I know just enough about English to be dangerous - and dull at parties - but I had always thought that English lacked gender nouns (if that’s the wrong term please I apologize) like French, Spanish etc have.
This thread, specificaly post #35 started me wondering about the truth of this.
There are words in English that denote gender: actress, comedienne, stewardess, blonde etc.
So can English truly be said to be lacking in gender nouns?
You’re using the word “gender” in two different senses here. Grammatical gender, which is what languages like French and Spanish have, just means that all nouns are arbitrarily divided into classes, which are sometimes labelled with terms like “masculine” and “feminine”. (These classes are used to determine other grammatical features, such as inflections and verb agreement.) However, these labels are similarly arbitrary, and rarely have anything to do with the biological gender of the things they describe.
So to answer your question, English (like all other languages) do indeed have words which refer to things with a specific biological gender. But English doesn’t have grammatical gender, outside its pronomial system.
I can’t think of such a noun that doesn’t refer to an actual male/female, either human or animal; I think a full-blown gender system requires categories for every noun, not just the ones whose referents are gendered.
More importantly, in speech the gender of nouns affects other words that refer to them. For example, here are the same sentences in English and French:
The man is big. The woman is big.
L’homme est grand. La femme est grande.
The word grand means “big” in both circumstances, but because it refers to nouns of different genders in each case, the form of the adjective changes. And, of course, you have the same thing when using nouns whose referent isn’t gendered (soulier = shoe, chemise = shirt):
Le soulier est grand. La chemise est grande.
We do have a tendency of calling vessels, cars, and other objects of value or possession a “she” (e.g. “Nice Camaro, she sure is a beauty.”), I suppose implying objects of arbitrary value are female. But this seems more a colloquialism, rather than a formal english grammatical function.
We don’t have adjectives that take on a “gender” based on the noun it’s describing. Like MikeS was saying, english nouns don’t have intrinsic (arbitrary or not) genders built into them.
English does in fact have grammatical gender. But there are two conditions that make the fact nearly irrelevant:
Unlike many languages, English’s articles and adjectives are undeclinable, and do not change to agree in gender (and usually in number) with the noun they modify; they are a single fixed form. Only in the third person singular pronouns does English have a form which changes by gender to agree wiith its noun referent.
In general, Entlish noun genders are “natural” rather than “morphological.” In some other languages, the noun ending governs what gender it will fall into, e.g. Latin nouns in -atio are feminine; Russian nouns in -o are neuter. For the most part English feminine nouns reference female living things; masculine nouns male (and customarily indeterminate-gender) living things; and neuter nouns non-living things. There are however exceptions: by longstanding tradition, slowly becoming obsolete in the last half century, ships are feminine, and there is a lively usage of personification to endow abstract nouns with male or female attributes. “France will do as she sees best” – “she” referencing France as a personified nation. “In his mind’s eye, he saw Faith beckon to him; she wished to lead his wayward spirit home.” ‘Faith’ in this case is not a person of that name but the personified abstraction.
So: 1. Grammatical gender remains present in English, but: 2. It governs only the choice of personal pronouns; and 3. It is in general accordant with natural gender rather than morpholopically dictated forms.
I once was in a Continual Education (adult) class in Spanish. I think it was in the second class that the teacher started teaching us about gender. A door is “una puerta,” a book is “un libro,” etc. The woman next to me had never studied a language with gender nouns, and was asking, “How can a door be feminine? How can a book be masculine?” The teacher was having trouble getting the point across to her, so I leaned over and said, “It’s like the way we used to give hurricanes female names, and we still use “she” for ships.” Then she got it.
Interesting. Okay, so English nouns can have gender, but they are of a different sort than romance languages.
However, we can still the the neutral pronoun “it” in all cases relating to non-living nouns, and I’m beginning to find it weird and awkwardly quaint to refer to ships, cars, countries or abstractions as a “she”, and use “it” almost exclusively. Is this possible in French or Spanish, etc.?
Don’t you mean "Grammatical gender remains present in English, but: 2. She governs only the choice of personal pronouns…? 
Well, it’s the same sort of grammatical gender as other languages, except that the English gender system has largely degenerated over the language’s evolution, so that today the vast majority of nouns are neuter gender.
“It” is the neuter third person singular pronoun in English. However, French and Spanish do not have neuter gender, only masculine and feminine. So French and Spanish nouns can be masculine or feminine, but it’s only a grammatical property without any obvious link to the noun itself. I don’t know what is done in languages with a different gender system.
