Why do words in different languages have different genders?

Question

For example, car, in French "la voiture" (female), in Spanish, "el coche" (male) and in German "das Auto"(neutral). Who decides the gender of a new word?

Answer 1

For the question in bold, I did a little research and this is what I found:

"For many decades, linguists have asked themselves why, and how, gender systems have come into existence, why and how these systems change over time, and why, in the end, some languages lose their gender system again.

Although the story is far from complete, it seems that gender systems arise from the use of nouns with classificatory possibilities, such as 'woman', 'man', and 'animal'. Such nouns may initially be used as classifiers, free forms that
(often obligatorily) accompany some other noun in order to classify the latter's referent in terms of some important conceptual dimension.

Consistent and repeated use of classifier forms (e.g., for 'woman') may gradually cause such forms to become attached to other parts of speech in the vicinity, such as adnominal adjectives. "

After this part of the explanation, the words get too big for me to understand, so I figured I should stop plagarizing here.

For the second question, there doesn't seem to be a standard answer, so I'll give two examples:

For French: The Academie Francaise assumes this duty as part of its brief to safeguard the purity of the French language, dating back to its founding by Richelieu in 1635. The Academie deeply resents any encroachment on this territory; for example, a few years ago they protested against government ministers issuing guidelines that feminine forms should be used to refer to the professional titles, ranks etc. of women.

For German: There is a well-defined hierarchy of rules which can be used to predict the gender of a word. Meaning is not the first of these rules, which is what can give rise to apparent anomalies such as 'wife' and 'brassiere' being masculine. In Germany, language reform is handled by a government commission with German, Austrian and Swiss representatives, but I don't know if its brief extends to gender ascription. In 1996 it began reforming German spelling, which was last ruled on by the Staatliche Orthographie-Konferenz in 1901.

Answer 2

Because each language is unique.

The gender is just a perception. But as in a language there has to be agreements, someone just suggest a gender (probably the same person that suggested the new word) and then the use over the years by the whole community makes it official.

Each language has its own agency who takes care of new words. Generally they are the editors/publishers of the "official" dictionarys.

Answer 3

in accordance to the German Wikipedia, around a million/2 of the worldwide's languages assign diverse genders to nouns. English initially had masculine, female and impartial nouns, too, by ability of how (purely like German), yet they have been given rid of this difference sometime interior the midsection a while. There are extensive lists of languages with and devoid of gender on the English and German Wikipedia and someplace else. See:

Answer 4

Genders of words in foreign languages are basically just categories that words are put into - i'm not sure why, and by the way, 'das Auto' in German in neuter not neutral!!

Answer 5

French is Romanic language they have their own system of Gender, English is Germanic so the car is also neutral (which was omitted in 1862), there are different families of languages and each has its own system. The biggest are : Germanic (icl English), Mandarin, Slavic (incl Russian), Semitic (incl Hebrew and Arabic), Romanic (incl French) and others

Answer 6

It gets worse. In German, for instance, Fräulein and Mädchen, which couldn't be more feminine in our mind's eye, as they respectively mean "young lady" and "girl" are neutral! This is because of rules of grammar. We have to separate our natural notion of gender from the genders of words, which seem to have arisen in a purely arbitrary way, often connected with the Latin or Greek words from which they were derived. Nowadays, we have other problems. Even English, which used to be happily free of the notion of gender, has recently developed something called "gender sensitive language" and people are becoming wary of using "he" and "she"!

Answer 7

Every language has some redundancies built in, which help assure communication between speaker and listener. Gender, declension of nouns, and conjugation of verbs all serve this purpose. English, for all its numerous faults, has at least the useful feature of having shed most of this surplus baggage.

Answer 8

well, those languages are both fairly old, so im sure now its more of tradition than anything else.

i really have no idea why they would have originally done it that way. i also really have no idea how they would pick what gender a new word would be. i would assume that there would be something like websters which could make the final say....

Answer 9

Probably started by the Greeks. Certainly this was a feature of Latin, and it was already confusing. I mean were all farmers (agricola) females in ancient Rome?

Answer 10

the language decides.i have no idea who created the languages