No Stupid Questions

It's a thing that can happen as more complex case ending systems like Latin lose audible distinctions over time.

You might think that'd just result in linguistic gender being skipped in favor of no case endings altogether like English, but that's not why English is theorized to have nixed gender.

Linguists have started to theorize that the Danelaw is what killed english grammatical gender, as old English and Old Norse were similar-ish languages at the time with a decent level of mutual intelligibility, but the big sticking point would have been disagreements on grammatical gender between the two languages. So the theory goes that inhabitants of the Danelaw just kinda stopped using it to facilitate less confusing mutual conversation when interacting with a speaker of the other language, and eventually that innovation spread south with the unification of the seven kingdoms into England.

What this tells us is that given a language with grammatical gender, it takes a very narrow set of circumstances to facilitate the conditions where a group might naturally innovate genderless communication.

What's actually kinda interesting is that Esperanto is having a moment like this, while technically you are to use the pronouns Li and Sxi, for he and her, Duolingo has a lot of the use of Si, which is a singular they, and since a lot of esperanto's modern speakers are duolingo users, a lot of folks are just using si.

The simple answer I'm seeing on a quick review is that it is a way to simplify the complexity of the many possible nouns that could be uttered.

"LA pap"
"LE pep"

These are imaginary words but the articles will help distinguish them from each other for a native speaker. They sound similar but I know it was "pap" and not "pep" because I also heard "la".

Also, gender is just ONE of the many possible dimensions used by noun classes in language. There are also things like size and animate/inanimate that are used by languages.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun_class

I am quite disappointed. I also think same exact question as my native language is not gender based. I expect to see answers based on studies or research. Much that I see here are opinions. Lemmy doesn't seem to have subject matter experts.

Él, ella, elle Yes now there's 3 of them

Robwords has an interesting video on this subject.

https://youtu.be/bKaVI-IStNE

Ever read 1984? They make a great case for simpler language!

• Wregarrd Hun moosh.
• Non, non. On dit UNE mouche
• wow you got quite good eyes.

if i'm not mistaken, the explanation fpr portuguese is that latin didn't had gendered nouns, you had it, she, he, basically, but in the evolution it and he got merged, so we have she and he, i can be totally wrong tho

Because everyone knows the sun has a penis and the moon has a fanny

Languages don't care about complexity. Look at Polish. It's like it makes things complex on purpose. Language evolution is not only about simplifying thing. It's also about conveying meaning and will adapt to the culture that uses it.

Ok it strange thing that we call them gender. It goes back ancient greek.

Really what Spanish does is put all nouns into 2 groups, the A group and the O group. Then you have rules like el goes on o nouns and la goes on a nouns.

these evolve out of more complex classifier sysyems with many more categories. There is a podcast called lexicon vally that goes over this more details.