It seems like a majority of languages have gendered nouns, but English doesn’t (at least not in a wide-spread, grammatical sense). I know that at *some point* English was gendered, but… how did it stop?
And, if possible, why did English lose its gendered nouns but other languages didn’t?
**EDIT:** Wow, thank you for all the responses! I didn’t expect a casual question bouncing around in my head before bed to get this type of response. But thank you so much! I’m learning so much and it’s actually reviving my interest in linguistics/languages.
Also, I had no clue there were so many languages. Thank you for calling out my western bias when it came to the assumption that most languages were gendered. While it appears a majority of indo-european ones are gendered, gendered languages are actually the minority in a grand sense. That’s definitely news to me.
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I mean modern English still has some genders. Up until recently the suffix -tor was for men and -trix was for women. A man was an aviator and a woman was an aviatrix. Now -tor is genderless and trix are for kids.
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