Back when I was a tour guide, people would occasionally ask me why I referred to Iowa as she. My reply was always the same. "To quote Admiral Nimitz, 'A warship is always referred to as she because it costs so much to keep one in paint and powder.'" It's a good line, and it almost always got a laugh, and let me move on quickly. Because the one problem is that it's not really true.
Keeping Nimitz in paint
If you ask a linguist, they'll tell you that the use of "she" for ships is a remnant of when English used to be gendered, like most European languages. But English lost that a thousand years ago or so, when Vikings and Frenchmen invaded, each bringing their own gendering system with them, and it eventually just made sense to ditch the whole thing. And that makes sense, as far as it goes, but raises the question of why it was ships that survived with their gender most strongly intact.
My basic answer is that it's because a ship rapidly become almost like a person to her crew, and it would be extremely weird to call a person "it". You can see this in daily life by looking at pets. Even a reluctant pet owner, like yours truly, would be disturbed by someone who insisted on referring to my cat, Dean, as "it". And yes, you could argue that's because cats do actually have genders, but it's not quite that simple. If someone referred to a dairy cow as "it", that would not set off any alarm bells, even though the cow's gender is integral to its status as a dairy cow. And this, ultimately, is because the dairy cow isn't a person, at least not to most people.1
I also think the use of the feminine gender contributed to its survival with respect to ships. Up until the last 50 years, ship's crews were almost entirely male, and while the ship is a person, we're talking about a person of a very different type from all the guys around you. So the obvious assumption is that if they're all male, the ship must be female. Speaking personally, it also just feels that way. When I was in LA, I was single, and we jokingly referred to Iowa as "the girlfriend".2 Obviously, there's probably some cultural conditioning to me feeling this way, but it does seem to work.
And a little bit of me believes that's because ships really are female, and get irritated when you gender them incorrectly. There's evidence for this, in a really interesting correlation between how a language genders ships and how its speakers perform at sea. Every single global naval power of the last 500 years, be it Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, Britain or America, has spoken a language that universally genders ships as female, and as we know, the last two even kept it while other gendered words are driven out. Less successful powers may break this rule. In traditional German, ships gained the gender of the thing they were named after, although this went away in the 1600s after the fall of the Hanseatic League, when the English practice became standard, as it more or less is to this day. Occasionally, a regress will happen, as in 1913, when Whilhelm II bullied HAPAG into using the masculine pronoun for their new liner Imperator, and he was appropriately punished. Later, Bismarck's captain had similar thoughts about his ship, and we can all see how that worked out for him.3 And Slavic languages like Russian always gender ships as male, which explains a great deal about their inability to build successful navies.
Of course, there's the question of what happens to non-Indo-European languages which don't gender inanimate objects.4 The results of Japanese warfare in the first half of the 20th century implies that not gendering ships sits somewhere between properly gendering them and systematically referring to them as male in terms of effectiveness.
1 I can't speak to dairy farms, having never spent any significant time on one. My grandfather did raise beef cattle when I was growing up, and while they were usually referred to by their gender, that seemed to be more because it was operationally important (particularly with respect to not going near the bulls) than because they were people. They weren't. They were delicious. ⇑
2 I should probably clear up that this is in no way sexual, and I find the "shipgirl" genre (ships that are also sexy anime girls) repulsive precisely because of this. My ship is already a person, and not a sexy anime girl. Making your pets into sexy anime girls would obviously be weird, but it's apparently OK to do to ships. ⇑
3 I had originally thought/written that the rule was still "male ships get male pronouns", presumably mostly because of the Bismarck case. Several Germanophone readers in the comments were very helpful in sorting this out. ⇑
4 The exceptions I know of are Arabic and Hebrew, both of which gender ships as female. ⇑
Comments
But Lloyds uses the correct 'it' pronoun.
Correlation does not imply causation. The causation could do the other way or it might just be random (say because male ship languages ended where a Navy isn't that important while English was descended from a heavily gendered language that happened to misgender ships as female).
In German most vessels are neuter and take "das." The exception to this is a yacht and that is considered feminine.
Think das Schiff, das Boot, das Segelboot, das Segelschiff, das Kanu, das Kriegsschiff, das Handelsschiff, but die Yacht.
