Why are ships always female? | Hacker News Reader

Why are ships always female?

english.stackexchange.com

29 pointsmelenaboija59 comments

I think (straight) guys find it easier to express affection and love for a "her".

I mean think of it this way, you're a guy with a "beautiful" car. What feel's right – to think of this thing of beauty as a "it", a "he", or a "she"?

Consider:

"It's a beauty". "He's a beauty". "She's a beauty".

"She" just sounds more correct to my heterosexual male head.

Although it may sound strange referring to an inanimate object as 'she', this tradition relates to the idea of a female figure such as a mother or goddess guiding and protecting a ship and crew.

https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/why-do-ships-have-a-gender

Is this not a chicken-or-egg kind of problem? Are ships associated to goddesses because they have a female noun, or is the "ship" word female in many languages because it's associated to goddesses?

I think it's the former, you say it's the latter. Usually we give something a name, deciding its gender in gendered languages (which to me is the interesting part), then we make any connection between the objects and other people/Gods based on the gender we felt was more appropriate for an inanimate object.

There are a lot of languages where ships aren't intrinsically feminine, like for example old english where they were neuter. You should be able to test your hypothesis by seeing whether those languages still associate ships with goddesses? Though IMO the goddess connection itself needs validation.

For the second part, about assigning connections after the fact, something I always found weird and interesting is french ship gender conventions. The ship has the gender associated with the name it carries, but the name itself is chosen to match the gender of the underlying form. eg a fuel carrier is masculine and so will get a male name and pronoun, a frigate is feminine and will get a female name and pronoun.

On a ship you are surrounded in a salty fluid. In fact, amniotic fluid is said to "smell like the sea" and I can confirm that it does.

Your field report has been recorded.

Thank you for your brave service.

In Russian all nouns are gendered (he / she / it), and "ship" is "корабль" which is a he.

The same is true in German, most words for "ship" are not female ("she"), but neuter ("Das Schiff", "Das Boot" => the ship / the boat, neuter like in "it") or male ("Der Kreuzer", "Der Schoner", "Der Zerstörer" => the cruiser / the schooner / the destroyer, male like in "he") with very few exceptions ("Die Fähre" => the ferry, female).

However ship names are still female in German, not only if named after "neuter things" like counties or numbers ("Die Bayern", "Die Cap San Diego", "Die U-96") but also if they are named after males ("Die Bismarck", "Die Otto Hahn", "Die Prinz Eugen", "Die Gorch Fock").

> In Russian all nouns are gendered (he / she / it)

isn't "it" non-gendered? like most nouns in english?

Grammatically, neuter counts as a gender. You could say it's an element of the same `enum` type as male and female.

Native speakers consider 'средний род' (it) as a gender in a grammatical sense, not a lack of gender or non-gender.

An interesting question tagged as duplicate with two unrelated references.

Who would have guessed?

Jannies deserve their name, often used as an insult. Whether they are Reddit mods or StackOverflow admins, the majority are people that love putting things into neat little boxes and creating rules out of chaos. They get a small release of dopamine every time they can catch someone breaking one of their infinite and arbitrary impositions.

To this day I still don't have a StackOverflow account.

I do not understand why, as many answers as they received, none of them pointed out that almost all inanimate objects in English are referred to as female when given a gender. An English speaker would say "oh yeah that old table saw, she's gonna give you some problems" but never "he's going to give you some problems". "This is my new hunting rifle, isn't she a beauty?" never "isn't he a beauty".

Pretty sure I’ve heard people use “he” more than “she” in parts of England, especially for tools and, I think, furniture (“see that table - squeeze him in there”). I would guess there is a gender role being attributed to the object.

Almost all can be referred to as female. I most often hear "it" rather than "she". The difference seems to be related to personal connection. If you think a device has a personality, you'll use she, otherwise you would use it.

Almost all can be referred to as female. I most often hear "it" rather than "she"

That's what I said, "when given a gender".

Why would they be given a gender anyway? If it's not some kind of self replicating dimorphous being that reproduces sexually it makes literally no sense.

Half of the world's languages have grammatical gender for inanimate objects. English is one of only a handful of Indo-European languages that don't. Giving inanimate objects gender doesn't have to make sense with regards to what maleness and femaleness mean in terms of human sexual dimorphism, it's just a part of how some languages developed. In French everything is male or female. In German things can be male, female, or neutral, but a table is always male.

What's a bit unusual is that in English nouns don't require gendered pronouns generally because we have a neutral impersonal pronoun "it" for things that don't have literal gender, and generally don't require gendered pronouns - except we sometimes gender them anyways, and that gendering generally follows some convention.

"A ship is always referred to as 'she' because it costs so much to keep one in paint and powder."

Adiral Chester W. Nimitz https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/chester_w_nimitz_126620

In French it's always male. Eg "le Marion Dufresne."

Maybe because the French words for ship (bateau, navire, vaisseau) are all masculine?

There's also "embarcation", "barque", and old types of boats like "caravelle", "carafe", "flute", "trirème", all feminine.

Not all boat names in french are masculine. Some famous ones that are feminine: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Dauphine_(vaisseau) https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grande_Hermine_(Nef) https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Cordeli%C3%A8re

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_frigate_Belle_Poule_(... :p

I thought this was the beginning of a joke - glad to see (most) of the rest of HN is more mature than I.

tl;dr: The English language, and thus its culture, derives from languages where the word "ship" is female, so it's natural to refer to one as such.

