Why do we refer to our ships as SHE

Bill Woods wrote:

Weird Harold wrote:Tradition!

The ad that came with that, for the Purple™ seat cushion ... oy!
I wasn't sure whether it was a joke or a real product. Apparently both.

Unfortunately, I can't do anything about the ads, but that scene was the first thing that came to mind re: the OP's question.

Basically.

While English has lost most of the verb/noun gender declinations etc of it's proto Germanic origins, ships are one of the few that have stayed.

phillies wrote:Because we speak English.

English going back to the original Saxon started with more gendered nouns, but still has a few gendered nouns left. "ship" is one of them. In at least one dialect spoken in England "stone" (as in "rock") is another.

roseandheather wrote:Because Reasons.

Any questions?

hmmm - never knew that. Out of interest, which dialect[s]

isaac_newton wrote:

phillies wrote:Because we speak English.

English going back to the original Saxon started with more gendered nouns, but still has a few gendered nouns left. "ship" is one of them. In at least one dialect spoken in England "stone" (as in "rock") is another.

hmmm - never knew that. Out of interest, which dialect[s]

Alas, it was 60 years ago that I learned this. While the county where this grammatical feature was named, I do not remember the name.

Dauntless wrote:don't the Russians and Chinese use HE as the pronoun of choice for their ships?

I'm not certain about the Chinese or other oriental cultures but the Russians refer to their warships in the male sense, as "He," war is traditionally man's domain after all.

Their merchantmen for the most part are referred to in the feminine, "She."

Westerners like the French, British and, of course us "colonists" pretty much refer to all ships in the feminine.

USN retired.

Gustav Lindemann, Captain of the WW2 battleship Bismarck, was very insistent that Bismarck was male.

German is an interesting language in that regard: "Schlachtkreuzer" (Battlecruisers) as a classification are male (i.e. "der Schlachtkreuzer"; this extends to every variant of Cruiser/"Kreuzer"), "Schlachtschiffe" (Battleships) are neutrums (as are all "Schiffe"), "Fregatten" (Frigates) and "Korvetten" (Corvettes) are female.

But here's the trick: Individual ships are female. FGS Nordrhein-Westfalen will invariably referred to as "die Nordrhein-Westfalen" or "die Fregatte Nordrhein-Westfalen"

robert132 wrote:
I'm not certain about the Chinese or other oriental cultures but the Russians refer to their warships in the male sense, as "He," war is traditionally man's domain after all.

Their merchantmen for the most part are referred to in the feminine, "She."

Westerners like the French, British and, of course us "colonists" pretty much refer to all ships in the feminine.

USN retired.

interesting.

thanks

All nouns in Hebrew have a masculine and feminine tense that changes the way one refers to given objects. And the word for ship or vessel in Hebrew is "ספינה" (Sfina) and "אוניה" (Oniya) which are both feminine-tense words. I'm pretty sure that's the case in Arabic and other Semitic languages, which are some of the oldest on the planet. So I think the reason goes much further back - etymological reasons that made their way into mariner traditions thousands of years ago.

thanatos wrote:All nouns in Hebrew have a masculine and feminine tense that changes the way one refers to given objects. And the word for ship or vessel in Hebrew is "ספינה" (Sfina) and "אוניה" (Oniya) which are both feminine-tense words. I'm pretty sure that's the case in Arabic and other Semitic languages, which are some of the oldest on the planet. So I think the reason goes much further back - etymological reasons that made their way into mariner traditions thousands of years ago.

I believe, and I am going back over a half century to my college days, that at least some of the boats in Homer's work were "she's".

That might have been a peculiarity of the translation I was reading.

ldwechsler wrote:

thanatos wrote:All nouns in Hebrew have a masculine and feminine tense that changes the way one refers to given objects. And the word for ship or vessel in Hebrew is "ספינה" (Sfina) and "אוניה" (Oniya) which are both feminine-tense words. I'm pretty sure that's the case in Arabic and other Semitic languages, which are some of the oldest on the planet. So I think the reason goes much further back - etymological reasons that made their way into mariner traditions thousands of years ago.

I believe, and I am going back over a half century to my college days, that at least some of the boats in Homer's work were "she's".

That might have been a peculiarity of the translation I was reading.

Also, there were entreaties to goddesses for protection and some romantics say that they were called she because they carried human lives.