Rovers - He Or She? Options

[Tman]

I'm still confused about the gender of Spirit and Oppy! What the consent about? If Spirit female (so I think) then make it sense to keep quiet about her age and make she younger

No kidding! I would like to know which personal pronoun (she, her or he, his etc.) I have to use by Spirit's and Oppy's gender definitely?

[dvandorn]

I'm sorry, I guess I haven't stated my point of view about "irrationality" clearly.

I find the *requirement* of assigning a gender identity to each and every noun in a language an irrational approach to communication. There is simply no rationality that I can see to the requirement of assigning a male or female identity to a chair, a keyboard, a leg, a cloud, a window frame, etc., etc., etc., ad nauseum, when those objects do not have any intrinsic gender.

The Romance languages require such a set of assignations because of the way in which the *article* part of speech (in English, the words "a" and "the") is used. In every Romance language, you must use "la" as the definite article for feminine-assigned nouns, and "le" for masculine-assigned nouns. The indefinite article, "a" in English, varies a little more, but in French the masculine is "un" and the feminine is "une".

You cannot just say "the" and let it go at that. A proper English translation of a French phrase commonly translated as "The sky is blue" would have to be worded something like "The sky, she is blue." Because the word you use for the definite article "the" either has to call the sky he or she -- there are no other choices.

In what manner does this add to the amount of information conveyed, or the quality of that information? It conveys a cultural set of assumptions about the gender identities of inanimate objects, is all I can see that it does. And is it just me, or is there something a little *odd* about making cultural assumptions as to the gender attributes of inanimate objects which have no intrinsic gender? And not just a few objects -- every object for which the language has a noun.

As a French student in high school, the most absolutely *absurd* thing we tried to absorb was the whole issue of which nouns were feminine and which were masculine, since there is almost *never* an apparent rhyme or reason for the specific assignation.

If someone can explain to me in rational terms why it is in any way poetic *or* rational that a pencil *must* be referred to as a male object, while a chair *must* be referred to as a female object, I'll be happy to consider their arguments -- I generally have an open mind.

But, from the point of view of someone who grew up with a language that lets you use gender-neutral articles and pronouns for inanimate objects which *have* no intrinsic gender, the requirement for such assignments seems irrational.

And, by the way -- who sits around in Paris deciding what gender attribute get assigned to new nouns? I mean, is a personal computer male or female, and who decided which it was? And what genders are assigned to the individual components -- the keyboard, the monitor, the mouse, the CPU, etc.? And do the French make the same gender attributes for these new nouns as the Italians or the Spaniards, or are all of the new nouns for new things that never existed 100 years ago getting completely garbled between the various Romance languages these days?

-the other Doug

p.s. -- You'll remember that this thread began when someone asked which gender-related pronouns we should use for the rovers, and I chimed in with the feminine. Yes, that's sort of counter to my arguments above. But my feeling about the gender of the rovers is that there are traditions that govern certain things, and the naval tradition of giving ships (both of war and of exploration) the feminine gender attribute ought to apply here. I'll go along with tradition -- but I still think that languages whose very structure require giving every inanimate object in Creation a gender identity are at least *slightly* irrational...