well noun gender does seem disconnected from the nature of the thing only in modern languages, IMO. because of how each word evolved. in antique languages, gram

well noun gender does seem disconnected from the nature of the thing only in modern languages, IMO. because of how each word evolved. in antique languages, grammatical gender is closely tied to the word's morphology, especially to the word's ending in Latin. in essence there is not really gender in languages, just some group of nouns which behaves very grammatically similarly. they just happened to be suspiciously congruent to the genders in words indicating things which do have gender in those languages which were studied when linguists invented the term of grammatical gender. "Key" in Italian and Spanish comes more or less directly from Latin 'clavis' (fem), I guess, they are being romance languages; in German however it may have a different root (aber https://www.dwds.de/wb/Schl%C3%BCssel#etymwb-1 https://www.dwds.de/wb/Schl%C3%BCssel#etymwb-1 says something about Latin origin too). Most likely its form was more similar to other masculine words when its gender stabilized. The arbitrarity is among naturally gender-less things, as I observed. People, professions, animals have the "right" grammatical gender overwhelmingly. There was also a process in Romance languages. Neuter words tended to become masculine because many of them behaves more like masc than fem in most cases. thats why some woman body parts are grammatically masculine.