I was speaking about French. In French, most nouns have genders. Usually, the gender is well defined but for some nouns like Wifi, the gender is different depending on the area or even across people. Where I live, wifi is mostly masculine, but you hear the feminine form often enough. Usually from people from the South West of France but not exclusively.

You can notice the gender of the noun from the article: le wifi, un wifi, or from the adjectives qualifying it, if any.

> I take it WIFI is a noun. How is gender prescribed to a noun?

Easily, by the language making it an obligatory grammatical category for nouns. Grammar says there's concord in the language and some words have gender? Suddenly all nouns require gender for concord, regardless of whether it seems reasonable to you or not.

English doesn't have a notion of gendered nouns. In a lot of other European languages, however, they have them. I don't know French so can't draw any examples from it, but in Italian "tavolo" (table) is masculine while "sedia" (chair) is feminine. The reason for that is, at this point in time, by definition of the language. However, when creating novel words or bringing in loanwords the choice is largely arbitrary. GP is pointing out that the Académie Française chose to assign covid the feminine gender despite the popular use of the masculine gender for it in widespread use before their decision.

Exactly.

And so while "tavolo" in Italian is masculine, our table is feminine. And while our planète is feminine, Spanish's planeta ends with an A and is masculine.

English generally doesn't have genders on common words, except for cases like vehicles that can be found used as feminine (ship, car, …) [1], but that's fairly anecdotal.

[1] https://www.antidote.info/en/blog/reports/metaphorical-gende...

It’s kind of a quirk of history that English lost grammatical gender when importing French, German, and Latin words.

The closest idea to gender would probably be the idea of weak/strong vowels that while no longer codified, is what results in things like see/saw, run/ran, mouse/mice. IIRC Old English had a much stronger sense of these and conjugated many of their words in this way.

An example: Mouse -> Mice is valid. Moose -> Meese is not.

> English doesn't have a notion of gendered nouns.

‘She’s a fine ship.’

I actually did have that in my original comment but it didn't survive an edit. Vehicles, vessels, countries and a few others seem to get a gender, but it's not actually a part of the language in the same sense as in Spanish, Italian, German, French, and others. It more seems to reflect a kind of personification (the nation as an entity becomes a she, same with a ship). That's distinct from the grammatical gender in other languages.

That's anthropomorphism, not grammatical gender.