gender-neutral words we lack in English

[fox]

So it's interesting to me that although we mostly don't have grammatical gender in English, we do have some words with inherent gender but no neutral alternative (which other gendered words do have). Viz:

mother, father, parent
sister, brother, sibling
daughter, son, child

But:

niece, nephew, _____
aunt, uncle, _____

And, interestingly, _____, _____, cousin.

I wonder why we can have gender-neutral terms for the immediate family but not for the slightly extended one. Bit of a drag.

I was going to use animal terms here, too, which is also interesting:
mare, stallion, horse
filly, colt, foal
cow, bull, _____ (cattle, sure, but that's a mass rather than a count noun; you can't specify one gender-neutral adult animal, and maybe not juveniles either - is it heifer, calf, _____ or heifer, _____, calf?)
ewe, ram, sheep
_____, _____, lamb
?nanny, billy, goat? (can you say "a nanny" or does it have to be "a nanny goat"?)
_____, _____, kid
?bitch, dog, _____? (rarely used anymore, of course, and/so people would probably correct me to bitch, _____, dog if they're prepared to use "bitch" in the canine sense at all)
_____, _____, pup
_____, _____, wolf
?vixen, _____, fox?
?_____, tom, cat?
_____, _____, kitten
hen, cock, bird/fowl (is this true of all birds and just generally not used for most of the little flying ones?)
_____, _____, chick
?jenny, mule, _____? (or jenny, ____, mule?)
sow, hog, pig
_____, _____, piglet
... we don't give a shit about the genders of fish, do we.

Comments

[ellen_fremedon]

Wikipedia used to have a really good chart of all these terms, but I can't find it; it looks like they've folded it into the animal names chart and there's no way to separate out the domestic ones.

General observations--
1.) You're missing three columns:
a.) For a lot of domestic animals, you need to specify whether males have been castrated
b.) Many of these animals have a culinary noun for their meat, different from the generic noun
c.) Many of them also have a term of venery, or group name, different from the plural of the generic noun. (From Latin venor, to hunt. It is from the same root as Venus, and so Venus also got reinterpreted as a goddess of the hunt, once the interpretatio romana had to figure out what to do with Cybele, who was a love goddess but also a potnia theron.)


2.) For wild animals, or domestic ones not employed in England such as camels, English usually makes a female term by adding "she-" (she-wolf, she-bear, etc.), domestic animals with no specific gender terms get gendered by human nicknames--jack and jenny ass, nanny (short for Anne) and billy goat, tom and mog (=Mag, Margaret) cat.

English also does this with bird names, though not as a gender marker, for wild or tamed (but not domesticated) birds that live in close proximity to humans= Tom Tit, Jenny Wren, Poll Parrot, Robin Redbreast, Mag Pye, and Jack Daw, and possibly others I'm forgetting.

[ellen_fremedon]

To expand your chart:

Mare, stallion / gelding, horse; filly, colt, foal; _____; stud

Cow / freemartin, bull / (ox), ____/cattle; heifer, bullock / steer, calf; beef / veal, herd

(You are correct that there's no singular. In some regions 'beast' is used); An ox is always castrated if male, but the term refers to the work done and not to the animal's sex. Freemartins are sterile cows masculinized in the womb by twin brothers, which can be used for draft.)

Ewe, ram / wether, sheep; ___, ____, lamb; mutton; flock.

(The bellwether was originally the senior male of a flock. The presence of full-grown wethers, whose horn development differs from that of intact rams, is the main archaeological marker of a wool industry. If you're raising sheep for meat you'll slaughter both sexes as yearlings or younger, and if you're raising them for milk the ewes will be slaughtered very old and the males very young; wethers are only good for wool.)

Nanny-goat, billy-goat, goat; ____, ____, kid; chevon; herd, flock, sometimes trip or tribe.

Bitch, dog, dog; ____, ____, puppy or whelp; _____; pack.

Jenny, jack, ass or donkey; young animals as for horse, mules same as for donkeys.

Sow, boar / barrow / pig, hog / swine; gilt, ____, piglet or farrow or shoat; pork; drift or drove.
(Yeah, pigs get complicated. Technically, 'pig' is the missing word for a young male animal and the non-sex-specific term is hog or swine; one of my favorite corrections ever issued by any media outlet was the Australian Broadcasting Corporation clarifying that in a news report on a flash flood, they meant to say that thirty sows and pigs, not thirty thousand pigs, were floating down the river. The terms for young animals divide the juveniles more by age than by sex--farrows are nursing, shoats have been weaned, piglets can refer to any young animal, and gilts are females that haven't been bred yet.)

Hen, cock or rooster / capon, chicken / fowl; pullet, cockerel, chick; ___; flock.

[ellen_fremedon]

Hmm. Also, birds seem to be the main exception to the rule that the male is the generic: Goose, gander, goose, gosling; duck, drake, duck, duckling. And swan, pen, cob, cygnet--swans are nicely specific, which almost makes up for them being assholes.

[fox]

I wasn't missing the castration and meat columns, just ignoring them as outside the scope of the present question. :-)

Anyway mainly I was interested in the gaps in the human-relations-terms paradigm. Like I couldn't tell my brother his future [noun] is doing fine because I have not yet publicized the sex of the baby, but I can tell my nephew his future cousin is doing fine, because the word "cousin" doesn't care.

[ellen_fremedon]

You know, I'm super surprised we don't have a generic word for niece/nephew. The words are Norman French, but supplanted OE words of very similar shape (nift/nefa). Nefa did hang on a while in a general sense of 'young male kinsman, scion,' and shows up in ME as neave, where it could mean nephew or grandson (as in Latin or PIE, for that matter), but also stepson or younger cousin. I'm really surprised it didn't generalize out to apply to girls as well. We have tons of other doublets where a native and a borrowed word, or two borrowings, hung out together with slightly different semantic shading--this seems like one of the instances where that would happen, and yet.

It's less weird that we didn't end up with gender-specific cousin terms--when we borrowed words that took French gendered endings we almost never borrowed the endings. And we didn't really have OE words to fill in the gaps, either--OE is full of words meaning 'kinsman,' and had separate words for mother's sister, mother's brother, etc.--Sudanese-type kin system--but for cousins you had to go super specific and spell out the lineage, or else just say 'kinsperson.'

(Also, OE and Latin both got the full set of PIE in-law words--non-derived terms for husband's brother, daughter-in-law, and mother-in-law--and we didn't get modern versions of those from OE or French. Or from ON, which I think also got them--I know OHG did.)

[coyotegestalt]

I have seen "dog" used for a male-specific fox in similar contexts to where it would be used as male-specific domestic dog, if that helps

[resonant]

Didn't the singular of 'cattle' used to be 'beeve'?

And as for nieces and nephews, I've heard 'niblings.'

[meara]

I have also heard niblings, as well as niecephews (which sounds better than it looks).