The modern English use of the word gender to refer to sex is, in my opinion, a relatively recent development made possible by the total loss of gender markings in nouns, adjectives, and articles.

There are examples of gender being used to mean sex in English going back to the 14th century. Of course, Middle English had pretty much gotten rid of grammatical gender by then. In Greek γενος (genos) and Latin genus, generis, both meant primarily 'birth, stock', extending to 'kind, species', and finally in the grammatical sense gender. Of course, the fact that two of the three genders (in Greek and Latin) were called masculine and feminine, no doubt, lead to a metaphorical (?) use of gender for sex. There is an example of this in Aristotle's Rhetoric 1407b7. (I am still chasing down the citation.)

[Addendum: I have found the citation in Aristotle which I cited above, and it refers not to biological sex, but to grammatical gender. Not sure what LSJ was on about.]

Last edited by zmjezhd; 03/22/10 12:35 PM.
Ceci n'est pas un seing.