# Genders for the Sun and the Moon **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [January 15, 2013, 7:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/genders-for-the-sun-and-the-moon/647319 "2013-01-15T19:31:55Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Colibri](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/colibri/32/1841_2.png) [@Colibri](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colibri)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2013, 3:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/genders-for-the-sun-and-the-moon/647319/41 "2013-01-16T03:16:59Z")
> [@Speak\_to\_me\_Maddie](#): > > The OP never asked for anything “official”. Yeah, she did, actually. She asked for citable references in the OP, and as noted above later asked for official information. > [@](#): > > others decided to act like pedantic teenagers. **Moderator Note** **Speak to me Maddie!** , if you are going to snark at people it’s best to actually read the OP and subsequent posts. No warning issued, but let’s keep remarks like this out of General Questions. Colibri General Questions Moderator ---
**Author:** ![Floater](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/dc4da7/32.png) [@Floater](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Floater)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2013, 10:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/genders-for-the-sun-and-the-moon/647319/42 "2013-01-16T10:08:59Z")
> [@Leo\_Bloom](#): > > To continue the female moon thing, I heard a ha-ha joke about moon phases a long time ago (I really did want a way to remember): > > “When the crescent moon looks like a ‘D’ that means it’s decreasing. But, since the moon is a woman, she’s lying, so it means the moon is increasing.” > > I don’t know if I have that right. I still don’t know which direction the lighting on the moon will go day by day when it looks like a ‘D.’ This only works on the northern hemisphere. It’s the other way round south of the equator. ---
**Author:** ![Giles](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/giles/32/60_2.png) [@Giles](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Giles)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2013, 10:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/genders-for-the-sun-and-the-moon/647319/43 "2013-01-16T10:20:55Z")
> [@Floater](#): > > This only works on the northern hemisphere. It’s the other way round south of the equator. Righ1t, but the indigenous cultures south of the equator didn’t have the letter D or the word “decreasing”. ---
**Author:** ![hibernicus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hibernicus/32/2802_2.png) [@hibernicus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/hibernicus)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2013, 1:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/genders-for-the-sun-and-the-moon/647319/44 "2013-01-16T13:15:57Z")
I think the kind of evidence the OP is looking for is literary. There must be dozens of poetic references to the moon as feminine - for example in Romeo and Juliet - suggesting that the moon is indeed “considered” female in our English-speaking culture. Regarding languages (which I acknowledge the OP isn’t asking about), I note that in Irish the sun is feminine and the moon is masculine. Same in Lithuanian. I don’t know about Slavic or other gendered languages. So, so far we have: Sun male, moon female (Quechua, Romance languages - and Greek?) Sun female, moon male (Celtic, Germanic, Baltic) Could be either, but normally both female (Hebrew) ---
**Author:** ![Dr.Drake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/ad7895/32.png) [@Dr.Drake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr.Drake)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2013, 2:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/genders-for-the-sun-and-the-moon/647319/45 "2013-01-16T14:28:07Z")
> [@hibernicus](#): > > So, so far we have: > Sun male, moon female (Quechua, Romance languages - and Greek?) > Sun female, moon male (Celtic, Germanic, Baltic) > Could be either, but normally both female (Hebrew) Don’t be so quick on the Celtic. Welsh and Breton follow the Romance pattern, with sun (_haul / heol_, cognate with Latin _sol_) masculine and moon (_lloer / loar_, alternatively _lleuad_) feminine. There’s some reason to suspect the “sun” words switched genders at some point, notably the Irish cognate _súil_, f., now meaning “eye”. ---
**Author:** ![Filbert](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/filbert/32/3433_2.png) [@Filbert](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Filbert)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2013, 2:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/genders-for-the-sun-and-the-moon/647319/46 "2013-01-16T14:58:34Z")
> [@jayjay](#): > > It should be noted also that in Tolkien’s _Silmarillion_, the Sun is carried by a female “angel” and the moon by a male one. Neither sun nor moon themselves have gender, though…one is a flower and one is a fruit. > [@Tolkien](#): > > “Elves (and Hobbits) always refer to the Sun as She” They do blur the lines in later days 😉 Incidently, Maori mythology generally has both the sun and moon as male, they’re not always one of each. ---
**Author:** ![robert\_columbia](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e79b87/32.png) [@robert\_columbia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/robert_columbia)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2013, 3:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/genders-for-the-sun-and-the-moon/647319/47 "2013-01-16T15:16:20Z")
> [@gnoitall](#): > > … > But Germany is certainly no less part of mainstream Western culture, so the characterization of “Western culture is American culture” is demonstratably overbroad. Western culture certainly also includes France (Romance language with Roman, Celtic, and Germanic cultural influences), Scandinavia (Mostly Germanic culture with some Celtic and Finnic influences), and Italy (The cradle of Rome, the original “Western” power, with a Romance language and heavy Greek and some Germanic cultural influence). Smaller countries in that region such as the Netherlands are no less Western. Many would say that Spain and Portugal count as “Western” too, but some might say that they are part of a separate “Hispanic” culture that is non-Western, as opposed to e.g. defining “Hispanic” as a subset of “Western”. ---
