Yeah, that was an interesting experiment, but the published précis of it mentioned only the one word, “bridge”. It takes more than one tree to make a row. On the other hand, “thinkers” have been trying to show that there is a valid correlation between grammatical concord classes in European languages and semantics of inanimate objects, but with little agreement on the value of the claims. A multilingual friend of mine says that gendered nouns “poeticize” nature. Does the English habit of referring to ships (and whales) as “she” poeticize them?
Yeah, that was an interesting experiment, but the published précis of it mentioned only the one word, “bridge”. It takes more than one tree to make a row. On the other hand, “thinkers” have been trying to show that there is a valid correlation between grammatical concord classes in European languages and semantics of inanimate objects, but with little agreement on the value of the claims. A multilingual friend of mine says that gendered nouns “poeticize” nature. Does the English habit of referring to ships (and whales) as “she” poeticize them?