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Lack of Noun Gender in English | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| 1e4e6 Octoglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4290 days ago 1013 posts - 1588 votes  Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Norwegian, Dutch, Swedish, Italian Studies: German, Danish, Russian, Catalan | Message 9 of 126 06 December 2013 at 10:59pm | IP Logged | ||
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True, the "she" for ships is not because the noun is feminine, but it tries to give the
ship a human character. I think this also pertains to how in English, some call their country "Motherland", but that is just figurative speech to apport a patriotic tone instead of simply using "country" or "nation", not because the word itself is feminine in gender. The Australians sometimes (or more often than sometimes) use the acronym "pom" for people from England, the origin whereof is derived from the term "Mother England". In written English, especially in a book, calling a ship "she" or "her" for nominative would sound very strange. In the UK, I have never seen this outside of novels or creative writing. In a civil or maritine engineering book, I would be very surprised if "she" was used for a ship, i.e. "Her velocities range from 150-200 km/h" would look very odd. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Stolan Senior Member United States Joined 4032 days ago 274 posts - 368 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Thai, Lowland Scots Studies: Arabic (classical), Cantonese | Message 10 of 126 07 December 2013 at 9:14am | IP Logged | ||
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Should English have gender though? Ought it? We could use something to assign a standard to each word. Measure
words maybe? Non-gender noun classes? What could be there to use in the future. I admit this stems from fascination and envy both. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4665 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 11 of 126 08 December 2013 at 1:08am | IP Logged | ||
Using "she" for a ship or aircraft seems perfectly natural to me. A quick google threw up many such examples just on the beeb's website, here's one for Concorde: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-24629451. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Speakeasy Senior Member Canada Joined 4052 days ago 507 posts - 1098 votes Studies: German | Message 12 of 126 08 December 2013 at 4:31pm | IP Logged | ||
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To dampingwire,
Yes, an English speaker may, "by custom" or "by choice", but NOT "by necessity", use the pronoun "she" when referring to ships, aeroplanes, railway steam engines, old automobiles, hospital gurneys, hurricanes, cats, dogs, and any other manner of things, according to the degree of affection that they feel towards these objects, be they concrete or abstract. However, NONE of these can be said to serve as an example of grammatical "gender" in English, which simply does not exist! They are all examples of the grammatical device "personification", that is: the attribution of a personal nature or human characteristics to something nonhuman, or the representation of an abstract quality in human form. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| 1e4e6 Octoglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4290 days ago 1013 posts - 1588 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Norwegian, Dutch, Swedish, Italian Studies: German, Danish, Russian, Catalan | Message 13 of 126 08 December 2013 at 9:12pm | IP Logged | ||
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Right, ships and even pets are technically and officially "it", although the latter can
have gender according to its biological gender, but inanimate objects, like natural storms, food, books, etc. only have an objective feeling whereto some apport a gender as a type of personalisation. Like in Spanish "el coche" or French "la voiture", one cannot technically and officially correctly say, "I cannot find my car. Did you see her?" or put a sign in the neighbourhood stating, "Lost car, blue paint, 1974 model, sedan. If you find him, please telephone me." English noun gender I refer to something like this: http://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Old_English_grammar#Strong_nouns That seems to be the last time that English had noun gender. I suppose that English speajers back then had less problems with other languages, but insofar I have not seen any accounts from anyone back then who documented any experience about anything like that. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| jdmoncada Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 5034 days ago 470 posts - 741 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Finnish Studies: Russian, Japanese | Message 14 of 126 16 December 2013 at 5:26pm | IP Logged | ||
I don't understand how this could be the cause. Obviously, English lost grammatical genders, but I'm confused that the French conquest (good word, that) would have caused it since French itself has grammatical gender. Without derailing the topic too much, can someone help explain this to me? Thank you. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4707 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 15 of 126 16 December 2013 at 6:10pm | IP Logged | ||
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It just stopped being used. The French brought words to English, but gender was probably
already on its way out by then. The languages changed so much over that time that somehow gender was one of the things that got axed in the turmoil. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Medulin Tetraglot Senior Member Croatia Joined 4668 days ago 1199 posts - 2192 votes Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali | Message 16 of 126 16 December 2013 at 8:21pm | IP Logged | ||
But, as stated before, sometimes, the feminine gender is still used with objects: ''Why I Love America... You ask me why I love her? Well, give me time. I’ll explain. Have you seen a Kansas sunset, or an Arizona rain?'' (John Mitchum) ''America And Her Allies Stand Opposed To Kurdish Aspirations'' (news article) ''America and her resources: or, A view of the agricultural, commercial, manufacturing, financial, political, literary, moral and religious capacity and character of the American people'' (Google eBook) ''On her maiden voyage, she carried 2,224 passengers and crew.'' (Wikipedia on Titanic) In poetic writing, a "ship", a "car", and a "country" can be used in feminine gender, so they're potentially feminine. Other nouns like ''sun'' are not, because you can never come across things like ''the sun and her rays''... Edited by Medulin on 16 December 2013 at 8:33pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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