Man-o'-war.

"Look at that man-o'-war. She rules the main!"


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## Sepia

This doesn't really tell us anything because in other Germanic languages - like Danish or High German - you also use the F pronoun when you call a ship by name although the word "ship" (DK: skib; DE: Schiff) are N in both these languages.


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## Kevin Beach

Sepia said:


> This doesn't really tell us anything because in other Germanic languages - like Danish or High German - you also use the F pronoun when you call a ship by name although the word "ship" (DK: skib; DE: Schiff) are N in both these languages.


Perhaps it tells us that, in Germanic languages (including English) there is a long-standing distinction between grammatical gender and sexual gender. Maybe ships have been "feminised" in order to express what sailors see as their personalities.


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## sokol

Kevin Beach said:


> Perhaps it tells us that, in Germanic languages (including English) there is a long-standing distinction between grammatical gender and sexual gender. Maybe ships have been "feminised" in order to express what sailors see as their personalities.



This may well be the case: as the examples of grammatical gender in English are really marginal (like this one with "ship") it would be logical to explain the female gender of "ship" through personalisation (here the sailor being "married" with his ship, as the metaphor goes).

Also on a previous thread some native speakers clearly stated that they themselves don't treat ships as female at all and that they resent this use; re-reading this thread I've now come to the conclusion that there really is no grammatical gender for English nouns and that the cases where indeed objects are personalised (as seems to be the case with flowers occassionally, as mentioned there) could be seen in a similar light, that is a deliberate personalisation of these things like with the ships for sailors.

By the way, as for reference to a ship as a "she": to my knowledge - and I don't live at the sea, I am a real _Landratte _= a "non-sailor" - it is only possible to refer to ships if calling them by name, e. g. if your ship were called "Stern" (= masc., English "star") you could say "die Stern" = fem.; but for me at least "Das ist mein Schiff; *sie *hat mich € XXX gekostet" = fem. ("That's my ship, *she *cost me € XXX") sounds strange to my ears.
Probably Sepia can confirm if it is really possible to use "sie" = the feminine pronoun in this context.


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## Sepia

Kevin Beach said:


> Perhaps it tells us that, in Germanic languages (including English) there is a long-standing distinction between grammatical gender and sexual gender. Maybe ships have been "feminised" in order to express what sailors see as their personalities.



That at least is sure. It comes even worse than this. People are not always that particular about it, because it sometimes seems a bit strange. Like in this dialogue:

Schau mal, da steht ein Mädchen over there!
Look there is a girl standing over there

Girl - Mädchen is N

Was macht sie da?
What is she doing there.

That is what most people would say

Was macht es da?
What is it doing there?

Is actually what you should say. Some might even do that, but noone I know.


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## ajo fresco

Sepia said:


> That at least is sure. It comes even worse than this. People are not always that particular about it, because it sometimes seems a bit strange. Like in this dialogue:
> 
> Schau mal, da steht ein Mädchen over there!
> Look there is a girl standing over there
> 
> Girl - Mädchen is N
> 
> Was macht sie da?
> What is she doing there.
> 
> That is what most people would say
> 
> Was macht es da?
> What is it doing there?
> 
> Is actually what you should say. Some might even do that, but noone I know.




The American author Mark Twain pondered this same gender question in his 1880 book "A Tramp Abroad."  

About his trip to Germany and the German language, he wrote: 
"In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has. Think what overwrought reverence that shows for the turnip, and what callous disrespect for the girl."


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## Kotlas

ajo fresco said:


> The American author Mark Twain pondered this same gender question in his 1880 book "A Tramp Abroad." About his trip to Germany and the German language, he wrote:
> "In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has. Think what overwrought reverence that shows for the turnip, and what callous disrespect for the girl."



Mark Twain was obviously looking for a humorous line when he was writing it. Had he been serious, he would have pointed out that his example merely shows respect of German people for the rules of their language, or to be more specific, that particular rule by which certain suffixes determine/express the gender of a German noun: thus, suffix _chen_ makes a noun's gender neuter in German. Hence, Mäd_chen_ is a noun of neuter gender.

I wonder what joke he would have cracked about Russian where there are formal signs (inflectional endings) to express the gender of the noun: for instance, _a_ or _я_ for feminine gender; however, when it comes to people, we ignore those formalities:

девушка [ˈdʲevʊʂkə] (girl) - feminine inflection and feminine gender
дедушка [ˈdʲedʊʂkə] (grandpa) - feminine inflection but masculine gender.
So the agreement is done accordingly:
моя (feminine pronoun) девушка (my girl)
мой (masculine pronoun) дедушка (my grandpa).


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## Olaszinhok

Kotlas said:


> девушка [ˈdʲevʊʂkə] (girl) - feminine inflection and feminine gender
> дедушка [ˈdʲedʊʂkə] (grandpa) - feminine inflection but masculine gender.
> So the agreement is done accordingly:
> моя (feminine pronoun) девушка (my girl)
> мой (masculine pronoun) дедушка (my grandpa).



I would say, however, that the gender of Russian nouns is way easier to grasp than that of German, which is utterly unpredictable most of the time.


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## danielstan

In Romanian we do have, like in Russian, some inflection endings which are in accordance with the gender of the noun:
_-ă/-a_ ending is a marker of feminine
-[consonant] is never a feminine (could be masculine for living beings / neuter for objects)

And we have exceptions for persons:
_o_ (feminine indefinite article) _mamă _(a mother) - feminine inflection and feminine gender
_o fiică_ (a daughter) - feminine inflection and feminine gender
_un_ (masculine indefinite article) _tată_ (a father) - feminine inflection but masculine gender
_un popă_ (a priest) - feminine inflection but masculine gender
_un papă_ (a pope) - feminine inflection but masculine gender


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