Why in romance languages does the letter a represent femininity and the letter o masculinity?
In:
Ultimately from Proto-Indo-European, from which all Indo-European languages descend, with a shit-ton of detours over the past 6,000 years.
PIE’s nouns largely ended in **o**, later morphing into other endings… i, u, a, e. Sanskrit’s masc. nominative case ending in **a** (pronounced “uh” like “**a**bout”) is the largest class because it includes the former **o** endings from PIE, which became **a**. The feminine ends in **ā** (pronounced “aah” like “f**a**ther”), among some other endings.
So at some point in the past 6,000 years noun endings other than **o** broke away. Maybe it was just a quirk or dumb luck that the masc. nouns kept the **o** ending, and feminine and neuter changed. No way to really know because there are no written records of PIE. Its daughter languages have gone bat-shit crazy with nominal endings… Italian has feminine ending in **o** and **ù** (la mano, the hand), la virtù (virtue), for example, as well as **o** for masc. And not to mention English which has lost almost all case endings and grammatical gender.
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