I wonder whether part of the problem is that we’re using “gender” for two different things: referring to entities that are actually male or female, and sorting entities into classes. ISTR reading that some language, possibly Hungarian, has 10 or fifteen “genders”. Some of those may be male or female, but the others? Narrow things, bumpy and wiggly things, blue things, things that are alive, things that fall, things that are on fire, who knows? “Gender” in the sense of male/female doesn’t really seem to apply here.
Nope. Hungarian has no genders. You may be thinking of its elaborate case system… depending on how you count, there could be as many as 30 of them.
Indeed… Dyirbal famously has a separate grammatical gender whose members are comprised primarily of “women, fire, and dangerous things”. Its other three genders are “animate objects and men”, “fruit and vegetables”, and “miscellaneous”.
Where to begin?
[ol]
[li]There is no such word in German as Frauelein. It’s spelled Fraeulein or (more commonly) Fräulein.[/li][li]The German word Weib, while it’s cognate with English wife, does not actually mean “wife”. It’s just a (usually derogatory) term for a woman.[/li][li]It’s not true that the three words have three different genders. Frau is feminine, and the other two are neuter.[/li][/ol]
Thanks for painting in the picture. I feel I’m getting a better sense on how they’re used and perceived.
That’s what I was thinking. They seem more like categories of a sort, even though the lingo itself seems semantically gender-based. If we could somehow retro-fit the idea of “genders” to English; would it even help to clarify anything?
In the same vein, would there be a way to remove genders from such languages and still have it make sense, or would you lose too much information, in most cases?
Of course it’s possible to remove genders from languages. It’s already happened almost completely with English. Persian’s an example of a language which used to have grammatical gender but which has now completely lost it. I’m sure there are many others.
Ahh, I didn’t realize English used to be laden with genders. I know over time, it’s borrowed a lot of words from French and such, but I suppose that’s true with any language.
Not only genders, but cases too! These are also almost completely gone.
I’m sure there are plenty of languages out there which haven’t borrow any words from French. 
From one of the marvelous essays by Jorge Luis Borges, The Analytical Language of John Wilkins:
According to this Cracked article, research has shown that grammatical gender may colour our perception of objects (see point 1 and links therein). But as the article points out, this phenomenon can also be seen in English.
That might not be grammatically incorrect, but it does sound wrong. I’d probably say “il est arrivé hier soir”, having the pronoun “il” refer to “homme” instead of “personne”.
This is still a form of grammatical gender, but what we can say is that the grammatical gender system in English is largely degenerate.
You have never been a sailor out to sea for 6 months.
Swahili has sixteen.
The general term you’re looking for is noun class. Grammatical gender is a particular type of noun class (though it seems not all linguists agree).
English does have a noun case system of sorts. We use “he” or “she” to refer to humans and pets, “it” to refer to other animals.
In those languages with grammatical gender, how does one decide which gender a word belongs to? A formal body or just common usage? With the examples above, it clearly has little to do with the object itself.
Turns out there’s plenty of inconsistency.
Usage, of course. That’s how everything having to do with language is determined. And of course usage may vary in time or in place. Here in Sherbrooke, for example, the word “bus” is apparently feminine, unlike in every other French-speaking place I’ve been. I’m still appalled by it after nearly five years.
In fairness, some of those words aren’t used very often. So most speakers have no reason to know their gender.
Great, now I wonder if spells in the Harry Potter universe have grammatical gender.
In German, there is widespread disagreement over the gender (and sometimes also spelling and pronunciation) for some very common nouns, such as the words for butter, pretzel, pepper, and rat. The preferred gender usually follows a geographical distribution. For example, here’s a map of German-speaking Europe showing the distribution of the preferred gender and form of the word for pretzel, taken from the Atlas zur deutschen Alltagssprache (AdA). You can see dozens of similar maps on that site by following the Ergebnisse links on the left-hand menu.
Spanish actually does have a kind of neuter, used only for things that are abstract. “Lo que pasó es…” or “Lo bueno es…” The use of “lo” in this sense is kind of “that which is” which has no gender at all. (Note that this is distinct from the homonym “lo” as an object.)
So does French. “Ce” is used similarly to “lo” in Spanish. However, “ce” is considered one of the demonstrative pronouns. The English demonstrative pronounces are that, this, those, and these. Is lo actually considered one of the personal pronouns in Spanish?