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A comment on Why isn’t there an English Academy? Blame the plague. Parent comment

Re:Why isn’t there an English Academy? Blame the plague by Jtsummers on Thursday August 26, 2021 @06:19PM (#28321723)
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.
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Re:Why isn’t there an English Academy? Blame the plague by jraph on Thursday August 26, 2021 @06:49PM (#28322044)
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...

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Re:Why isn’t there an English Academy? Blame the plague by quartesixte on Thursday August 26, 2021 @10:46PM (#28323783)
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.

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Re:Why isn’t there an English Academy? Blame the plague by chrisseaton on Thursday August 26, 2021 @08:28PM (#28322851)
> English doesn't have a notion of gendered nouns.

‘She’s a fine ship.’

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Re:Why isn’t there an English Academy? Blame the plague by Jtsummers on Thursday August 26, 2021 @08:37PM (#28322938)
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.
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Re:Why isn’t there an English Academy? Blame the plague by TheCoelacanth on Thursday August 26, 2021 @11:02PM (#28323864)
That's anthropomorphism, not grammatical gender.
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