Kenneth G. Wilson (1923–). The Columbia Guide to Standard American English. 1993.
GENDER 2, GRAMMATICAL AND NATURAL
Old English, like certain modern foreign languages, had something called gender, a grammatical consideration that classified all nouns as belonging to either a masculine, feminine, or (sometimes) a neuter class based entirely on grammatical considerations, not on sex or the lack thereof. All nouns were referred to by pronoun declensions that also were classed according to grammatical gender. During the Old English period this system of grammatical gender began to disappear, and Modern English nouns now have only natural gender, the gender stipulating the sex of the referent or its lack of it. Today’s English can give this grammatical information only through pronoun reference: a man is he, a woman, she, a hen, she, and a tree, it; a horse can be he, she, or it, and so can many other animals, including human babies; but a lioness can be only she or it, and a rooster, he or it. Then too there are other possible confusions, in that we can conventionally refer to ships and colleges with feminine pronouns and also use plural pronouns when we are unsure of the sex of the referent (Someone called, but they didn’t leave a message). But see INCLUSIVE LANGUAGE; SEXIST LANGUAGE.
