Bahasa Indonesia (and Bahasa Malay on which it is based) doesn't even have gender specific pronouns. It distinguishes between mother/father, but I think that's about it. (Of course it has man/woman, boy/girl, male/female, etc. Just not gender in the linguistic sense.)Piscez said:It appears Old English had gender. It is odd it got dropped- almost all languages have that feature. I can't think of one that doesn't.
BenEBoy said:Could it be from when english language had gender, like most of the other european languges?
I've been told that the moon and ships are always referred to as 'she' because of this. Not being an early english language geek I can't confirm this, bust it sounds plausible...
Incidentally, did you know the Catholic Church is referred to as 'she'?
Marion said:EDIT there also might have been archaic laws banning lower classes from owning a bitch,
I think I know the Sappho poem alluded to -- at least, I know a Sappho poem that says in part "You outshine the women of Lydia just as, after the sun has set, the rosy-fingered moon outshines all the stars" -- but the moon was already feminine and the sun masculine in Greek before then. (I don't know just how far back the idea that the moon is female and the sun male goes, partly because I don't have a decent understanding of the family tree of languages [as it were]. It's that way in Greek and Latin, and so, I guess, in some common ancestor of theirs; but in the Germanic languages the moon is male and the sun female, so something must have changed since Proto-Indo-European.)The Virgin Queen said:I asumed that ships where 'She' because of the gender of the bowspirit (always female whenever I've seen one) whille perhaps the gender of the moon has alot to do with Sapho who, it is claimed, was the first to link the moon with women in Ancient Greece.
ephemeron said:I think dividing the world by gender is more likely to have gotten into the Judeo-Christian worldview from language than vice-versa, but then I'm more philologist than theologian. (shrug)
anome said:Bahasa Indonesia (and Bahasa Malay on which it is based) doesn't even have gender specific pronouns. It distinguishes between mother/father, but I think that's about it. (Of course it has man/woman, boy/girl, male/female, etc. Just not gender in the linguistic sense.)
BenEBoy said:Could it be from when english language had gender, like most of the other european languges?
I've been told that the moon and ships are always referred to as 'she' because of this. Not being an early english language geek I can't confirm this, bust it sounds plausible...