From Wikipedia, I see there are three useful reasons:

In a language with explicit inflections for gender, it is easy to express the natural gender of animate beings.
Grammatical gender “can be a valuable tool of disambiguation”, rendering clarity about antecedents.
In literature, gender can be used to “animate and personify inanimate nouns”.

However, this all seems archaic to me.

Very interesting question.

The fact is that we don’t really know why languages have things like gender, but many of them do. Gender is a form of sorting nouns into classes. Originally, of course, gender did start out by grouping things with natural gender. Words for women, girls, things associated with femininity were “feminine” and things for men, boys, and masculinity were “masculine” and this remains the case in most languages with genders. However, gender became a class larger than simply corresponding with natural gender as it came to be a way to classify any noun, including inanimate nouns.

I always saw it as a way of creating new nouns on different patterns. If Latin had no gender, then would all nouns end in ”-us”? That would fairly…bland. Having the gender allows for more variety of noun forms. But the fact is that other languages have different means of sorting and classifying nouns without “gender”; it seems to me that classifying nouns and having schemes for creating new words is a natural function and property of language. Gender arises as the means of this classification because natural gender is easy to observe and corresponds well with many words. Other words that had no natural gender were just sorted into this system arbitrarily.

But I’m just theorizing…I don’t really know for sure :)

In French, the word for vagina is masculine and the great majority of slang words equivalent to “dick” are feminine. It blows my mind. I don’t think there’s a damn purpose.

@DominicX & @zenvelo good answers. Yours in particular @DominicX makes me feel better about memorizing them in foreign language study. However that’s because gender does behave like you describe in the language I’m working on. But what about a language where gender doesn’t describe a consistent type of noun? I know there’s one (it might be German?) where you have to straight up memorize the gender of the noun because there is no consistent structural attribute that makes word feminine rather than masculine or neuter. But you still have to decline words describing it in accordance to it’s gender.

@bookish1 I kinda want to have a linguistic throwdown where we attempt to figure out what the ulitmate gender of an objects is, pitting one language’s gender assignment against another.

@fundevogel: But words just point to more words, not to essence.

@bookish1 which is why it’s ripe for debate.

@fundevogel Latin is like that too with the 3rd declension. You can’t tell that “navis” is feminine, but “pulvis” is masculine—the only thing you can do is memorize it. I don’t understand it very well either. There are some patterns and common themes, but they’re not guarantees.

In creating my own language, I’ve used the purpose of gender to class nouns and create schemes for new forms. In my language, it’s impossible to look at a word and not know its gender right away—it’ll be very obvious.

Maybe many languages started out that way, but the lines became fuzzier as the language evolved. That could explain why Old English had gender, but it was completely lost in later forms of English.

@DominicX It’s my understanding that English lost almost all of it’s Old English vocabulary through serial invasion and occupation so the bulk of the words we think of as English actually have Norse origins. I don’t know what the deal is with gender in Nordic languages, but the fact that the bulk of English vocabulary started out as loan words dumped into English grammatical structures might explain how gender got stripped out of English grammar.

I’m curious about your language. It’s a work in progress I take it? Like all language :)

That is true, although there are not as many Norse words as people assume. Our basic vocabulary and functional words are for the most part Anglo-Saxon in origin and Scandinavian influenced some of our other basic words (whereas Latin/French/Greek influenced are “complex” words). When forms in languages stop being productive and increase in ambiguity, they often do tend to drop out.

As for my language, it’s a work in progress, largely seminal at this point. I’ve based the core grammatical forms largely on proto-Indo European but the vocabulary is entirely my own creation. Latin, Greek, and English have been my main influences for grammar, but essentially what I’m doing is I’m taking what I like most about the grammar of these languages and incorporating them into my own (and leaving out what I find annoying, ambiguous, etc.)

I take the grammar will be pristine? None of that nonsense with irregular verb forms and borked phonics? If only language was so reasonable in practice.

Well, there will be irregular verbs, but only because I like the idea of truncated irregular verb forms with the most basic of verbs (be, go, etc.) but yeah, for the most part, no irregularity and no ambiguity. At least I will be trying to minimize it. :)

I can deal with that. Out of curiousity, how to you deal with perfect/imperfect verbs? I realized recently the English solution to the problem is sorta unusual.

I’m treating perfect as an aspect. So in other words: present, past, future each has a perfect aspect that can be tacked onto it (in the form of a suffix) to give it the meaning of completed action. Similar to Latin, although the system in Latin is different since in Latin, what’s called the “perfect tense” can be translated either as present with perfective aspect (I have come) or simple past (I came). The difference is not obvious.

I will probably do the same with the imperfective, have it be an aspect that can be tacked on to the tenses (in the form of a suffix or infix) to express ongoing or habitual action.

The bare forms without the aspectual affixes would just be what we call in Englsih simple present, past, and future.