I’m curious as to what the initial purpose of gendering every noun would be, since (from what I understand) it doesn’t really change the meaning of the sentence, just the form of certain words. Also, since English evolved from many of the ~~Romance~~ European languages that do have gendered nouns, why do we not use them in English?
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Previously it did. English is primarily Germanic so had very similar gendering. However it feel out of use. Which is probably for the best since it was very obtuse.
iirc the old english had gendered nouns, but middle english lost them.
Not sure, but commenting just to stay on the post and see what the actual answer is when someone smarter comes
> since English evolved from many of the Romance languages
Off-base — English is a West Germanic language like Dutch or Scots. Much of our vocabulary is Latinate, but in no way is English a Romance language.
Edit: misidentified English as North Germanic
One theory is that English used to have genders, but was influenced by other languages where the genders for nouns didn’t match up so they fell out of use.
Afaik old english had a very rich gendered lexicon but started to lose it after the norman invasions mostly becos how the clash of languages just made it hard to gender things and a lot of words started to lose the already weak last vowels. Also english was mostly spoken and not written so grammatical rules where kinda iffy and people just started abandoning gendered words for simpler and easier words.
It’s a very interesting story that you should do a deep dive if you’re interested in linguistics.
>since English evolved from many of the Romance languages
English is a Germanic language, not Romance – we have a lot of borrowed words from French due to French being used by the upper classes back in the day, but we are not from the same branch of languages.
>I’m curious as to what the initial purpose of gendering every noun would be,
Potentially to distinguish between homonyms – band could be a group of musicians or a piece of fabric going round something. In German the different meanings have different genders so you know what people are referring to. There’s not a consensus on why it occurred but that is a possibility.
>Why does English not have them?
We used to, but stopped using them. You can see this happening in other gendered languages too, where one of the genders gets combined with the other to leave you with only 2 or even 1. Once there’s only one, everyone just forgets it was ever a thing.
We used to have gendered nouns, and a significant number of verb forms, but English got streamlined by repeated invasions. Early AD, England was a bunch of Celts speaking Common Brittonic, then the Romans showed up. So now there’s Common Brittonic and Latin for most of the island, though there was a lot less of the Latin up north where the Romans kept losing. Few centuries on, and a bunch of Germans show up. Specifically, the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Frisians. The word English comes from the Angles, in fact. This is where Old English came from, and it had genders and inflection and ten different verb conjugations. It’s not generally intelligible to modern English speakers, and honestly, we’re well rid of it.
Next, Vikings show up. And they keep showing up, and in 865 a massive Danish army led by the sons of Ragnar Lodbrok (legendary Viking raider) lands with the plan to conquer instead of just raiding. East Anglia cuts a deal with them, the Danes get horses and ride north, and East Anglia doesn’t get stomped on by an unimaginably huge army of foreigners with weird gods (literally called the Great Heathen Army). The Danes conquer Northumbria, the Mercians make peace and only lose a little bit of territory, and a big stretch of land becomes known as the Danelaw. In this area, Danish Law applies. Now, they stayed there, a bunch of invaders speaking Old Norse, and the various villagers who had been conquered still mostly speaking Old English. Old Norse is actually quite similar to Old English, being as they are both quite similar to Old German. As these folks mingled, in a lot of cases words were only really different at the end where there were different inflections and such. People wanted to talk to each other, so they more or less just stopped using those, and made word order more important. Before you could generally assume what was going on because of the specific word form, but that’s getting dropped, and you still need to know if Ivar was stabbing or getting stabbed. We’re still in Old English from a vocabulary standard, but the grammar is really getting stripped down to the simplest version that is mutually intelligible.
Now, this is working for a while, but then 1066 comes along, and Norman France conquers England. Any words that are mostly administrative or religious or high society in nature go away, because the French are occupying these stations, and they aren’t going to learn some half-assed Celtic German with all the fancy bits stripped off. About 85% of Old English vocabulary goes away, and pretty quickly by the standard of linguistic shift. You keep the things that you were using every day as farmers and merchants and assorted peasants. Pig, cow, house. But even then, finer items and finished products were mostly French words, like pork, beef, and mansion. This is Middle English, and because it’s mostly the language of the mostly illiterate lower classes, there’s not much being written in it. Chaucer is a notable exception, and he sort of gets the ball rolling on Middle English as a legitimate language instead of just the vulgar tongue.
