Why do some languages have gender when it adds nothing and just complicates learning the language?

Question

e.g. all nouns in French are masculine or feminine and their adjectives must agree with the nouns

Answer 1

the language mother is the Sanskrit and in those people culture (Vedic culture) , the Arians would see everything as a person, not merely the matter body itself; so, any entity, even what we think it is inanimate, like the sun, moon, river, actually they would see the god/goddess behind them, the personality involved in that particular body and it could be female or male as stated by they direct perception of them or by the revealed scriptures;

Answer 2

I agree that having to learn the gender of inanimate objects is a pain in the kiester. However, what can you do about it?

Worse than gender, though, is case endings for nouns and adjectives. I'm hopelessly biased as a native English speaker, especially when many languages have case endings *and* prepositions, making the case endings unnecessary! Russian is horrible because of this: it has 3 genders, 6 cases and 2 numbers (sometimes 3) - and the same endings for one gender indicate a different case for another gender. Plus the endings will vary depending on whether the noun is animate or inanimate, and there are Russian linguists who debate each other over whether bacteria are animate or not.

Needless to say, I've never attempted Finnish, Estonian or Hungarian, which have 16 or 17 cases depending on who's counting.

Answer 3

To correct a previous answer, most languages do NOT have gender.

Now for the answer. What you call "gender" in Indo-European languages originated as a system to mark different noun classes. Many languages, such as the Bantu languages of Africa, have noun classification systems. Sometimes these systems have a semantic basis, as they do in Bantu; sometimes they have a phonological basis, as they did in early Proto-Indo-European.

Here is the linguistic problem which a noun class system solves. When you have a noun, that noun can be modified by adjectives to refine its meaning. But you have to have a surefire means of matching the adjective with its noun and making sure that it doesn't match another noun in the same sentence. So if you have a sentence like Noun Adjective Noun Verb, which Noun does the Adjective go with? Various solutions to the problem have been devised in different languages.

Solution 1: Word order. This is the solution in English, adjectives always precede the noun they modify. Most languages of the world use a solution like this, where the adjectives always either precede the noun, as in English, or follow the noun (can't think of an example off the top of my head, but they are out there). So in the example Noun Adjective > Noun Verb you know which Noun gets the Adjective by word order.

Solution 2: Put the same case marker on the adjective that the noun receives. Thus, if the noun is marked for accusative, then the adjective will also be marked for accusative. So in the example Noun-nom Adjective-acc Noun-acc Verb you know which Noun gets the Adjective because it shares the Noun's case marker.

Solution 3. Put the same class marker on the adjective that is on the noun. This is the way Bantu languages operate, so that kidogo kitabu is 'small book' and mdogo mtoto is 'small child'. So in the example we would have Noun-class1 Adjective-class2 Noun-class2 Verb. This system is not as good as Solution 2, because if you have both nouns of the same class, you need another means (Bantu languages use word order) to determine which noun the adjective goes with.

Solution 4. The Combination. These systems combine two of the other solutions for a more foolproof way of indicating which noun the adjective goes with. Indo-European languages generally use 2 and 3, case and noun class. Bantu languages often use 1 and 3, word order and noun class.

So you see, the noun class system of Indo-European languages evolved to solve an important problem in language processing.

Answer 4

I come from Indonesia where the language knows no gender at all (even for a third person). And the gender in language is troublesome to learn (I've learned german for more than 4 years and still find dificulties in it)...
Language is a reflection of a culture, and it evolves as well. I think those cultures, which have gender in their language, think that certain things have feminime traits while others masculine traits, and some others none at all. That's how they saw it, although maybe the people using those language don't know why there are gender in their language.

but trust me, those who have gender (and tenses) in their language would be surprised when they learn a language which has none at all. hahahaha...!!

Answer 5

Great question! It seems there has been a lot of debate about why so many languages have gender. You will get lots of articles if you google this:

"origin of gender" languages
or:
"origin of grammatical gender"

- but I think you will have to be *really* interested to dive into that debate.

Wikipedia has an article about Grammatical gender, too. Excerpt:
"Many linguists think the earliest stages of Proto-Indo-European had two genders, animate and inanimate, as did Hittite, but the inanimate gender later split into neuter and feminine, originating the classical three-way classification into masculine, feminine, and neuter which most of its descendants inherited. Many Indo-European languages kept these three genders. Such is the case of most Slavic languages, classical Latin, Sanskrit, and Greek, for instance. Other Indo-European languages reduced the number of genders to two, either by losing the neuter (like the Celtic languages and most Romance languages), or by having the feminine and the masculine merge with one another into a common gender (as has happened, or is in the process of happening, to several Germanic languages). Some, like English and Afrikaans, have all but lost grammatical gender.
Even in those where the original three genders have been mostly lost or reduced, however, there may still be a trace of gender in some parts of speech. Thus, Modern English has kept the three-way division of personal pronouns into he (masculine), she (feminine) and it (neuter)."

Another article: "Traditional theories attribute the origin of grammatical gender systems to the human-primitive tendency to anthropomorphize nature, when one endows human qualities to non-human creatures and objects (Ibrahim 16). Another theory raised by James Frazier of Golden Bough fame is that early men and women spoke a differently inflected form of the language from one another (Ibrahim 19). However, these kinds of speculations assume a universal tendency in human linguistic relations to the world, and break down with the fact that many languages have never had a grammatical gender system (Ibrahim 24). Rather, Ibrahim argues that grammatical gender is an “accidental outcome of the linguistic development of some languages” (102). Indeed, studying the human-animate nouns of OE, one finds that nearly all of their grammatical genders correspond to their natural genders to begin with (Platzer 35)."

Answer 6

Who knows but I like it, maybe since I'm use to it. It makes everything more organized in my head, I guess since I'm able to distiguish what is feminime and masculine. If I didn't know such a language, I would probably think the same as you but if one day things didn't have a gender in Spanish, I would be very confused since it wouldn't sound right and it would change the whole language in general and way of speaking.

Answer 7

I think (in language terms) that evolution leads to simplification and no all the languages have evolved in the same aspects. If you compare the current languages with the previous forms, they were, by far more complicated. Same for dead tongues.

German is even more complicated, it has feminine, neutral and masculine

Answer 8

Most languages have gender. They always have done. English words used to have gender but it died out about 400 years ago. Try not to take it personally.

Answer 9

It's because when they were created, things really actually kinda deserved a gender, such as plants as they are also living things.

Others which were less living, were just inanimate objects, and were also called objects because of it.

Answer 10

in roman languages yes the gender is very imortant but dont try to learn them just understand and it wont seem so complacated