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I heard this was down to Viking raiders moving into the anglish isles and not wanting to be bothered with all that complicated stuff

• littlestymaar 3y ago
  Given that the Viking's language was itself fairly complex pronoun-wise[1] I suspect that this is an urban legend. [1]: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Old_Norse/Pronouns https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Old_Norse/Pronouns
  • vidarh 3y ago
    And indeed, modern Scandinavian languages have retained gendered nouns. Though it's gradually being watered down. Eg. in Norwegian Bokmål (there are two official variants of Norwegian, Bokmål is the dominant one) you can now mostly choose whether to use feminine or masculine forms for a noun if a word takes either (but you can't do this for neuter), e.g. en sol (masculine; a sun) vs. ei sol (feminine; a sun) are both valid as long as you're consistent (combining "en sol" (m; a sun) with "sola" (f; the sun) in the same text, mixing genders, is frowned upon, though some of us do that intentionally - "solen" (m; the sun) sounds to stuffy/posh to me, but I prefer "en sol" to "ei sol").
  • Tagbert 3y ago
    The problem was that the pronouns and declensions didn’t match. Since this was a case of large numbers of adults learning a new language, they just learned enough to get by and didn’t bother with the complicated bits.