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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English used to have them but lost them over time.
There’s a few reasons why languages having gendered nouns is so common. One big reason is that the Proto-Indo-European language (the ancestor of most European languages and many across the near East into India) had a gender system. This language had three genders – Masculine, feminine, and neuter (these genders actually developed from an animate/inanimate gender distinction) – and many daughter languages have preserved some or all of these genders. But the Indo-European language family is certainly not the only language family with gendered nouns.
Now as for the why of these gender systems: Generally, they develop because it helps speakers and listeners remove ambiguities in a language. Especially in languages that might have a lot of grammar baked into conjugations or inflections with very flexible word order, it helps a listener to more immediately understand what is being referred to if the information can be conveyed within the word.
An example:
> There was a cat and a dog. It chased it.
In modern English it’s not clear who is doing the chasing. However, in a gendered language, that information might already be baked into the pronouns we use for it. For example, lets regender English and consider dogs to be feminine and cats to be masculine.
> There was a cat and a dog. She chased him.
Now it is more clear that the dog is chasing the cat. This is a bit of a convoluted example, but humans like to take shortcuts like this when speaking, and if you expand this idea to other aspects (for example, imagine if word order didn’t matter and add in a bunch of descriptors), then it could clear up a lot of potential ambiguities like this.
It should be noted that these things just kind of develop in language over time. It’s not like a bunch of people woke up and decided that trees were one gender and rocks were the other. “Gender” also isn’t a really good word to use for it given the modern connotations with the word, especially since many languages have more than two grammatical genders and they aren’t necessarily male or female. It helps to think of them as noun classes.
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