A thoughtful piece on the NakedTranslations weblog highlights a curious feature of the English language and its use of gender.
Since almost all inanimate objects are considered neutral (unusually), rather than masculine or feminine, a speaker of English can demonstrate sentimental attachment to a well-loved object by giving it a grammatical gender it would otherwise not have had - referring to a boat with the pronoun ’she’ being the classic example.
It hadn’t occurred to me that the stronger presence of grammatical gender in other languages actually makes this a rather unusual feature of English.