4 ms·

Eh, gendered nouns are kinda helpful in spoken language. It's an extra bit of redundancy which can help distinguish similar-sounding words in noisy environs. S

Eh, gendered nouns are kinda helpful in spoken language. It's an extra bit of redundancy which can help distinguish similar-sounding words in noisy environs. Same deal with verb conjugations and adjective declensions. Granted they don't have much of a point in written word, at least not today when writing is easy to preserve digitally without accumulating errors over time. (No smudges making it hard to make out a word) I really do wonder though how English seemingly uniquely in I-E languages ended up dropping those features, for the most part.

retrac 3y ago
> I really do wonder though how English seemingly uniquely Not uniquely. Just within the Germanic languages, Afrikaans, an offshoot of Dutch, is without gender, in a way similar to English. And there are others in the IE family that have lost gender. Persian is a notable example. English lost its noun gender right after the Norman conquest. The language underwent rapid and extensive change, different populations merged, dialects flattened, and a lot of vocabulary was borrowed from the new French overlords. Many language structures, other than gender, were also lost at that time. Some have argued English almost underwent a sort of creole effect, where the native grammar of the parent languages is lost, and the next generation invent a new heavily regularized grammar to fill the void. That's going a bit far, I think, still there was a great deal of simplification. The lack of gender in Persian and Afrikaans has a somewhat similar history, in terms of social upheaval/displacement/dialect flattening, having an influence on the loss of gender.