Modern English really started happening once London got a printing press. There had been multiple dialects, but with mass production, London’s Chancery dialect won. It gained reach beyond any of the others. The nail in the coffin, though, was a man named William Shakespeare. It is incredibly difficult to quantify how much Shakespeare and his peers did for both building and legitimizing English as a language. He created thousands of words, and an unknown number of common phrases still used today. He essentially won the dialect wars in the same way that VHS porn won the video standard wars back in the 80s.
Gender systems help reduce how much thinking you need to do to figure out what words go together in a sentence. Words of one gender will take compliments, like adjectives or articles (the, an) or other parts of speech that match up with their gender—nouns (or pronouns) of one gender get one version of the adjective while nouns of another get another version. Or in languages where nouns appear in different forms depending on what they are doing (case), nouns of one gender get one sort of case marker while nouns of another gender get another case marker.
This helps make it so even if you move the compliment far away from the noun it describes, you can still tell what goes with what. It can also help sort out which noun a compliment goes with, since there is a good chance the nouns may not share genders. Objects that aren’t alive get either the sort of endings and compliments that go with male people and get called masculine or the sort that go with female people and get called feminine. It isn’t saying the objects are male or female themselves, just that they share the same rules as male or female people nouns.
English has very rigid word order, so this type of confusion doesn’t happen very often. Also, its gender system got confused when Old Norse (a North Germanic language) and Old English (a West Germanic language) got put in close contact during the 8th-10th centuries. They often had different genders for the same words, so people think it got too confusing and got reduced in importance. French is even less related and has even more different genders for nouns, so that may have helped make it even less important when the Normans took over England in the 11th century. This ended up with English only keeping gender in its personal pronouns (he, she), which also kept part of the case system where nouns with different roles have different forms (I, me, my). Old traits sometimes stick around in very fundamental systems like this.
Male/Female/Neuter gender systems are very common in Indo-European languages (a very big family that very many European languages are in), but other times genders have nothing to do with the genders male and female, instead having totally different traits. We often don’t think about that since so many European languages have them.
Old English used to have gendered nouns and case markers, like other Germanic languages.
Here’s one theory about why the language lost those features:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_English_creole_hypothesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_English_creole_hypothesis)
tl;dr: A massive influx of furriners (either Vikings or Normans) set up house on the island and learned to speak Old English. Because they learned it as a second language as adults, they learned it imperfectly. They dropped the gender and case markers. This got so common that everybody started talking this way.
English did not evolve from Romance languages, but it did have gendered nouns in the past. However, gender was marked by word endings which have since disappeared.
Even in other Germanic languages it’s often hard to tell the gender of a noun just by looking at it, and languages like Danish and Swedish have also lost some distinctions (merging the masculine & feminine, only distinguishing the neuter nowadays). This is because Proto-Germanic developed strong stress on initial syllables, which led to many final syllables getting weakened and disappearing (this also affects verbs, which have been greatly shortened and simplified, especially in English).
Many languages have different kinds of grammatical noun classes, although a grammatical “masculine-feminine” distinction in particular is not too common outside of a couple language families such as Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic.
The word “gender” originally simply meant “kind/type” and had nothing to do with men/women, so the term “grammatical gender” may be somewhat misleading for modern English speakers. It basically just means “noun classes”; different kinds of nouns which use different adjectives/verbs/etc, making it easier to form complex sentences and still keep track of which thing you’re referring to.
In English if you say “There was an apple on the table.” and someone asks “Was it big?”, you can only guess whether they meant the apple or the table. On the other hand in a language where “apple” and “table” belong to different noun classes, there’s far less ambiguity (since some or all of the words “was”, “it”, and “big” will change according to the noun class they happen to refer to.
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