by nigheandonn » Fri Jan 28, 2022 1:29 pm
I like that idea!
No, I just meant that grammatical gender is confusing. It's true that 'beinn' is grammatically feminine in Gaelic, and so if wanted to to say something (daft) like 'that is a mountain, it is big', the word you use for 'it' is the same word that you would use for 'she'.
'Boireannach'/'woman' is grammatically masculine, but you (probably*) wouldn't say 'that is a woman, he is tall', because the real life gender of the woman seems to overrule the grammatical gender of the word in that context.
So if you think a mountain has a real life gender, and that gender is male, I don't see why you couldn't call it 'he', or 'the old boy', any more than you couldn't call a woman 'she' because her word is masculine.
(*I'm not sure if it would actually be ungrammatical, or just odd. Some languages are probably stricter than others about complete grammatical agreement of gender, regardless of real life influences.)
I have thought about this too much!