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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>since English evolved from many of the Romance languages
English is a Germanic language, not Romance – we have a lot of borrowed words from French due to French being used by the upper classes back in the day, but we are not from the same branch of languages.
>I’m curious as to what the initial purpose of gendering every noun would be,
Potentially to distinguish between homonyms – band could be a group of musicians or a piece of fabric going round something. In German the different meanings have different genders so you know what people are referring to. There’s not a consensus on why it occurred but that is a possibility.
>Why does English not have them?
We used to, but stopped using them. You can see this happening in other gendered languages too, where one of the genders gets combined with the other to leave you with only 2 or even 1. Once there’s only one, everyone just forgets it was ever a thing.
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