Some languages, like English, have adapted over the years to flatten out some gendered aspects, but others, like German, French, Spanish, Russian or Hebrew, remain strongly gendered. Now, the new government has until the end of 2018 to change thousands of laws and draw up new rules for issuing passports and birth certificates.īut if lawmakers are changing to acknowledge that not all people fit into just two categories, should language change too? Gender plays an integral role in many languages, from nouns assigned to a specific gender to adjectives changing their declensions based on the noun being described. The court recommended creating a third gender category for people born with ambiguous sexual traits and those who do not identify as either male or female, or even dispensing with gender altogether in public documents. The ruling - the first of its kind in Europe - found that having only two genders for official purposes was unconstitutional. No doubt, the new administration has lots of catching up to do, not least because of a groundbreaking decision made by the country’s highest court last November. However, it also popular these days to subvert expectations with regard to gender, and if you were to assert that something is feminine when most would consider it to be masculine that can be an interesting literary twist.After almost five months of talks since September’s parliamentary elections, a new coalition government has finally come to power in Germany. If you are trying to be poetical, and wish to imitate classical Latin sentiments then perhaps go with a masculine sun and a feminine moon. There are also various European folk tales about a 'man in the moon'. Norse, Egyptian, Hindu, and Sumerian mythologies contain moon-gods that are masculine, while in ancient Roman, Greek, Chinese, and Inca mythologies there are feminine moon-goddesses. Mythologies offer a different perspective. In English, we don't automatically assign genders to inanimate objects as in some other languages, but in French and other Latin languages the sun (sol) is masculine and the moon (luna) is feminine. What gender to use for the sun and moon is not really answered authoritatively by English linguistics. "It" may even be the default for animals for many people unless the animal is being anthropomorphised, or if the animal is well-known to the speaker such as a pet. However, it is probably even more common for a native English speaker to refer to an animal as "it" unless they knew its gender. Some animals even have names for their male/female counterparts (for example, cows/bulls) so the gender is clear before you even use a pronoun. You would call a male dog 'he', a female rabbit 'she' etc. Animals have genders, so there is no comparison between them and inanimate objects such as the luminaries, really.
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