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.
DrFidelius’ answer was very straight.
I suspect that’s common in Germanic languages. German has “die Sonne” and “der Mond” (feminine sun, masculine moon). In Anglo-Saxon “sunne” is feminine and “mōna” is masculine, so if Modern English still had gender “sun” would be feminine and “moon” would be masculine.
“Considered” by whom?
Without that information, there’s not a chance in hell of answering the question.
Old English sunne is feminine. Old English mōna is masculine. If you’re asking about English, that’s the GQ answer for the gender of the words.
ETA: Drat you, Giles! I shouldn’t have wasted time looking for a macron.
Perhaps this question would have been better suited to Cafe Society. But due to the inane amount of snarkiness received here, I shall limit my research to friendlier colleagues with whom I work.
Thank you to those who answered as best they could.
Given what’s been said about Old English, German, and Norwegian, I wouldn’t be surprised if sun=girl and moon=boy is a Germanic language thing. Modern English would probably be the same had we not removed gender from most non-living nouns. Nowadays pretty much the only inanimate objects that have a non-metaphorical gender are ships, who are traditionally feminine. E.g. “The Pride of the Seas sails for Hawaii tomorrow. She was built in 2006.” However even that’s optional and it isn’t Bad English to refer to ships with “it”.
I usually use the Character Map program provided by Windows as the fastest way to find a special character.
Indeed. If you examine the Wikipedia list of moon dieties, you’ll note that the Norse one is masculine: Mani. The Nordic/Germanic cultural identity of the moon is masculine. So, if “main stream of Western culture” means “US culture, derived mostly from English culture”, then perhaps you can argue that the Romanization of Britain imported the Greco-Roman identification of the moon as feminine, possibly overriding indigenous Brythonic Celtic identification of a masculine moon (no citation; can’t find a Brythonic moon diety in any of the pantheons I can find online) and later resisting the Anglo-Saxon identification of the moon as masculine as well.
But Germany is certainly no less part of mainstream Western culture, so the characterization of “Western culture is American culture” is demonstratably overbroad.
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.
That being said, the moon is a harsh mistress!
OP has stormed off, I think.
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.
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.’
I think that statement needs to be qualified. Outside the Indo-European family, linguistic gender almost never has much to do with sex. However, Indo-European words for male and female people generally have masculine and feminine gender, respectively. (There are exceptions, of course – the German “Mädchen” for “girl” is neuter because words ending in “-chen” are neuter.) So, Indo-European words for the Sun and Moon probably get their grammatical gender from associated male or female deities.
And that, of course, is the other way to OP’s question can be answered: in different religions or mythologies, are sun gods and moon gods male or female? So I’ll add another data point: in Shinto, the sun god Amaterasu (the mythical ancestor of the Japanese Imperial Family) is female while the moon god Tsukuyomi is male.
OP has gently withdrawn herself from any further discussion, as she has found solace in face-to-face discussions about the subject with her work peers.
But y’all should feel free to continue the discussion. 
I think you got as close to a straight answer as is possible for such a question. In case the answers in the thread weren’t clear to you, let me sum up:
- If you’re looking for linguistic genders, it varies from language to language.
- If you’re looking for actual genders, that makes no sense for inanimate objects.
- If you’re looking for literary genders, there is no governing body that assigns official genders to objects.
In song, anyway, the first tunes that come to mind are Mister Moonlight and Mr. Sun Mr. Moon.
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.
[quote=“Gary “Wombat” Robson, post:36, topic:647319”]
I think you got as close to a straight answer as is possible for such a question. In case the answers in the thread weren’t clear to you, let me sum up:
- If you’re looking for linguistic genders, it varies from language to language.
- If you’re looking for actual genders, that makes no sense for inanimate objects.
- If you’re looking for literary genders, there is no governing body that assigns official genders to objects.
[/QUOTE]
The OP never asked for anything “official”. She simply asked for examples of gender assignments for the sun and moon. There are plenty of these in everything from linguistics, to mythology, literature, religion, etc. Many people helpfully provided many of these examples, others decided to act like pedantic teenagers.
I thought she did:
(which is what made me wonder how something like that could be official)