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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Note that grammatical gender is not the same as biological gender. Nobody speaking Spanish thinks an armchair has a penis. It’s simply “this category of article goes with this noun”.
It also gets weird in some cases – eg in German the word for “girl” is in the neuter gender.
The origins of grammatical gender in the Indo-European language tree are ancient, predating the oldest and now long dead languages we even have records of. There are a few theories for how it originated, one is classification of words based on “animate” vs “inanimate”, but I’m not sure you’d ever be able to definitively prove any of them.
In modern languages like Spanish and Italian the grammatical gender has a very strong association with word sound, and helps the language flow nicely – a little bit similar to how in English we use “an” vs “a” if the following word is a vowel sound. It also serves to collect terms in a sentence together to remove some ambiguity over which terms are referring to what.
Then there’s French… who have the same approach to grammatical gender as the English have to spelling.
Old English used to have grammatical gender, but as it saw significant influence from French, along with other smaller Norse influences, the gender was eventually dropped from nouns, possibly due to inconsistent genders between nouns for the various native speakers of the languages that merged to form modern English.
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