To be honest, there IS sort of a reason to call them masculine and feminine. You would say to a female “Tu es belle” but to a male “Tu es beau”. Similarly, it would be “Une belle porte” and “un beau mur”. A woman says “je suis heureuse” and a man says “je suis heureux”. So there is kind of a link.
Probably the first people who anaylzed language as grammarians and classified words as nouns, adjectives etc. noticed that one set of adjectives was always used for females and another for males, and decided to call the whole class or nouns and adjectives “masculine” or “feminine”.
All I know is that VERY ancient languages like Ancient Greek, Latin and German (which is way, way older as a language than English, French Spanish and Italian) have masculine, feminine AND neuter nouns and adjectives in those three genders to go with them.
Spanish and French have only masculine and feminine, and English has neither.
All I am really saying is that you should not let yourself be sidetracked by thinking that there is something fundamentally “man-like” or “woman-like” about nouns and adjectives that are called masuline or feminine. For example, “beard and mustache” are feminine nouns and “vagina” is masculine.
Continue to use the words “masculine” and “feminine” as a designation because that is how they are listed in the dictionary, but do not get all confused by the term and scratch your head wondering why a chair is feminine.
Elle est belle, la Tour Eiffel, eh? I like it. Is that a standard schoolchild rhyme?
Here’s an anecdote about how culturally local those things can be: a graduate student who came to the US after studying English for several years, and was fairly fluent, asked why Mozart was associated with using the library. (This was about 15 years ago, at the very end of when “card catalogs” instead of computer terminals were still the standard way to find books.)
She had noticed that almost everyone searching through the cards was humming a melody she recognized as Mozart’s variations on Ah!, Vous dirai-je, Maman, which in English is usually used to teach the alphabet to children and is also called “The ABC Song” (and also, although completely unrelated, “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star”).
As for languages with cases: I’ve also taken 3 years of Latin, so inflected languages don’t seem odd to me. In addition I’ve found that having studied Latin first has made spelling French words much more logical. All those unpronounced letters, like “-ent” at the end of “ils portent”, or why “vingt” is spelled the way it is, suddenly have a clear etymological context.
As a result, I hardly ever made those common noun/adj gender/case/number agreement typos until I started actually thinking in French instead of just parsing and building sentences in French (which is the only way I ever approached Latin). Then I was sudddenly leaving off the terminal ‘s’ and such.
One area I’d like some clarity in would be figuring out when to use “de” and when to use “de la, du”. For example, why is it Je viens des Etats-Unis but les Indiens d’Amerique (and not de l’Amerique)? And why would it become d’Amerique du Nord and not de l’Amerique de Nord?
