Comment by Jun8

Here's an interesting question: How do the French decide on gender (and hence the article to use) of imported English words (same question can be asked for many of the European languages that have grammatical gender, e.g. German)? This Guardian note provides some answers (http://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,5753,-125...), in French imported words are mostly masculine.

Some examples I pulled from this (http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/archive/index.php/t-3917...) thread for the gender of Internet in various languages:

  * Spanish: Generally assumed to be masculine but the Real Academia Espanola page lists it as "amb", i.e. undecided gender (http://buscon.rae.es/drae/?type=3&val=internet&val_aux=&origen=REDRAE)
  * Russian: Интернет - masculine
  * Welsh: rhwngrwyd - feminine (but that's because "net" (rhwyd) is feminine, itself borrowed from Latin neuter rete, retis "net.")
  * Czech: masculine
  * Hebrew: masculine, although the more commonly used "net" (reshet) is feminine.

It's commonly taught that grammatical gender in languages (at least in IE languages) is semantically meaningless, i.e. they are just arbitrary classifications. this may not be totally true. If you have 10 minutes this article (PDF file: http://lera.ucsd.edu/papers/gender.pdf) by Lera Boroditsky has an in-depth discussion on this topic.

French and German native speakers: Can you provide examples of English borrowed words that have feminine gender?