Subject: cetacean sexism

[Mark Mandel]

Here's my WAG. If folks here think it's reasonable, maybe it's not all so
wild-ass after all:

I have long thought, without any evidence (nor do I know how any might be
found, if it exists), that sailors' use of the feminine pronoun for the ship
originated at least partly from the pragmatics of discourse. Here is a
speech community consisting entirely of males, speaking a language with
three pronoun genders. All the persons present are "he"; all the objects are
"it". The only referents for standard "she" are remote, represented only by
reference in occasional discourse, while the most important single object in
their lives, which they depend on for their very lives as well as for their
living and everything they own and use, is the ship. There seems to be a
valuable economy in having the ship be the default referent for the feminine
pronoun.

A similar argument could be made for the object of the hunt.

Mark A. Mandel

On Tue, Jul 6, 2010 at 10:43 AM, Amy West <medievalist at w-sts.com> wrote:

> On 7/6/10 12:02 AM, Automatic digest processor wrote:
> > Date:    Mon, 5 Jul 2010 22:07:12 -0400
> > From:    Jonathan Lighter<wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM>
> > Subject: cetacean sexism
> >
> > A viewing of John Huston's vastly underrated film of_Moby Dick_  (1956)
> > raises the question of why whales should be generically female.  Even
> when
> > it's pretty sure to be Moby, the lookout cries "There she blows!"
> >
> > I don't know what they say in Japanese or Norwegian (probably something
> like
> > "I have a sonar contact"), but this familiar English usage seems not to
> have
> > been commented on.
> >
> > JL
>
> Good question!
>
> The OE word, hwael is masculine, so that's not the answer. Is it simply
> extending the ship gender usage? And I just recently learned that that
> usage is comparatively recent (1700s) (did I learn that here?).
>
> --
> ---Amy West
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org