There are lots of examples where the masculine term of actor and waiter is now used for both men and women. The profession of fighting fires was historically a predominantly male job.Īt the same time, traditionally feminine nouns such as actress and waitress are becoming less common. Let’s look at the example of “fireman.” We don’t really say “firewoman” in English. In fact, we use “man” and words ending in “-man” far more as gendered nouns in English. We’ve had a look why some words are referred to as “she”. It might make you seem a tiny bit pretentious. “The Titanic sank in 1912, didn’t she?” But, you have to be careful. ![]() So, if you’re a non-native speaker of English and want to impress someone with your linguistic knowledge, make a reference to a ship or country using the word ‘she’. ![]() I travelled from England to New York on the Queen Elizabeth she (the Queen Elizabeth) is a great ship. She (the car) is my greatest passion.įrance is popular with her (France’s) neighbours at the moment. There are some other examples of gender in English language, too: It’s worth noting that Lloyd’s Register of Shipping now calls ships “it”. Why? Because it gives a gender to an inanimate object. So, making ships female and calling them “she” is an example of old English-speaking practice. As we have seen, other languages have “male”, “female” and sometimes “neuter” words. But, English generally uses a neutral words such as “the” or “it”. For example, “I travelled from England to New York on the Queen Elizabeth she (the Queen Elizabeth) is a great ship.”Ī naval historian provides an explanation why this might be the case. Therefore, in English, ships are sometimes referred to as “she”. These include ships, countries and churches, for example. Interestingly, in Modern English, there are some word groups which are considered ‘feminine’, at least in a poetic or quaint sense. See how this works in other languages.Įnglish makes life a little easier for us when it comes to gender and grammar.Īre there any masculine and feminine words in English? Other languages others have different genders for animate versus inanimate objects. In some languages, grammatical gender is more than just “male” or “female.” Some languages have a “neuter” class. But this doesn’t always match up with the “natural gender” of the person or object being described. Grammatical gender is a way of classifying nouns. Natural gender is simply the biological sex of a person, animal or character. It’s important to distinguish between grammatical gender and natural gender. In some languages, nouns, such as Qantas, can be male or female. Examples of nouns might include Sydney, Louis Vuitton, or Qantas. For example, nouns can refer to an individual name of a person, like Mike or Amrita. A noun is a part of language that names a person, place, thing, idea, action or quality. ![]() In technical terms, gender in languages is just one way of breaking up nouns into classes or categories. About a quarter of the world’s languages uses gender.
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