But there are some gender specific words   like “waiter” and “waitress;”  "emperor” and “empress,” and “hero” and “heroine.”   The former in each instance being masculine and the latter being feminine.  To read more about these exceptions, you can go to the following web site.  <a href="http://www.dailywritingtips.com/5-fluctuating-forms-of-gender-specific-language/">http://www.dailywritingtips.com/5-fluctuating-forms-of-gender-specific-language/</a> ; I hope this helps.

Maybe the reason that English speakers do not have many gender specific nouns is because we are just not as romantic as people who speak the "Romance" languages. so gender is not as important.<img title="Laughing" src="http://www.italki.com/Scripts/tinymce/jscripts/tiny_mce/plugins/emotions/img/smiley-laughing.gif" alt="Laughing" border="0" />

Even when speaking of humans we sometimes do not denote gender.  For example, an English speaker may say: “I do not like babies, they cry too much;”  - and no gender is implied. Our lack of denoting gender is mainly due to the dearth of gender specific suffixes.  Words like “tree,”  “table,” “hat” or “automobile” have a specific gender in Spanish [and French], but no specific gender in English.

Even when we have a tendency to refer to something as gender specific – such as a ship – we still do not use any words to denote gender except for pronouns.  An English speaker might say: “She is a fine ship.”  But an English speaker might just as often say: “It is a fine ship.”

In Spanish most [if not all] nouns are gender specific.  In English, only a very few words are gender specific.  “Cat” and “mouse” are not gender specific nouns.  When an English speaking person wants to denote the male gender of a cat, we will use the pronoun “he” to refer to it.  But most of the time we will not specify gender.  We say: “The cat ate the mouse,” without ever caring whether either the cat or the mouse was a male or female.