All languages in some form derive from one other, but is there an ancient/root language that doesn't have gendered nouns? English seems to me to be an exception, especially in the context of Latin and European languages.

Maybe the question exists in the first place because English is such an anomaly.

The politically correct language police have got us so confused about sex and gender that we don't understand our own language anymore.

Ships aren't female to English speakers. Rather, they're tagged with the feminine gender. Linguistic gender is separate from sex; it just happens that in English, although gender is almost completely dead in the language we still happen to tag females as "feminine gender" and males as "masculine gender".

The reason for the associations are more or less random. They vary from language to language, and don't seem to have much to do with whether you'd think of something as "manly" or "related to pursuits of the fairer sex".

In French and Spanish, the gender assignments of some random words:

     pencil      m  m
     truck       m  m
     house       f  f
     building    m  m
     store       m  f
     fortress    f  f
     navy        f  f
     military    f  f
     castle      m  m
     shoe        f  m
     boot        f  f
     hat         m  m

So in both French and Spanish, fortress, navy, and military are all feminine, while pencil or hat are masculine? While other words like store and shoe change their gender from language to language.

There's really just two coincidences together that cause all this confusion:

1) For what little gender English has, it happens that there are two genders. That's not true for other languages. Lots of languages have many genders.

2) Many other languages have gender but don't even concern themselves with "masculine" or "feminine". According to wikipedia, The Bantu language Ganda has "10 classes called simply Class I to Class X and containing all sorts of arbitrary groupings but often characterised as people, long objects, animals, miscellaneous objects, large objects and liquids, small objects, languages, pejoratives, infinitives, mass nouns". No confusion about females being feminine here, and so forth.

You cannot compare the gender of words across languages.

Gender is a property of words, not the concept it refers to. For example, you say that boot is feminine in both French and Spanish, but look at how it is for various synonyms in Romanian:

    gheată      f     (from Italian)
    ciubotă     f     (from Ukrainian)
    bocanc      m     (from Hungarian)
    cizmă       f     (from Hungarian)
    botină      f     (from French)

"Bocanc" is masculine because it sounds masculine to us (it doesn't end in a feminine vowel like "a").

"Botină" comes from "bottine" in French which is pronounced /bɔ.tin/. It's feminine in French but since it ends in "n" it sounds very masculine in Romanian. It would have been a masculine word if it got imported as "botin" instead of "botină".

Of course it isn't always that simple and words which sound feminine might be masculine, or other combinations since we have 3 genders.

> Ships aren't female to English speakers.

I would say they are - they are the thing that stands between you and all sorts of very unpleasant outcomes - very like your mother.

Oh yeah, I forgot about the fact that my father never stood between me and many unpleasant outcomes. I guess the only weird thing is that I don't refer to my seatbelt and bike helmet as "she".

in my somewhat later life, the person that stood between me and doom was in fact my father, so you are not wrong. earlier on though it was imprinted on me as being my mum.

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?)

>And then there are some words that are becoming more directly gendered in the modern world. "Guys," as the easy example.

I'm not sure it's so much words becoming more gendered as an increased sensitivity to casually applying male-gendered terms to everyone.

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?

Well, singular "they" is historically ungrammatical but most people find that it's a reasonable choice to be gender-neutral for people.

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.

I think those are ingrained culturally as many cultures associate the sun with kingship.

But the thing about gender is that it is a property of a word, not the thing it is referencing. So synonyms could have different genders.

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 don't know how universally people would answer the question that way but the Greek/Roman gods were male and female respectively.

I'm a native speaker and this doesn't apply to me.

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.

Yeah, me either.

I don't have any intuition that inanimate objects have an affinity to human sexes.

English is ultimately derived from Indo-European. The earliest surviving language of that language tree is actually vedic Sanskrit. It has 3 numbers (single, dual, plural) and 3 genders (male, female, neuter)

So you need to look at languages not derived from Indo European.

Current theory is that Proto-Indo-European had two genders: animate and inanimate. Wonder how its child languages developed three.

Interesting! From wiki:

In Northern Kurdish language (Kurmanji), the same word can have two genders according to the context. For example, if the word dar (meaning 'wood' or 'tree') is feminine, it means that it is a living tree (e.g., dara sêvê means 'apple tree'), but if it is masculine, it means that it is dead, no longer living (e.g., darê sêvê means 'apple wood'). So if one wants to refer to a certain table that is made of wood from an apple tree, one cannot use the word dar with a feminine gender, and if one wants to refer to an apple tree in a garden, one cannot use dar with a masculine gender.

Dravidian languages like Tamil and Malayalam don't have gendered nouns. One theory about how english lost genders is that it mixed too many gendered languages : Germanic + Latin + French + Danish

>tl;dr: The English language, and thus its culture, derives from languages where the word "ship" is female, so it's natural to refer to one as such.

This is not a sufficient explanation, as the same thing must apply to many or most nouns in the English language, which we don't use gendered pronouns for now.

It's also not a summary of the answer linked to, which says it's more likely due to a tradition of male mariners naming ships for important women in their lives

I thought I read somewhere, Mandarin also do not have genders. But I could be miss-informed.

AFAIK the only languages which have genders are Indo-European (except English and Farsi, which lost theirs) and Afro-Asiatic.

Some other langauges, such as Basque and possibly Etruscan have/had an animate/inanimate distinction.

Because they are always wet.

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