**Author:** ![Floater](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/dc4da7/32.png) [@Floater](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Floater)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2013, 3:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/genders-for-the-sun-and-the-moon/647319/48 "2013-01-16T15:29:47Z")
> [@robert\_columbia](#): > > … Scandinavia (Mostly Germanic culture with some Celtic and Finnic influences) … Celtic? That was news for me. ---
**Author:** ![Dr.Drake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/ad7895/32.png) [@Dr.Drake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr.Drake)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2013, 3:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/genders-for-the-sun-and-the-moon/647319/49 "2013-01-16T15:43:43Z")
> [@Floater](#): > > Celtic? That was news for me. It’s a stretch, but maybe it refers to the Irish slaves in medieval Iceland, or the provenance of Gundestrup cauldron. Or maybe counting medieval Norse Scotland and Ireland as Scandinavia. ---
**Author:** ![Noone\_Special](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/noone_special/32/2863_2.png) [@Noone\_Special](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Noone_Special)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2013, 3:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/genders-for-the-sun-and-the-moon/647319/50 "2013-01-16T15:58:55Z")
> [@Noone\_Special](#): > > In Hebrew, both Sun and Moon can be either. This is actually quite rare in Hebrew, which is a very strongly gendered language. > > Sun - usually _shemesh_ which is one of the few words in Hebrew that can take either gender without modification; or (rarely) _hama_, which is feminine. _Shemesh_ in modern Hebrew is **usually** treated as feminine, but not necessarily. > > Moon – _yareah_ or _levana_, both of which are feminine; or (again, rarely) _sahar_ which is masculine. > > So – either one can be either gender, but in common speech both of them are usually female. OK, I be stupid… :o :smack: ☹ _yareah_ is _ **masculine** _ not feminine. No idea how I had this brain-fart. Bottom line – Moon is usually _ **masculine** _; Sun is usually feminine. Sorry 'bout that… :o ---
**Author:** ![smaje1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e47774/32.png) [@smaje1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/smaje1)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2013, 6:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/genders-for-the-sun-and-the-moon/647319/51 "2013-01-16T18:20:47Z")
> [@Colibri](#): > > Yeah, she did, actually. She asked for citable references in the OP, and as noted above later asked for official information. > > **Moderator Note** > > **Speak to me Maddie!** , if you are going to snark at people it’s best to actually read the OP and subsequent posts. No warning issued, but let’s keep remarks like this out of General Questions. > > Colibri > General Questions Moderator Colibri- I’m surprised you jump on Speak to me Maddie! for “snark” when the whole reason I left this thread was due to the snark of other posters. My OP question was obviously unclarified and confusing. I tried to clarify, and would have been happier to clarify even more (I was actually loooking for examples --what I meant by “cites” – of romantic, Western listerature where the sun and/or moon had been assigned a gender) had I not been hit with what felt like a wall of snark. ---
**Author:** ![Inner\_Stickler](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/inner_stickler/32/318_2.png) [@Inner\_Stickler](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Inner_Stickler)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2013, 6:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/genders-for-the-sun-and-the-moon/647319/52 "2013-01-16T18:49:39Z")
Cafe Society would probably have been a better choice then. ---
**Author:** ![Smeghead](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/f1d935/32.png) [@Smeghead](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Smeghead)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2013, 7:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/genders-for-the-sun-and-the-moon/647319/53 "2013-01-16T19:27:39Z")
> [@smaje1](#): > > I was actually loooking for examples --what I meant by “cites” – of romantic, Western listerature where the sun and/or moon had been assigned a gender If you had just mentioned that in the first place, this whole thing would have gone more smoothly. ---
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2013, 7:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/genders-for-the-sun-and-the-moon/647319/54 "2013-01-16T19:40:44Z")
> [@John\_Mace](#): > > Linguistic gender is not sexual. A noun is not female-related in Spanish because it’s a “la” word, nor is one male-related if it’s an “el” word. No, but their anthropomorphizations (whether in mythos, legends, poetry or “that bitch or me”, said by my sailor’s daughter aunt to the merchant ship captain who was courting her - he chose her) tend to follow word gender. > [@Inner\_Stickler](#): > > I don’t think anyone is arguing as such; that sort of “el puente is colgado” is best left to the sapir-whorf fetishists, in my opinion. But the linguistic genders of various relatively abstract concepts such as Night, Day, Death, and the Moon and Sun appear to correlate with their depictions as anthropomorphizations. _El puente no puede ser colgado_… it’s either _el puente es colgante_ or _el puente está colgado_ (in which case I’d ask where from). _Colgado_ means hanging as in “from a coathanger”, not as in a bridge. ---
