Re: Indo-European Languages and Gramatical Gender Loss
- From: Andrew Woode <andrew_woode@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2007 04:25:31 -0700
On 14 Jun, 06:03, VK <schools_r...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In the elevated style some personal pronouns are preferred over others
for some nouns. Say seamen say "she" about the ship: "She came to the
port today". I don't know though if it's leftover of old grammatical
gender relations or just modern poetic association like "a ship - a
beloved woman" or so.
Are there any feminine words for 'ship' in Old English which might
justify the gender historically? 'Scip' itself is neuter.
Metaphorical and other associations seem usually to trump the
historical genders where semantic gender is overruled; I'd be
unsurprised to read English poetry with the sun as 'he' and the moon
as 'she', following the Romance pattern, but the other way round -
with a masculine moon and feminine sun as in OE - is more unusual
these days.
(OK, I can think of an exception in Tolkien's usage, but he was hardly
a naive and typical user on this point).
I believe that some traditional dialects had different usage of
pronoun gender, but whether any of that preserves original
distinctions is another question.
.
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