Folklore #201
Folklore & calendar
English speakers assume the Moon is feminine and the Sun masculine. German, Sanskrit, Japanese and Arabic all take the opposite view, and so do the Norse, the Inuit and the Hittites.
German has der Mond and die Sonne, exactly the reverse of French. Sanskrit Chandra, Japanese Tsukuyomi, Norse Máni and Mesopotamian Sin are all male. The moon-as-woman pattern is real but regional — Greek, Latin and their descendants, plus a lot of the Americas — and it gets projected backwards onto cultures that never held it.
Tradition: Comparative; grammatical gender and mythological gender do not always agree · checked Sep 2026