The gender of the TARDIS

Via, a glorious video of the construction of a foldable and transportable TARDIS by a talented young German lady.  She refers to the TARDIS as 'she', for which there is extensive precedent in the series (I remember Fourth Doctor calling the TARDIS 'old girl' early in the Ian Marter novelization of The Ribos Operation, just after Romana had cut a hole in the console).  And the TARDIS is a ship, and ships are female.  Still, this was enough to send me to the Wikipedia entry to see what gender the TARDIS has in languages other than English.  A few of the languages that have TARDIS articles:

•     Català - El TARDIS (M)
•     Česky - "Byla ukradena z Gallifrey" means 'it was stolen from Gallifrey', I think, with 'byla' having a feminine preterite ending; hence (F)
•     Deutsch - Die TARDIS (F)
•     Español - La TARDIS (F)
•     Français - Le TARDIS (M)
•     Italiano - Il TARDIS (M)
•     Русский - " ТАРДИС вернулась" is 'the TARDIS returned', I think, with feminine preterite reflexive-verb ending.  (F)

I've always vaguely wondered how newly-coined or newly-imported words get assigned a gender in those languages where gender can't be inferred from the word's ending...  Interesting how Spanish has TARDIS as M whereas Catalan, French and Italian have it as F.