Editing Grammatical gender (section)

=== Gender can vary across related languages ===
Nouns which have the same meanings in different languages need not have the same gender. This is particularly so in the case of things with no natural gender, such as sexless objects. For example, there is, by all appearances, nothing about a table that should cause it to be associated with any particular gender, and different languages' words for "table" are found to have various genders: feminine, as with the French {{lang|fr|table}}; masculine, as with German {{lang|de|Tisch}}; or neuter, as with [[Norwegian language|Norwegian]] {{lang|no|bord}}. (Even within a given language, nouns that denote the same concept may differ in gender—for example, of three German words for "car", {{lang|de|Wagen}} is masculine whereas {{lang|de|Auto}} is neuter, and {{lang|de|Karre}} is feminine.)

[[Cognate]] nouns in closely related languages are likely to have the same gender, because they tend to inherit the gender of the original word in the parent language. For instance, in the [[Romance languages]], the words for "sun" are masculine, being derived from the Latin masculine noun {{lang|la|sol}}, whereas the words for "moon" are feminine, being derived from the Latin feminine {{lang|la|luna}}. (This contrasts with the genders found in German, where {{lang|de|Sonne}} "sun" is feminine, and {{lang|de|Mond}} "moon" is masculine, as well as in other [[Germanic languages]].) However, there are exceptions to this principle. For instance, {{lang|it|latte}} ("milk") is masculine in Italian (as are French {{lang|fr|lait}} and Portuguese {{lang|pt|leite}}), whereas Spanish {{lang|es|leche}} is feminine and Romanian {{lang|ro|lapte}} is neuter. Likewise, the word for "boat" is neuter in German ({{lang|de|das Boot}}), but common gender in Swedish ({{lang|sv|en båt}}).

Some more examples of the above phenomena are given below. (These come mostly from the Slavic languages, where gender largely correlates with the noun ending.)
* The Russian word {{lang|ru|луна}} ("moon") is feminine, whereas {{lang|ru|месяц}} ("[[Lunar phase|crescent moon]]", also meaning "month") is masculine. In Polish, another Slavic language, the word for moon is {{lang|pl|księżyc}}, which is masculine.
* Russian also has two words for "potato": {{lang|ru|картофель}} which is masculine, and {{lang|ru|картошка}} which is feminine.
* In Polish the loanword {{lang|pl|tramwaj}} ("tram") is masculine, whereas the cognate loanword in Czech, {{lang|cs|tramvaj}}, is feminine.
* The Polish word {{lang|pl|tysiąc}} ("thousand") is masculine, whereas the cognate in Russian, {{lang|ru|тысяча}}, is feminine, while the [[Icelandic language|Icelandic]] cognate {{lang|is|þúsund}} is neuter.
* The Spanish word {{lang|es|origen}} ("origin") is masculine, but its close relatives {{lang|pt|origem}} (from Portuguese), {{lang|gl|orixe}} (from Asturian) and {{lang|gl|origem/ orixe}} from Galician are feminine.
* The French word {{lang|fr|équipe}} ("team") is feminine, while the Spanish word {{lang|es|equipo}} is masculine. The Spanish form contrasts with the Portuguese {{lang|pt|equipa}}/{{lang|pt|equipe}}, both of which are feminine.
* The Italian word {{lang|it|scimmia}} ("ape") is feminine, whereas the Spanish word {{lang|es|simio}} is masculine.
* The French word {{lang|fr|mer}} is feminine, but the Spanish cognate {{lang|es|mar}} is generally masculine (except in some poetic contexts and among sea workers<ref name="mar">{{cite book |title=Diccionario panhispánico de dudas |date=2005 |publisher=Real Academia Española |url= https://www.rae.es/dpd/mar |access-date=25 May 2021 |language=es |chapter=mar}}</ref>), whereas the Catalan cognate {{lang|ca|mar}} can be masculine or feminine, depending on the dialect. All these words mean "sea" and are descended from the Latin {{lang|la|mare}}, which was neuter.