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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English is a pidgin language (germanic + celtic + romantic), and as with most pidgin languages the functionally useless / overly complicated parts of the parent languages get erased
“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.
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.
im curious about that too. like how the hell am i supposed to know that pizza a woman and salad is a man in germany 😭
English used to have them but lost them over time.
There’s a few reasons why languages having gendered nouns is so common. One big reason is that the Proto-Indo-European language (the ancestor of most European languages and many across the near East into India) had a gender system. This language had three genders – Masculine, feminine, and neuter (these genders actually developed from an animate/inanimate gender distinction) – and many daughter languages have preserved some or all of these genders. But the Indo-European language family is certainly not the only language family with gendered nouns.
Now as for the why of these gender systems: Generally, they develop because it helps speakers and listeners remove ambiguities in a language. Especially in languages that might have a lot of grammar baked into conjugations or inflections with very flexible word order, it helps a listener to more immediately understand what is being referred to if the information can be conveyed within the word.
An example:
> There was a cat and a dog. It chased it.
In modern English it’s not clear who is doing the chasing. However, in a gendered language, that information might already be baked into the pronouns we use for it. For example, lets regender English and consider dogs to be feminine and cats to be masculine.
> There was a cat and a dog. She chased him.
Now it is more clear that the dog is chasing the cat. This is a bit of a convoluted example, but humans like to take shortcuts like this when speaking, and if you expand this idea to other aspects (for example, imagine if word order didn’t matter and add in a bunch of descriptors), then it could clear up a lot of potential ambiguities like this.
It should be noted that these things just kind of develop in language over time. It’s not like a bunch of people woke up and decided that trees were one gender and rocks were the other. “Gender” also isn’t a really good word to use for it given the modern connotations with the word, especially since many languages have more than two grammatical genders and they aren’t necessarily male or female. It helps to think of them as noun classes.
English speakers trying to paint half of the world as “weird” because now in 2024 they don’t use 3 genders that English people used a thousand years before.
ELI5: NO. Gendered nouns is a standard, not a minority, so screw you.
Why? Because it’s useful, I guess. English has possessive pronouns (his, her); why is that? Many languages don’t.
Note that grammatical gender is not the same as biological gender. Nobody speaking Spanish thinks an armchair has a penis. It’s simply “this category of article goes with this noun”.
It also gets weird in some cases – eg in German the word for “girl” is in the neuter gender.
The origins of grammatical gender in the Indo-European language tree are ancient, predating the oldest and now long dead languages we even have records of. There are a few theories for how it originated, one is classification of words based on “animate” vs “inanimate”, but I’m not sure you’d ever be able to definitively prove any of them.
In modern languages like Spanish and Italian the grammatical gender has a very strong association with word sound, and helps the language flow nicely – a little bit similar to how in English we use “an” vs “a” if the following word is a vowel sound. It also serves to collect terms in a sentence together to remove some ambiguity over which terms are referring to what.
Then there’s French… who have the same approach to grammatical gender as the English have to spelling.
Old English used to have grammatical gender, but as it saw significant influence from French, along with other smaller Norse influences, the gender was eventually dropped from nouns, possibly due to inconsistent genders between nouns for the various native speakers of the languages that merged to form modern English.
English does have gendered nouns to a degree. Actor/actress, aviator/aviatrix, etc.
More in the sense of grammatical gender, there are implicit genders, like boats generally being referred to as “she”
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