who says linguists aren't funny?

[fox]

this is a direct quote from Morphology By Itself: Stems and Inflectional Classes, by Mark Aronoff, 1994.

The term gender is often understood as being essentially connected to sex.  For example, The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary gives the following definition of the grammatical use of gender:  "Each of the three (or two) grammatical 'kinds,' corresponding more or less to distinctions of sex (or absence of sex), into which sbs. are discriminated according to the nature of the modifications they require in words syntactically associated with them."  Etymologically, this association between gender and sex is partly correct.  The Latin term genus 'kind' (and indeed the English word kind) is derived historically from the Indo-European root gen/gon 'be born', and the connection between reproduction and sex is well established.

hee.