In most cases, the wrinkle is that traditionally sailors and naval personnel most often, as in English, refer to a ship as sie (she). This is particularly true when using the vessel's name even, from my reading, if the name is male. So one will see: "Die Bismarck lief aus dem Hafen aus." (Bismarck departed the port) or "Sie war das größte deutsche Schlachtschiff ihrer Zeit." (She was the largest German battleship of her time)
You will see the Bismarck referred to as "sie" in this example.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bismarck(Schiff,1940)
I hope this theory was meant as a joke that you just played too straight for me. I can't speak for other languages, but as for German, the theory doesn't even get past the linguistics:
When calling individual ships by their name, they are considered female no matter the gender (male, female, neutral) of their namesake. Die [the, female] Bismarck, die Bremen, die Gorch Fock, and so on.
Like in English, the most common, most generic terms "Boot" (boat) and "Schiff" (ship) are neutral.
More specific types of vessels are either gendered or neutral, like "der Kreuzer" (cruiser, male), "die Yacht" (yacht, female), "das Kanu" (canoe, neutral).
In the case of composite words, the word as a whole is the gender of the final word, like "das Schlachtschiff" (battleship) or "das Unterseeboot" (sub); that is a general rule in the German language.
If you put type and name together, the whole term is gendered like the type, e.g. "das Schlachtschiff Bismarck" is neutral.
If you still want to draw sweeping conclusions about military history based purely on linguistics, then let it be that German war materiel is over-engineered and too expensive.
No, that was my understanding of how it worked in German. No idea where it came from, although if I had to guess, it was a discussion of Bismarck. In any case, that's the version that's been in my head for a decade+. I will have to go ahead and fix this.
(Also, to be clear, the stuff about the gendering of ships affecting actual performance is definitely not something I actually think makes a quantifiable causal difference. It seemed like an interesting path to go down, particularly given my misunderstanding of German. Although I don't think I'm alone. In Sabaton's Bismarck, they use "he" to refer to the ship, and at least according to AI, that's not the convention in Swedish, either.)
Apparently, the confusion comes from Bismarck specifically, where the Captain thought that such a large and powerful ship, and one named after a man, should be referred to as "he". Someone upstream of me (presumably) got confused and extended this to all Germans. I apologize for the unintentional slander.
Harry, it's an inanimate object.
I've looked into it some more. Wikipedia informs me that German ships did used to be gendered variably, but the English tradition of all-female gender (along with many naval technical terms) was copied with the demise of the Hanse trading alliance in favour of England in the mid-1600s, so not exactly recent either.
However, that wasn't the law or anything substantial like it. Prominently, Kaiser Wilhelm II was not a fan of female ship names; he tried to establish the male form for the Titanic-equivalent "Imperator" (1913). It was his personal wish that it be renamed from the originally intended "Europa" for that reason, but it didn't catch on in the long run, what with WW1 breaking out soon after.
The German usage of female shipnames apparently does have exceptions even today, though I don't think I've ever encountered that in the wild.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schiffsname
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperator(Schiff,1913)
It Italian ships are male because they are a vascello, a vessel, and vascello uses male pronouns, like almost everything ending in o.
“Italian ships are male”
This seems to fully support Bean’s half-serious suggestion that how a language genders ships determine naval performance.
Also, regarding German, if the convention to refer to specific ships as female began in the 1600s, and if the basic words for ship and boat are neutral while other objects can be specifically feminine or masculine, I’m not sure that his theory doesn’t still hold. ‘Das schiff’ in German and ‘the ship’ in English may seem identical in use of gender, but the fact that German has ‘die Schublade’ and ‘die Zeitung’ while English uses ‘the drawer’ and ‘the newspaper’ shows that at its root German did not use the female gender for ships while English did (supported by mixed gendering in specific ships before the 1600s). Bean’s Law (TM) as formulated above stated that only people whose languages gendered ships as female will be globally successful naval powers, not that gendering them male led to failure.
What about the Punic Wars?
I actually did check Italian, although the person I asked had a degree in it rather than being Italian. She said they used the feminine pronoun, and other searches I did seemed to agree. I will have to do more looking to see what's going on there.
Russian does gender ships as male, but submarines are "undersea boats" and "boat" (лодка) is female. And that is the best performing component of the Russian Navy aiui, so your pattern continues. Another feminine ship type is "yacht", and, well.
On the other hand, when a ship is referred by its/his/her name, it always inherits the gender of the namesake, and that didn't work out so well for Moskva (feminine).
Wiktionary's translation tables include grammatical gender (but as already noted for German, official (lack of) gender does not necessarily match actual usage). For Italian and Spanish, it lists multiple words for 'ship' with opposite genders.
Given how little Punic-language text survives we probably can't know for sure, but it was related to Hebrew so probably feminine.