Timeline for Does the English language have a grammatical gender?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
9 events
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| Mar 17, 2016 at 0:37 | comment | added | MichaelS | @KRyan: That's precisely what grammatical gender is, when you're blindly applying it to an entire class of object. At some point, someone decided that noun was more sex than other sex because reasons, and now noun is always considered sex because of that personification. Calling a ship "she" might be a result of someone considering it female, but is largely a matter of convention; ergo, it's a grammatical, not natural, gender in most cases. | |
| Mar 17, 2016 at 0:00 | comment | added | KRyan | @MichaelS No, it really isn't. In those cases, the speaker is anthropomorphizing the object, giving it a natural gender. The grammar has still not changed. | |
| Mar 16, 2016 at 23:58 | comment | added | MichaelS | @KRyan: In the case of ships, cars, or any similar thing where people regularly use "he" or "she" to refer to that class of things, it's a weak form of grammatical gender (as opposed to stronger forms in languages where the article, pronoun, and noun itself all change). It's not nearly as wide-spread or standardized as other languages, but it's still the same concept. | |
| Mar 16, 2016 at 19:50 | comment | added | KRyan | Gendered pronouns still do not have a grammatical gender, they just reference the natural gender of the antecedent. It changes nothing about their grammatical use. | |
| Mar 16, 2016 at 14:57 | comment | added | Ken Bellows | @MichaelS I think the key point in all of these cases is that the object in question is being personified or referred to as though they were animate. They aren't being gendered in virtue of its own properties, but rather metaphorically, as though it were something else, specifically something animated. | |
| Mar 16, 2016 at 13:58 | comment | added | Pharap | @MichaelS "This is Bob. We hang out when I want to get away from all the girly nonsense at my house." And that doesn't sound at all obsessive? Not even a tiny bit? | |
| Mar 15, 2016 at 21:02 | comment | added | Loren Pechtel | I find myself using gendered terms when referring to things with voices. My GPS is "she" because it's at it's factory default setting of American Female voice. It's not that I really love it, it's that it sounds female. | |
| Mar 15, 2016 at 13:51 | comment | added | MichaelS | In my experience it's about convention more than obsession. I have a friend who names all his cars with some female name, even if it's just another car. Similarly, lots of people refer to cars or boats in general as "she". I met a guy in Nevada who made a point to name his motorcycles male names. "This is Bob. We hang out when I want to get away from all the girly nonsense at my house." And, to be extra pedantic, inanimate objects that represent something with a clear gender are often called he or she instead of it. Like a statue, player avatar, animated character, etc. | |
| Mar 15, 2016 at 12:31 | history | answered | Ken Bellows | CC BY-SA 3.0 |