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

Afaik old english had a very rich gendered lexicon but started to lose it after the norman invasions mostly becos how the clash of languages just made it hard to gender things and a lot of words started to lose the already weak last vowels. Also english was mostly spoken and not written so grammatical rules where kinda iffy and people just started abandoning gendered words for simpler and easier words.

It’s a very interesting story that you should do a deep dive if you’re interested in linguistics.

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