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

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.

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