Quote:
Originally Posted by
Vegania
Trees and Flowers do not have a "gender"! Trees and flowers have a stem or a bark and ROOTS,where's the "gender" in this--every Tree and Flower has the same!
I beg to differ. Trees and flowers do have genders. Their are female trees, and male trees. How do you think fruit is cross polinated? All trees have flowers and all trees have fruits-- though some are not obvious, not edible, not sweet-smelling and so on. A pine cone is a fruit. Anything that is the ovary of a plant is a fruit, like a nut, a fleshy fruit, a "helecopter" seed like a maple seed, an acorn-- All plants, have both fruits and flowers. Grasses and grains have seeds, which would be a fruit without the nourishing shell. Flowers are where the pollin is kept (flowers are male). Sometimes they are pretty and smell nice but they are not really meant for humans, but for the insects and birds that cross polinate them. When you go to the nursery to choose a tree to put in your yard, you choose it by gender. If you get apple trees, you usually buy them in pairs in order to get apples, if there are no apples in the area. Some plants like slip skin grapes (concords) have both sexes (hermaphrodites, which would be called cross-polinating plants) but no plant has "no sex"-- on average female plants generally bear the fruit.
Now-- if you want to get technical, your argument actually refers to the fact that the English language specifically does not acknowledge gender in all but a few words. Ships and many vehicles are traditionally called "her". Many languages Like Russian apply gender to all, or most, words. In other words, if I said in Russian, "go get that pencil," someone could reply, "I've got "him," or "her." Each word in some languages is called either "him," "her," or "it." The gender given the word does not refer to a biological "sex" but often an abstract concept. This is true of most languages. English has less gender rules because it began as a trading Creole, so it has less grammer rules than most.
In the case of an animal, when using the English Language, if a speaker does not know the gender of an animal they can call it "it." for example "It broke in through the screen door." (when refering to an unknown Racoon). However, if the racoon is named Daisy, and it is your mother's pet, you can say "She broke in though the screen door." In the same way that if your horse is a mare, you call her "she," but if it is a horse you dont know, you call her "it."
Plants are usually called "it" whether you know the gender or not. It is simply a convention of habit, not a manner of gramatical corectness. In the same way that insects and fish are generally not given a gender-- it is expedient, not necessarily correct.