German has the three genders, and the preceding articles and modifiers have endings reflecting the gender of the noun. Young unmarried girls have been neutered: das Maedchen, or at least in the dialect of High German I learned. I’d love to know the reason for that.
To answer that one, it’s because adding -chen (or -lein for that matter) to any noun makes it neuter.
Because, as has already been pointed out, generally speaking, grammatical gender rarely has anything to do with biological gender. It’s perfectly unremarkable that some biologically female referents would have “masculine” or “neuter” grammatical genders. Those latter terms are just labels used by grammarians for certain languages. Some languages’ grammatical gender labels don’t refer to biological gender at all.
I do not speak German but happen to know that a diminutive in German is neuter. So Frau is feminine but Frauline is neuter, much counter to this English-speaker’s intuition.
This brings up an interesting thought. As a native speaker of American English, and never having learned another language; for native speakers of languages that have grammatical genders, do those words color your perception of those things as vaguely masculine and feminine?
In other words, when I think of a book, the thought of it having a masculine or feminine “sense” wouldn’t even cross my mind. It’s just an inanimate book. Is there some part of your mind that “sees” a book as masculine?*
Does that make any sense?
*even knowing full-well that grammatical gender isn’t taken literally as biological gender, as I don’t imagine a schooner having a vagina.
The question makes sense, but no, it doesn’t color my perception. As has been pointed out earlier, the assignment is mostly arbitrary.
In three-gendered Norwegian (the older norm in the Danish derived writing standard only has common and neuter gender) there are for instance several words for dog, some of which are masculine and some feminine, but there’s nothing discordant about “ei hannbikkje” - “(feminine article)a male dog”.
Of course that’s not an inanimate example, but I think the animate example is stronger. But here’s one that’s all inanimate.
Et hus - (a house - neuter)
En bygning - (a building - masculine)
Ei kirke - (a church - feminine)
I don’t ascribe gender related stereotypes to those different categories.
Et fjell - (a mountain - neuter)
En ås - (a hill - masculine)
Ei høgde - (a hill/height - feminine)
Or to those.
I’m having a hard time coming up with any Latin nouns ending in -atio… A better example would be -a. It’s not entirely morphological, though, since there are a handful of masculine nouns in the first declension (ending in -a). And they’re paired with adjectives according to their gender, not according to their morphology. Thus, for instance, a “good farmer” would be “bonus agricola”, not “bona agricola”.
Almost any English abstract noun ending in -ation has a Latin cognate in -atio, which calls for feminine modifiers. (Also -ition and -itio, now that I think about it.) Inspiratio, incarnatio, explanatio, duratio, natio, levitatio.
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French has separate words for male and female animals of many common species (pets, cattle, poultry, etc.), but certainly not all. For instance, giraffes, ostrich (ostriches?) and whales are designated by feminine nouns (une girafe, une autruche, une baleine).
It does colour our perceptions. Early translations of Moby Dick designated the whale using baleine, so the assumed gender was feminine. Everybody knows that there are whales of both sexes, but there’s still (in my mind at least) a tendency to perceive the animal as a female. More recent translations have used the term for a sperm whale (cachalot), which is masculine.
When considering the difference between biological gender and grammatical gender, note that in some languages grammatical gender is not based entirely, or at all, on male/female. It can be based on animate/inanimate, or human/non-human, among many other classifications.
Aren’t cat and ship (sometimes ?) feminine ?
That’s a good question. I can certainly give a partial answer. I know (or used to) a woman who is a professor of linguistics and a French Canadian. She is a student of Chomsky’s incidentally. She told me that she had read some criticism of feminist writing on the grounds that the author used too many masculine nouns. So obviously the gender does, in some instances (or for some people) color the impression. But it is not clear that this is true for the average speaker.
In German, the three words Frau, Frauelein, and Weib (wife) have three different genders. In French, Personne is feminine. So you might say something like, “La personne etait un homme. Elle est arrive hier soir”. Literally “The person is a man. She arrived last night.”
I think it would better if we didn’t call them by the names masculine, etc. One of the problems for English speaking people learning French (as well as vice versa) is that “son” and “sa” (“his, her, its”) do not agree with the possessor but with the thing possessed. “Elle a son livre; Il a sa voiture”.
English entirely lacks grammatical gender. It does have semantic gender and this shows up in the third person singular pronouns and nowhere else. Calling ships and such “she” should be thought of as poetic.