In another thread we happened to stumble across the problem of astronomical objects having different genders. I rather think it has something to do with traditions and cultural connections (for example all former Roman provinces having the same system, all Celtic countries using another system.) What's your opinion on this subject? Symbolic, climatical or cultural reasons? Or completely different ones? What genders to sun, moon and earth have in your own language (and do you happen to know why?)
As stated in the other thread, the Sun is male in Italian ("il Sole"), while the Earth and the Moon are female ("la Terra", "la Luna").
But as English is the language of science, gender confusion isn't an issue. As pointed out above it only becomes an issue when it's translated to another language. That isn't to say individual names for celestial bodies might be feminie or masculine in nature.
Yes, no gender in English apart from poetic imagery, which usually has mother Earth, sister Moon, father Sun, father time, and so on. Ships are also usually considered to be feminine, although I guess submarines must be male as they're full of seamen.
Yeah, even in English we still get The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, despite words having no grammatical gender.
In Serbian the Earth is female, the Sun is neutral and the Moon is male. I believe this has more to do with random chance (and linguistic history and origin of the words and thus some patterns showing up) than anything else.
Same in Polish, another Slavic language. And in Russian too. Gender is nothing more than the endings of words which assign them to a certain gender.