> The article notes that proto-indo-european only had animate and inanimate and that is not the same as gender. Animate here is "alive". A human and a tree are

> The article notes that proto-indo-european only had animate and inanimate and that is not the same as gender. Animate here is "alive". A human and a tree are animate but a rock is inanimate. Rocks (outside of Terry Pratchett books do not procreate). Baseless speculation: I think I can see how gender might develop out of this paradigm. Far as I remember, there's the sky father and earth mother, and the sky impregnates the earth to create life. The animate/active is associated with the masculine, and the inanimate/passive with the feminine. I've read a little about alchemy and the various ways one might determine the elemental nature of a thing, and this process was much more involved than one might expect, leading to a variety of interesting conclusions. I can imagine something similar behind the genders of things, at least at the beginning.