[…] another very striking difference between the ancient and modern English: the Anglo-Saxon had grammatical gender, like the Greek and Latin and German; it regarded ‘ear’ as neuter, but ‘oecer’ and ‘doeg’ as masculine, and, for instance, ‘tunge’, ‘tongue,’ and ‘doed’, ‘deed,’ as feminine; to us, who have abolished grammatical gender in favour of natural sex, all are alike neuter.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.39

[…] our own family of languages [...] has erected this distinction of sex into a universal one, like number, making it a test to be applied in the use of every word; breaking away from the actual limits of sex, and sexualizing, as it were, all objects of thought, on grounds which no mortal has yet been wise enough to discover and point out in detail.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.215