grizgrin75 t1_iw304fh wrote
Been a thing ever since people gendered boats and gods.
The_Humble_Frank t1_iw697uu wrote
...not sure if you are aware, but many modern languages gender books, food, chairs, pencils, i.e. everything, as part of their normal syntax.
Old English lost its gendered articles, starting in the 10th century and completely by the 14th century.
TracyMorganFreeman t1_iw3kmb5 wrote
Boats being gendered has more to do with arbitrary grammatical gender.
grizgrin75 t1_iw3qmjo wrote
I'll take your word for it. I merely presented these as some of the first instances of people gendering a class of things in their lives.
Also, as a semi-related side note, not all cultures that gender boats gender them female, which seems to drive the cultures that DO gender them female right up a tree. Kinda weird, but whatever.
TracyMorganFreeman t1_iw5zux1 wrote
Gender in grammar is just another dimension to word, like case, number or tense. It isn't even necessarily masculine or feminine. German has a neuter gender as well; Arabic has a two level gender system with masculine/feminine and animate/inanimate. Dravidian languages have genders that distinguish a noun between human and non-human classifications.
Grammatical gender largely serves to distinguish the antecedents of pronouns in the same sentence through agreement with other words. It isn't necessary for a language to function(only 25% or so of languages have it), but adds granularity with fewer words.
The reason people who gender a particular noun masculine in one language are put off by them being gendered grammatically feminine in another isn't because of bias for or against one sex, but the normal jarring effect of differences in syntax. Some languages have different rules for apposition that mess with you, and some languages have different rules for whether an adjective for a noun follows or precedes the noun to which it applies, or whether there's agreement in number or not.
English is a particular one of confusion for non native speakers because it's a Germanic language with a simplified Germanic grammar structure(absent grammatical gender and noun declension) but has tons of French loanwords and cognates that brings with them French syntaxes and orthographies(German doesn't have silent letters for example)
Test19s t1_iw35lbu wrote
All vehicles are female and all deities are male. I’m old school that way.
jesus_fucks t1_iw6vyvu wrote
Please respect my horse’s right to choose the gender it is most comfortable being labeled.
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