Why do many languages have male and female aspects (e.g., 'le' and 'la' in French), but not English?

Answer 1

It has nothing to do with English being a "mishmash" of languages, as one contributor has suggested, nor - strange though it may seem - was grammatical gender invented in other languages to make them harder for Brits to learn!!

The fact is that, until the middle ages, English did have masculine and feminine nouns, and, indeed, a third gender (neuter), and both the definite article and the noun itself changed for gender and case. What happened is that, because of the way English is spoken, gradually, the difference between the way masculine, feminine and neuter articles and case endings were pronounced became less and less clear and gradually disappeared altogether.

Examples:
se stán -meant "the stone" and was a masculine noun; its plural was þá stánas "the stones" (þ was an old letter that sounded like modern English "th")
þæs stánes - meant "of the stone".þára stána - meant - of the stones.
þæt scip - the ship - was neuter, and its plural was þá scipu - the ships; þæs scipes - of the ship; þára scipa - of the ships.
séo giefu - the gift is feminine; þá giefa - the gifts;
þære giefe - of the gift; þára giefa - of the gifts.

There are times when I deplore the habit we British have of not opening our mouths when we speak as wide as speakers of other languages; but we can thank heaven that our forefathers seem to have had the same bad habit, which has lead to the grammar of English being much more simple now than it was 700 years ago!!

Answer 2

Old English (pre 1066 and all that) had three genders, just like Latin, German, Russian and many other languages.) These were lost in the Middle English period apart from references to living creatures - where 'he' and 'she' still survive. Loss of grammatical gender (that's what we call male and female aspects) is a sign of a well-developed and mature language. Chinese has no grammatical gender either.

Answer 3

Because English is the resulting smush up of Latin, French and German. Latin and German have three genders, and French only has two, as a result, keeping genders would be tricky.

Anyway, we make up for our lack of genders by having awful spelling/pronounciation. Though, through, Slough..... Nightmare!

Answer 4

To make it harder for us Brits to learn. Mind you there are peculiarities in the English language. We sometimes refer to cars or boats as female, but not as complicated as French. The Germans have the same with der, die and das.

Answer 5

cos they are un-PC