I’d be fascinated to know why do we sometimes refer to ships, countries, the church, the Earth, the moon and cars among other things as “she”? Is it the same in other languages?
Keith Williams
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Readers reply
Ships are always referred to as females because they are always looking out for buoys. Yvonne Moore
Ships were so called by their sailors because they were considered a protecting force, like a replacement mother while away at sea. BladeAbroad
Perhaps the answer lies in a view of these objects as vessels, a metaphor for women as carriers of offspring. Jorge Moreira
I think it’s to do with them all providing some form of protection, oversight, succour or other life-affirming aspects. Much like a good mum. Is this patriarchal, Freudian bias? Or is it a fair rationalisation of where human consciousness leads to, biology and evolution? Discuss ... senoj1
Railway locomotives, particularly steam-powered locomotives, are also traditionally “she”. Even if they have names such as Flying Scotsman and William Whitelaw. RichardofDarlington
On a related note, I was surprised and irritated by the various contributors and commentators during the recent Mars Perseverance landing live stream that referred throughout to the rover as a “she”. I do feel that gendering of inanimate objects is neither necessary nor useful and was disappointed that Nasa continues to do this. It seems simply to be a perpetuation of a misogynistic worldview. jimlewis1
In 1593, Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen, declared she would have no marriage to any, other than England. Since then, any country, ship or celestial body to which a man might devote his soul has henceforth been referred to as “she”. rfriday
In the case of churches, it’s based on the Roman Catholic allegory of the Mother Church. Allegory gives the clue to the other uses in English, too: they’re poetic, and have absolutely nothing to do with linguistic gender. I’ve never called a ship “she” in my life. If I ever do, I’ll be consciously speaking poetically, although I’d probably avoid it because it’s the sort of tiresome, mock-archaic thing that Jacob Rees-Mogg and Boris Johnson do. alexito
For Gaians like me, the Earth is the All-Mother, source of all life and sustenance, the archetypal mother. All Her ecosystems are linked into a planet-wide network of living beings. In some ways, this is not unlike a colony of ants or bees (though on a much greater and inter-species scale). Gaia may or may not be sentient, but she is most certainly alive and our failure to treat Her with respect will lead to our destruction – whether she “wills” it or not! dickthetag
Why are some countries Vaterland, others Mutterland? Mahadevan
As I understand it, Vaterland is where people are from and Mutterland where things or ideas originated. Tritian
Maybe fatherland when marching to war and motherland when limping home. LossinLips
Gendered nouns?
I believe that this is explained, at least in part, by the influence of Latin, used by the educated classes until relatively recent times. In Latin, moon (luna), church (Ecclesia), ship (navis) and country names (such as Britannia) are grammatically feminine. ALuizCosta
Yes, undoubtedly the gender usage in all Latin-derived languages was important in these distinctions. But why did Latin evolve with these gender distinctions? And many other old languages have similar distinctions. And having said that, Latin (and most European languages) have many gender anomalies: not only are ships feminine, but so are sailors (nauta). wetblanket
But the English words “moon”, “ship”, and “church” are all from German (Mond, Schif, and Kirche in modern German, kirk in Scots etc), so how does the gender of the Latin or French words lune and église influence English usage? theindyisbetter
I hate to be “that person” but it’s definitely nothing to do with grammatical noun gender: in Old English “ship” (scip) and “country” (land) were neuter and “moon” (mona) was masculine, rather than feminine; just like in modern German and Dutch. I think it’s just a slightly poetic personification (used by homesick sailors and soldiers who miss their wives/mums/daughters) that has only ever been used in limited contexts. NursePanda
There isn’t a direct line from Old English to modern-day English. Over the centuries Old English noun genders were flipped with Norse gendering, Poetic gendering, or Latinate gendering. Up in Orkney, chairs are still referred to as “she” in the local dialect, as are watches, and compasses further south. Does that watch still work?, yes she’s still keeping perfect time! Also there were many different words for nautical vessels, the sun and the moon in Old English and they all had at least five declensions. I’m sure the poetic personification is also relevant but language is way, way too complicated to say definitively it has nothing to do with noun gender. IanRod65
