by William Lafferty » August 10, 2022, 12:32 pm
French has resolutely used masculine nouns in describing ships for well over a millennium. Le bateau = boat, le navire = ship, le vaisseau = vessel, le remorqueur = tugboat, le pétrolier = tanker, le paquebot = liner, and so forth. In English "ship" comes from the Germanic "schiff," which is a neuter noun. I don't know how non-native speakers can learn English as well as they do (I've had students from Sweden, Germany, Moldova, and elsewhere who speak better English than my quite a few of my American-born students) because it has to be an extremely difficult language to grasp, but at least English speakers do not have to deal with remembering the gender of nouns and their accompanying punctuation.
French has resolutely used masculine nouns in describing ships for well over a millennium. Le bateau = boat, le navire = ship, le vaisseau = vessel, le remorqueur = tugboat, le pétrolier = tanker, le paquebot = liner, and so forth. In English "ship" comes from the Germanic "schiff," which is a neuter noun. I don't know how non-native speakers can learn English as well as they do (I've had students from Sweden, Germany, Moldova, and elsewhere who speak better English than my quite a few of my American-born students) because it has to be an extremely difficult language to grasp, but at least English speakers do not have to deal with remembering the gender of nouns and their accompanying punctuation.