Re: [OT] Grammatic gender

[David Wright]

On Wed 15 Nov 2017 at 07:54:03 (+0000), Hilary Snaden wrote:
> On 15/11/17 01:13, Andrew Bernard wrote:
> >Hi Simon,
> >
> >As a native English speaker, allow me to say that the examples you have
> >given are not grammatical gender but literary. English does not have such a
> >thing. Since there are no gendered definite or indefinite articles ('the',
> >'a') there is just no such concept in English grammar.
> >
> >Often people refer to boats as 'she', but that's not a part of grammar. As
> >for 'grammatic gender of death' - it's pure tosh, I am sorry. For a start,
> >death cannot have a gender as it is an abstract noun. Any such description
> >is purely literary. As an aside, although 'grammatic' is considered to be
> >in current use, most people now would use the form 'grammatical', the most
> >recent example of use in the Oxford English Dictionary II being 1889. [But
> >I have no objection to using older and obsolete words - in fact, I love it!]
> 
> It looks from the preceding post that the "grammatic gender of
> death" was a reference to a non-English language, in which case it
> may not be tosh at all. The rest of your points are sound. (Though I
> prefer "grammatic" myself. :-))

The statement was "Only yesterday I talked with an

American native english speaker

about the grammatic gender of death; she said it could be all three,
depending on circumstances…"

I can only make sense of this as "native speaker of American English".
Perhaps if America had been colonised several hundred years earlier,
they might have hung onto gender just as they have (I assume) with
"gotten" and some other forms that sound odd to English ears.

If English nouns have gender, it must be possible to give examples.
The sun and moon don't have grammatical gender, but they were
personified as male and female gods. That doesn't count.

Cheers,
David.