Why do so many languages have gendered nouns? Why does English not have them?

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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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Anonymous 0 Comments

Most languages simply evolved due to influences of other languages around them. Aside from things like Esperanto and Klingon and Tolkien Elvish, etc languages were not really designed or created by experts sitting around.

A good example is how the Imperial system of measurement (inches, feet, miles, pound, ounce, etc) sort of don’t really make sense because they evolved from tradition and usage. For example a “furlong” is the distance a horse can plow in one day before being too tired to plow more. Meanwhile, some smart eggheads decided that the system of measurements we use are completely stupid in the modern world and developed the Metric system, which is so so so much better than the imperial measurement system (called “US Customary” in the US).

So languages (including the measurement system!) came about just from daily practical usage, and was not decided upon by linguists. Although grammar rules and dictionaries were assembled by experts, they basically just codified what was currently being used and they did NOT rename things.

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