Seems likely English actually just lost its genders, maybe because it was being mixed up a lot during the middle ages with French and Latin. Flattening the genders would make it easier to speak for people on both sides of the channel.
I don't know, maybe gendered nouns still exist but are assimilated as part of the culture. A shared set of assumptions about what gender things are.
I'm pretty sure if I were to ask a native English speaker to assign a gender to the Sun and the Moon, the first would be male and the second female, like it is in any Latin language. How is this possible?
I thought English was pretty heavy in the non-gendered side? There are some words that we remember the gender of, of course. But we don't have the hard separation of verbs and such that apply based on the gender. Consider the French "verb gender agreement" idea. Do we have anything like that in English?
I also confess I didn't think of a gender for the sun. The moon brings to mind some characters named Luna, but I wouldn't think of the moon itself being female.
And then there are some words that are becoming more directly gendered in the modern world. "Guys," as the easy example.
It is also interesting to me that different animals are seen as gendered in odd ways. "Cats" being one that feels more feminine to me. Despite all of our cats being male. My entire family also always refers to the chickens as "he" and "him." Such that we just don't seem to care about the animal sex/gender. (That makes me realize, has gender moved on from something that is applicable to animals?)
Right, that is why I said "more" gendered. I don't think many would argue that it wasn't at least somewhat gendered already. (I'm sure there is someone that would, of course.)
I thought I had heard some push for words other than "captain" and such, but I can't find anything coherent behind that.
None of this changes the rest of what I said, though? English is one of the few languages where I can change a "she" to a "he" or "they" and the rest of the words don't have to change for the sentence to remain coherent. Right?
I'm curious on what made it ungrammatical? I'm assuming you mean "they" used to not be singular? That somewhat surprises me, as I've never been distracted by talking about someone with the pronoun "they." Indeed, google tells me that singular "they" traces back to at least 1375? (https://public.oed.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-singular-they... is a full article on it. Amusing and interesting history of the word.)
Yes, there is precedent for singular "they" which is one of the justifications for why it's a convenient hack for generically referring to an individual person. But I can assure you that had I done so in school growing up I would have been corrected and told to use he unless the individual in question was clearly a woman. (Or, presumably, had some female-associated role like a nurse.)
And where I work now, it's probably only been in our style guide for five years or so. Prior to that we'd have used some other workaround.
But Mond in German is masculine? At least I think that's where Moon came from, Germanic. Seems closer than Lune.
Sun is feminine, Sonne. Not sure whether English got it from Soleil.
I think it's hard in English. If you want to do this gender-guessing experiment, pick a language with genders and ask for a speaker to place a neologism. I find in Danish I pick the same as everyone else, somehow. There's probably some rule that they don't tell you at school but it's in people's minds.
> Mond in German is masculine ... Sun is feminine, Sonne
Those are derived from old Germanic deities (Sunna, Mani). I think the inversion of gender between German and Latin/Greek mythologies makes sense if you consider the latitude of the people. In the high latitudes, the sun is warm and gentle while the moon is present during cold nights that can kill you. Closer to the equator, the sun will kill you and the moon is gentle. I think they just gendered them based on the idea that women are gentle and men are hostile.
Online etymology sources say that Sun comes from Germanic Sonne by way of Old English. Latin was Solis so that's presumably where Soleil cane from. No idea if the beginning S from both Germanic and Romance sources is just coincidence or if they're both diverged from a common proto-Indo European source.
In many languages gender is now associated with the form of a word (e.g. all "-ité" and "-tion" words are feminine in French) much more than with the word's meaning. The made-up but plausibly French words "ternigation" and "vivalité" would definitely be feminine.
Of course, since it is basically arbitrary and you've explained why you brought it up, I guess anyone who disagrees with your broader point can find a way to disagree with your assigned genders of the sun and moon.
But, typically in the US the sort of “default” is that women take on the more nurturing parental role (of course, everybody’s family is different, I’m just talking about the default/stereotypical roles here). So, in that context the sun would be female, right?
I'm English and I know a reasonable amount of French, Spanish, Italian and that would never have occurred to me from an English perspective despite knowing their latin genders.
I know, I'm not asking if it applies to you, but if you had to choose, which would you. But with the other responses the experiment is falsified. My theory was that if an English speaker had to choose, the choice would not be random, so gendered nouns somehow exist in culture as kind of a silent agreement, if you will.
But if you have to really think about it, you can rationalise any choice as being valid, so this thought experiment becomes moot.
