Philosophy, charity, &c., or the names of abstract qualities personified, take a conventional sex, and are feminine from their being feminine in Latin.
As in these words there is no change of form, the consideration of them is a point of rhetoric, rather than of etymology.
Upon phrases like Cock Robin, Robin Redbreast, Jenny Wren, expressive of sex, much information may be collected from Grimm's Deutsche Grammatik, vol. iii. p. 359.
[§ 279]. The remainder of this chapter is devoted to miscellaneous remarks upon the true and apparent genders of the English language.
1. With the false genders like baron, baroness, it is a general rule that the feminine form is derived from the masculine, and not the masculine from the feminine; as peer, peeress. The words widower, gander, and drake are exceptions. For
the word wizard, from witch, see the section on augmentative forms.
2. The termination -ess, in which so large a portion of our feminine substantives terminate, is not of Saxon but of classical origin, being derived from the termination -ix, genitrix.
3. The words shepherdess, huntress, and hostess are faulty; the radical part of the word being Germanic, and the secondary part classical: indeed, in strict English grammar, the termination -ess has no place at all. It is a classic, not a Gothic, element.
4. The termination -inn, so current in German, as the equivalent to -ess, and as a feminine affix (freund=a friend; freundinn=a female friend), is found only in one or two words in English.
There were five carlins in the south