Ruskin was of this view, when he said no one could think of the moon as other than feminine. This was a desperately unfortunate example, for “moon” is masculine in all the Germanic languages, including Old English Mona.

Another view is that grammatical gender is simply a grouping of nouns, according to the rules of agreement between nouns and adjectives and pronouns. In both Greek and Latin, this produces three groups and the ancient grammarians dubbed them masculine, feminine and neuter. There is no reason there could not have been four, or half-a-dozen, in which case, they would have just numbered them, as they did declensions and conjugations.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signoria_of_Venice

The article and the noun are feminine, but I doubt a woman’s face ever graced its assembly.

One could find all sorts of other curious-sounding combinations of Italian and its dialects, perhaps of all Romance languages.

Gregg,

In this incredibly vast universe, male and female, at least as we know it, may be an utterly local phenomenon, and in the overall scheme of things, trivial or pointless. It might possibly even be an embarrassment. Or, I suppose, it might be a fundamental principle of all of creation. Given the diversity of what it means to be male or female as we see it in various species on earth, I am inclined to think that in creation as a whole, it’s not very important.

239 By calling God “Father”, the language of faith indicates two main things: that God is the first origin of everything and transcendent authority; and that he is at the same time goodness and loving care for all his children. God’s parental tenderness can also be expressed by the image of motherhood, which emphasizes God’s immanence, the intimacy between Creator and creature. The language of faith thus draws on the human experience of parents, who are in a way the first representatives of God for man. But this experience also tells us that human parents are fallible and can disfigure the face of fatherhood and motherhood. We ought therefore to recall that God transcends the human distinction between the sexes. He is neither man nor woman: he is God. He also transcends human fatherhood and motherhood, although he is their origin and standard: no one is father as God is Father.

Let’s be perfectly honest and admit that all of us (me included) find it almost impossible to think of God as anything but male, and objections to characterizing him as anything else (even though he isn’t) are largely due to that irrational prejudice. Christine Haderthauer is no less prejudiced than the rest of us.

Thus, a number of military functions are feminine in form, une estafette, une ordonnance, une sentinelle, une recrue, une vigie, une vedette and, of course, une personne.

Others are invariably masculine. So, « Mme le juge », or le professeur, le médecin, although, here feminists are campaigning for gendered forms – the exact opposite of their demands in the UK, where gender-neutral titles are insisted upon. The Jospin government even produced a paper on it – « Femme, j’écris ton nom » [Woman, I write your name]

In some dialects, one finds « le dame dieu » [Lord God], a reminder that « dame » was once common gender, from Late Latin domnus [lord]