Yes, but that’s still not “grammatical gender”, but rather “natural sexual class”, and in most cases these don’t coincide. Grammatical gender is mostly down to derivation morphology and phonology rather than any real-world notion of male/female. NursePanda
The moon is male in German, but the sun is female. The stars are male, again. Boys are male, girls and children in general are neutral. It doesn’t have to make any sense. SusiundTobi
Dutch is very modern in this respect: it has a “common”, ie animate, and “neuter”, ie inanimate. When it comes to animate, it’s like “it’s complicated …” – much like modern discourse about gender. Perigrin
In Portuguese the moon is female and the sun male. This has absolutely no hidden meaning, it’s simply to do with the spelling. All words ending with “a” (moon=lua) are female, all words ending with a consonant are male (sun=sol). meansardine
In Arabic it’s the same as in German – moon (alqmar) is masculine and sun (shams) feminine. RaniMeliha
Finnish pronouns have no gender, and hän can mean “he” and “she”. Yet boats and vessels have traditionally been named as female. Sailing boats sometimes have very affectionate female nicknames, similar to “Babe”, “Honey” or “Gal”. I guess that has to do with some very primal longing for female companionship while being at sea. Mikko_
Just as a little aside, I understand that the Scottish Gaelic word for woman (boireannach) is masculine in terms of word gender. My learned book tells me this is because it belongs to a class of masculine nominal derivatives. Andreamaisie
Northern Welsh for woman is “dynes”, literally a female man. Eva_Brick
I don’t think it’s anything to do with grammatical gender. And as a speaker of German and French, calling things “she” without it referring to their grammatical gender is peculiar to English. In German, Germany is referred to as “it” as countries ending in -land are neuter. France is “she” because France is grammatically feminine (la France). I always thought it was a bit sexist. Anything a man can own (a car, a boat, a country) is called she rather than it. amoothegreat
Cars are sometimes a “she”, but I’ve known several given male names and referred to as “he”, mostly by female owners. Ships are “she” traditionally, in English at least. It could be an “opposite sex” thing where mostly male groups refer to “their” ship as “she”. It’s not universal, though: apparently the captain of the Bismarck, named after a male statesman, wrote of the ship as “he”. Ship names are male, female or inanimate. As are railway or traction engines; was Thomas the Tank Engine ever a “she”? Countries are variously “fatherland” or “motherland”; nations personified by male John Bull or female Britannia. The Lloyds convention is to use “it” when writing about ships from a business point of view. I suspect outside of poetic effect, the neutral “it” is used much more frequently in English for ships, moons, countries and cars than it might have been in the past. leadballoon
Ship names have various culturally and operationally contextualised traditions. For example, naval vessels are still often given names of “great men” and icebreakers are named after areas of operation, mythology, or functional sentiments (North Wind, Yamal, Ymer, Sisu). While there is a tradition of femininity in some ships, this is by no means a universal concept. Historically, maritime professions were predominantly male (not wholly though), which has contributed to maritime culture and to sailor-ship relations. AaroSahari
I assume that with things such as ships, cars, locomotives, spacecraft and possibly buildings, they are thought of by those who operate, construct or inhabit them as sentient, or at least responsive, entities with which the operators have an empathic relationship, and since English doesn’t really allow for talking about such a being as “it”, they require the use of a gendered pronoun. Since our industrial past has been largely male-oriented, it was natural for all those men to refer to their mechanical soulmate as “she”. The American humorist Erma Bombeck did a very good piece on the status of a man’s car as proxy girlfriend, up to and including the way in which a well-off man in middle age keeps the frumpy but practical and reliable car “because of the children”, but gets himself a sexy, high-maintenance little sporting number on the side. SpoilheapSurfer