**Author:** ![Inner\_Stickler](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/inner_stickler/32/318_2.png) [@Inner\_Stickler](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Inner_Stickler)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2013, 8:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/genders-for-the-sun-and-the-moon/647319/55 "2013-01-16T20:53:29Z")
Thanks, I haven’t used spanish in awhile and I was never that great to begin with. ---
**Author:** ![Colibri](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/colibri/32/1841_2.png) [@Colibri](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colibri)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2013, 9:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/genders-for-the-sun-and-the-moon/647319/56 "2013-01-16T21:43:01Z")
> [@smaje1](#): > > Colibri- > > I’m surprised you jump on Speak to me Maddie! for “snark” when the whole reason I left this thread was due to the snark of other posters. > > My OP question was obviously unclarified and confusing. I tried to clarify, and would have been happier to clarify even more (I was actually loooking for examples --what I meant by “cites” – of romantic, Western listerature where the sun and/or moon had been assigned a gender) had I not been hit with what felt like a wall of snark. **Moderating** If you felt posts before that of **StmM!** were inappropriate, you should have reported them. However, aside from **kambuckta’s** , which probably would have also received a mod note from me if it had been reported earlier, I don’t think most other posts were that bad, although some people were joking around. In any case, your own oversensitive responses in this thread didn’t help matters much. You’ve been here more than five years - you should have a better idea of what to expect in GQ. You’ve got to expect a certain degree of snark and kidding here. Colibri General Questions Moderator ---
**Author:** ![JackieLikesVariety](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jackielikesvariety/32/296_2.png) [@JackieLikesVariety](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JackieLikesVariety)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2013, 10:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/genders-for-the-sun-and-the-moon/647319/57 "2013-01-16T22:22:51Z")
Wall Of Snark be a good band, eh? ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [January 16, 2013, 11:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/genders-for-the-sun-and-the-moon/647319/58 "2013-01-16T23:06:56Z")
> [@](#): > > Quoth **John Mace** : > > I don’t know about that last part. We call it “gender”, but it’s unclear that the origin of why Indo-European languages divide nouns up into different classes was based on sex. Don’t assume there is a sexual origin just because we use the term "gender’ to describe how nouns are divided up. > > It’s certainly likely that the moon is associated with the feminine sex because of the lunar cycle. But that doesn’t make the Sun masculine. Actually, the word “gender” originally just meant something like “category”, with no particular sexual meaning. It actually went the other way around: Gender came to mean sex because the classification of nouns into linguistic gender tends to correlate roughly to sex. And back on topic, the Sun seems to be considered masculine in Middle English, as demonstrated in the prologue to the Canterbury Tales: > [@](#): > > …and the yonge Sonne / Hath in the Ram **his** halfe cours y-ronne ---
**Author:** ![smaje1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e47774/32.png) [@smaje1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/smaje1)\ **Post date:** [January 17, 2013, 12:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/genders-for-the-sun-and-the-moon/647319/59 "2013-01-17T00:18:40Z")
> [@Smeghead](#): > > If you had just mentioned that in the first place, this whole thing would have gone more smoothly. Trust me, had I known in the first place that that was what I was looking for, this whole unseemly scene could have been avoided. But when I first posted the question, I didn’t even realize that that was what I was asking. It took a handful of interesting responses to make me realize that my question was a) not clear enough, and b) would have been better suited to another forum. Also, I had been under the impression that General Questions was not as snarky as other, more opinion-based forums on the board. I was expecting a straight answer, or at least, helpful responses that could have guided me in the right direction. But I hit a wall of snark that hurt my tender feelings. It’s too bad, because a truly interesting discussion has sprung up here about the question I \*meant \*to post in the first place. ---
**Author:** ![Colibri](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/colibri/32/1841_2.png) [@Colibri](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colibri)\ **Post date:** [January 17, 2013, 3:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/genders-for-the-sun-and-the-moon/647319/60 "2013-01-17T03:04:37Z")
> [@smaje1](#): > > Also, I had been under the impression that General Questions was not as snarky as other, more opinion-based forums on the board. You must not read it very often.😉 > [@](#): > > I was expecting a straight answer, or at least, helpful responses that could have guided me in the right direction. You did get helpful responses, actually, as you have admitted above. > [@](#): > > But I hit a wall of snark that hurt my tender feelings. No you didn’t. Of the first seven answers, three were helpful, one was a request for clarification, a couple were jokes, and one was snarky. Hardly a “wall of snark.” You are way overreacting. > [@](#): > > It’s too bad, because a truly interesting discussion has sprung up here about the question I \*meant \*to post in the first place. So you don’t need to keep complaining any more, do you?😉 Colibri General Questions Moderator [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/genders-for-the-sun-and-the-moon/647319.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/genders-for-the-sun-and-the-moon/647319.md?page=4)