Comment by AareyBaba | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AareyBaba | Hacker News Reader

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Interesting to read. The Sun is referred to as 'he' and people were just beginning to understand how heat energy and mechanical energy could be transformed into one another.

"He has enlightened our globe from one generation to another without any apparent diminution of strength, and we have formed the instinctive belief that no limit in the past or any in the future can be assigned to his functions. No proof of progress or decay has been detected ; and it has been thought that nothing but the fiat of the Almighty can quench his rays. Principles have now been recognized, however, which enable us to assign limits, and to show that he has not shone from a past eternity, and that he has a limited existence as an incandescent body. This limit assigned to the solar system forces us to recognize the hand of a Creator."

"The meteoric stones that sometimes fall to our earth may be regarded as balls, but moving with much greater velocity. They strike against our atmosphere with so much force that the force is converted into heat, so intense that they glow or become incandescent. .... Assuming that the heat of the sun has been kept up by meteoric bodies falling into it, and proof has been given of such fall, it is possible from the mass of the solar system to determine approximately the period during which the sun has shone as a luminary"

"Limits can be set to the fuel of the solar system, and therefore limits can also be assigned to the existence of the sun as our luminary. The limits lie between 100 millions and 400 millions of years. These are enormous periods, but still they are definite. The mass is so great,and the cooling is so slow, that, even on the supposition that no fuel was added, it might be five or six thousand years before the sun cooled down a single degree."

> The Sun is referred to as 'he'

I wonder if they picked pronouns for the planets in accordance with the associated gods of Greco-Roman mythology? IIRC, the Greco-Roman sun gods were all male (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios).

If I'm correct they'd use male pronouns for the sun, Mars, and Jupiter; and female pronouns for Earth, the Moon (Luna), and Venus.

Latin has grammatical genres, "Sol, Solis" is masculine and "Luna, Lunae" is female.

It seems more likely to me that people just kept using the latin genres since old scientific literature was in latin.

Germanic languages, of which English was one, have this too and "sun" is Germanic in etymology. Most PIE-derived languages had this at one point but some, including English, lost it.

In German the sun is female though (and the moon male). In French the sun seems to be male and the moon female (I don't know the language though, just looked it up), so maybe these are traces of the French influence into the English language?

Old English, i.e. the language of Beowulf, is a Germanic language. With the Norman invasion, English became heavily influenced by the Romance languages. So English has roots in both both old German and old French.

One place you see this is in terms relating to food. Words relating to rustic activities like agriculture and raising animals such as "cow" tend to have German roots. While culinary words like beef and veal tend to have french roots.

In spanish only the Earth (f), the Sun (m), and the Moon (f) kept the pronouns (and the definite article).

Mars, Jupiter, etc. are used as proper nouns, without a definite article nor a gender. If any, we use the male gender, as in "the (m) planet Venus".

It seems that sun was feminine and the moon was masculine in Old English up to about the 16th century:

"sun (n.) [...] Old English sunne was feminine (as generally in Germanic), and the fem. pronoun was used in English until 16c.; since then masc. has prevailed." [1]

"moon (n.) [...] A masculine noun in Old English." [2]

[1] https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=sun [2] https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=moon

>Interesting to read. The Sun is referred to as 'he'

Many languages have gendered nouns. In mine sun is also a "he".

It's also common to gender objects when talking about them affectionately or poetically (e.g. talking about a motorcycle as a "she" or a "he").

Just an interesting bit of human psychology: a motorcycle could be either gender as it's strongly analogous to a horse, but a car is always female.

In languages with gendered nouns, objects which can have humans inside of them (e.g. cars, boats, houses) are almost universally female (presumably because females have wombs), and this leaks into English pronouns as well.

>... a motorcycle could be either gender as it's strongly analogous to a horse, but a car is always female.

In Brazilian Portuguese, we use masculine pronouns for cars ("o carro"). Same goes for boat ("o barco") and plane ("o avião"). This can also be seen in Spanish ("el coche", "el barco", "el avión").

I believe that the gender these things are referred to in languages with gendered nouns is more linked to the etymology and development of linguistics than psychology, although it is very likely that the later has some influence as well.

It’s interesting because English has not used grammatical gender for inanimate objects for quite some time (aside from a few exceptions such as ships). I don’t think I’ve seen the sun referred to as “he” in other 19th century writings.

In old Swedish (~19th century) nouns were divided into three grammatical genus: femininum, masculinum and neutrum. Dead objects could be referred to as either he or she:

- earth, sun and time are feminine words and can to this day still be referred to as 'she'

- heaven, road and stone were referred to as 'he', although this has disappeared from modern Swedish.

Icelandic retains the full 3-gender system to this day, and it’s generally incorrect to refer to gendered inanimate objects as “it”, rather than “he” or “she”.

Same with German, which has a neutrum genus but sometimes even uses it for people (the child, das Kind, the girl, das Mädchen, the victim, das Opfer, ...) The number of inanimate objects that are not gendered must be pretty small. The sun is female (die Sonne), a street is female (die Straße), cars and houses are neutrum (das Haus, das Auto)

Butter is a fun one. You get different answers depending on who you ask.

Ketchup is much more controversial though (das Ketchup? Der Ketchup? Wars have been fought about less controversial things.)

Some swedes (myself being one of them) speaks a dialect where the gramatical genus is (partially) retained. Clocks, for example, are still female.

What I remember from English lessons at school is that the sun is 'he' and the moon is 'she'.

Was this in classes for English as a second language?

Because, as a native English speaker, this seems like misinformation to me, perhaps partly influenced by your teacher having a first language where nouns do still have gender.

This a weird memory to be honest. Yes,you are right, English is a second language and normally sun and moon would be 'it' and not 'she' or 'he'.The teacher was too good to get mixed up when it comes to genders but because it was more than 20 years ago,I've got a feeling that there was more into it.Maybe it is how it used to be in onld English or something.

As an native speaker I think things that are personified have an aura of gender. Impersonal objects do not. Ships are female for instance. And you use the proper pronoun. The earth is feminine but you don't.

Fully agree. On that subject: theguardian.com/world/2019/apr/26/ships-she-royal-navy-language-row-female

Maybe "he" is short for "Helios" :-)

Or it's the elemental symbol for Helium, and they knew about nuclear fusion.

Oh, you weren't joking?

Well, coincidentally, helium was discovered in 1868, just a few years after the OP article was written, via detection of a spectral line in sunlight that didn't correspond to any previously known element. Hence the name. Of course they didn't yet have any idea about stellar nucleosynthesis and helium's role in it.

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