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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“Gender” is just a term for a way to classify certain inflections of nouns; “inflection” in this sense refers to the way a word is modified to change its meaning. For example, although English is lightly inflected, we use different word forms to represent the tense and aspect of verbs (catch, catching, caught; fix, fixed, fixing), or singular and plural nouns (dog, dogs; alumnus, alumni).
Grammatical gender sometimes maps to the concepts of male/female or masculine/feminine in human society, but the “genders” in language might also be “common” (e.g. both masculine and feminine) vs “neuter”; or “animate” vs. “inanimate”; or in some languages, they might be concepts like “large objects” vs. “small objects” vs. people vs. animals and more.
At the same time, the “gender” of a word does not necessarily have any relation to the thing it represents. In German, “mädchen” (girl) is *neuter*, not feminine even though “junge” (boy) is masculine. “Gabel” (fork) is feminine and “löffel” (spoon) is masculine. Naturally, different words for the same thing can be gendered differently in different languages, and one theory why the gender system in Old English died out with Middle English is that Old Norse was spoken in a large part of England after the Viking invasions, and Old English and Old Norse had different gender systems, which just merged over time into a single form.
In languages that inflect for “gender,” this “gender” exists because it is necessary to communicate sufficient information to be understood. It is needed in the same way English requires you to say “children” if there are more than one, even you’re explcitly specifying a plural number—”there are three child in the playground” is just not grammatical, even if “children” is superfluous to “three,” because that is how English works. In languages with gender, gender works in the same way.
For example, to use German again, gender may help disambiguate which meaning of a word you mean. The word “band” in German can refer to a band like a ribbon or a narrow strip of cloth or tape; in this sense it is neuter. When it is used in the sense of a musical group, it is feminine. And it also can mean a book or volume, in which case it is masculine. In English you can usually figure out which meaning is intended from context, and sometimes you need to say explicitly. But to a German native it is just natural to use gender, and it seems somewhat deficient of English not to have this tool.
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