Education of the republic of uzbekistan termez state university foreign philology faculty the department of english language and literature

Person A: Ah, there's a spider
Person B: Well put him outside^[16]
Animate pronouns he and she are usually applied to animals when personification and/or individuation occurs.^[16] Personification occurs whenever human attributes are applied to the noun.^[16] For example:
A widow bird sat mourning for her love.^[16]
Specifically named animals are an example of individuation, such as Peter Rabbit or Blob the Whale.^[16] In these instances, it is more likely that animate pronouns he or she will be used to represent them.^[16]
These rules also apply to other triple-gender nouns, including ideas, inanimate objects, and words like infant and child.^[16]

Metaphorical gender[edit]

Gendered pronouns are occasionally applied to sexless objects in English, such as ships, tools, or robots. This is known as metaphorical gender (as opposed to natural or grammatical gender).^[17] This personification of objects is usually done for poetic effect or to show strong emotional attachment.^[17]
Although the use of she and he for inanimate objects is not very frequent in Standard Modern English, it is fairly widespread in some varieties of English.^[16] Gender assignment to inanimate nouns in these dialects is sometimes fairly systematic. For example, in some dialects of southwest England, masculine pronouns are used for individuated or countable matter, such as iron tools, while the neuter form is used for non-individuated matter, such as liquids, fire and other substances.^[16][18]
One common use of metaphorical gender is referring to ships as she. This is the case even for ships named after men, such as HMS King George V; otherwise, the gender of inanimate objects with proper names tends to match the gender connotation of the name. The origins of this practice are not certain, and it is currently in decline and sometimes considered offensive. In modern English it is advised against by The Chicago Manual of Style,^[19] New York Times Manual of Style and Usage, and The Associated Press Stylebook. The Cambridge Dictionary considers the practice "old-fashioned".^[20]
The Oxford English Dictionary dates written examples of calling ships she to at least 1308 (in the Middle English period), in materials translated from French, which has grammatical gender.^[21] One modern source claims that ships were treated as masculine in early English, and that this changed to feminine by the sixteenth century.^{[22][unreliable source?]} In the 1640 English Grammar, author Ben Jonson unambiguously documents the neuter gender "under which are comprised all inanimate things, a ship excepted: of whom we say she sails well, though the name be Hercules, or Henry, or the Prince."^[23] Various folk theories on the origin include the tradition of naming of ships after goddesses, well-known women, female family members or objects of affection (though ships have male and non-personal names), the tradition of having a female figurehead on the front of the ship (though men and animals are also used as figureheads), and various justifications (many satirical) comparing the attributes of ships with women.^[24]
She is also sometimes used as an alternative to it for countries, when viewed as political entities.^[25]

Other pronouns[edit]

Other English pronouns are not subject to male/female distinctions, although in some cases a distinction between animate and inanimate referents is made. For example, the word who (as an interrogative or relative pronoun) refers to a person or people, and rarely to animals (although the possessive form whose can be used as a relative pronoun even when the antecedent is inanimate), while which and what refer to inanimate things (and non-human animals). Since these pronouns function on a binary gender system, distinguishing only between animate and inanimate entities, this suggests that English has a second gender system which contrasts with the primary gender system.^[16] It should also be noted that relative and interrogative pronouns do not encode number. This is shown in the following example:
The man who lost his head vs. the men who lost their heads^[16]

Gender-specific words[edit]

Apart from pronouns, sex is mainly marked in personal names and certain titles. Many words in modern English refer specifically to people or animals of a particular sex, although sometimes the specificity is being lost (for example, duck need not refer exclusively to a female bird; cf. Donald Duck).^{[citation needed]} Likewise, many feminine and masculine job titles (steward/stewardess, waiter/waitress) have undergone a process of becoming gender-neutralised in recent decades (see below).
An example of an English word that has retained gender-specific spellings is the noun-form of blond/blonde, with the former being masculine and the latter being feminine. This distinction is retained primarily in British English.^[26]

Words that retain their gender-related spellings[edit]

Certain words' spellings are indicative of their original grammatical genders, which may not correspond to their natural genders, for example abscissa, which is derived from a Latin feminine word. Certain foreign expressions used in English exhibit distinctions of grammatical gender, for example tabula rasa.
Certain gender-indicative suffixes denoting humans eliminate any practical distinction between natural gender and grammatical gender, for example -ess as in hostess; some gender-related suffixes are almost never perceived as related to grammatical gender, for example -itis, a suffix meaning inflammation, which is derived from Greek feminines.
Many words that retain their feminine endings refer to geographical regions (for example Africa) and stars (for example lucida).

Regional variations[edit]

Speakers of West Country English may use masculine (rather than neuter) pronouns with non-animate referents, as can be seen in Thomas Hardy's works.
A similar case is found in Newfoundland English. Harold Paddock observed the following in 1981:
Inanimate count nouns in Newfoundland Vernacular English differ from those in Standard English in that they are either masculine or feminine. Specifically, if an inanimate count noun denotes a mobile entity, then it is feminine; otherwise such a noun is masculine. Such a gender assignment is similar to but slightly different from that in Wessex Vernacular English. In Wessex Vernacular English, a non-human count noun (be it animate or not) is regarded as masculine, for example the word cow is considered as masculine.^[27]
This feature is stigmatized, widely regarded as a lower class or incorrect way of speaking. Nonetheless, one may find such a gender assignment less counterintuitive as nouns such as ship and boat can be referred to by the feminine pronoun in Standard English."While German preserved the system of grammatical gender inherited from Germanic and ultimately from Indo-European, English lost it and replaced it by natural gender, a development which is assumed to have taken place in late Old English and early Middle English, i.e. roughly between the 10th and the 14th century. . . ."