In many languages all (or virtually all) nouns have a “gender” associated with them, even when they refer to inanimate objects or concepts which have no correlation to the male and female gender. (I’m not sure it makes sense to refer to this breakdown as “gender”, but this is the convention, regardless.)
My question is what purpose this serves; IOW why did so many languages evolve this way?
Also, is there generally some consistent basis for assigning the genders to inanimate objects?
Short answer for the last question: no.
Two recent threads touching on the subject:
It should be noted that gender doesn’t have to be masculine or feminine. I believe it’s the most common, and it’s used by Indo-European languages which we’re the most familiar with.
There’s no way of knowing what purpose it serves. There are theories, of course. Wikipedia says: ‘three possible useful roles of grammatical gender: (1) In a language with explicit inflections for gender, it is easy to express the natural gender of animate beings. (2) Grammatical gender “can be a valuable tool of disambiguation”, rendering clarity about antecedents. (3) In literature, gender can be used to “animate and personify inanimate nouns.”’
Long answer for the last question: nnnnnnnnnnnnoooooooooooooooooo. 
I had seen that Wiki cite before starting this thread. But I don’t think that’s addressing the same question. They’re just pointing out useful aspects of this aspect of language. They’re not suggesting that languages would naturally develop in a manner that allows for literary animation, for example.
Well, there is some grammatical consistency, but I don’t know how strong it is. For example, in general, in Portuguese, words (nouns) ending in -gem are “feminine” and have the accompanying “a” article. Examples: a viagem (the trip), a passagem (the boarding pass, the passage), a mensagem (the message), a paisagem (the view).
At the same time, for reasons I don’t want to think about right now, the opposite is true in Spanish, where the words ending in -je (their equivalent) have the masculine pronoun. Example: el viaje, el mensaje, el pasaje, el paisaje.
So, there are some grammatical rules or conventions, but they’re specific to each language.
Yeah. In Polish, nouns ending in “-a” are usually feminine. Nouns ending in “-o” or “-e” are usually neuter. The rest are masculine. There are some exceptions, of course, but I’d guess that something like 95%+ of nouns follow this format.
I always thought these words end the way they do because of their gender, not the other way around.
Not in the examples I provided. Not all words end the way they do because of their assigned gender. The ones that I can think that change are usually adjectives (matched to the noun they describe), and nouns from organisms that have gender (niña/o, perra/o, gata/o, coneja/o, etc.). The examples I provided are either concrete, lifeless nouns or abstract nouns.
The obvious answer is that when a king brought in a queen from a different country, or a foreign king invaded and stayed, the words imported became associated with that ruler’s gender.
Often the grammatical articles came along with the words.
On Broadway, nobody says “The* Misérables*”, because the article always is heard with it: "Les Misérables". If this year’s queen is French, the words taking “les” instead of “the” would be considered feminine.
I don’t see how this could possibly be correct. Languages without grammatical gender have no problems whatsoever expressing the natural gender of animate beings. But conversely, languages with grammatical gender often assign gender to nouns with no regard whatsoever to the referents’ natural genders, so if anything this makes it less easy to express their natural gender.
I’ve always heard it was for disambiguation, so you can write sentences like “he gave her a present”, and not have to clarify who’s who. By contrast, without gender, that sentence would be something like “e gave em a present”, which might be less clear.
Obviously this doesn’t always work, since sometimes you get sentences involving two males, or two females, but it still helps.
And note that not all systems of grammatical gender have any connection at all to sex. I’ve heard of gender systems based on living versus nonliving, for instance, or things high above the ground versus things near the ground.
I was taught that there is no logic whatsoever in the assignment of gender in foreign (to English) languages. But somehow I just feel that “la chat” (fem: cat) works, as does “le chien” (male: dog). I think originally there was something there but it’s been lost. And that was just my feelings from college French, so take it as you will.
Sorry to poke a hole in your conclusion, but chat in French is masculine, not feminine.
Not at all: many Spanish words ending in -a are (f), but those Spanish words of Greek origin which end in -a are (m). And a same object can have names which are (m) and (f): el ordenador we borrowed from the French in Europe is the same object as la computadora that we borrowed from the Americans over yonder.
I checked RAE for the -je examples Karl Grenze provided, to see if they have a common origin. The origins for two of them are not given (mensaje and paisaje), for viaje it says “from Catalan” and for pasaje “from Provençal”. So the question of whether these -je/-gem words have a common origin remains hidden in the mists of my lack of access to better information…
This is what I figured as well. If inanimate objects have gendered pronouns, you can keep track of multiple pronouns without ambiguity. Someone once told me this is why Germans have such long sentences, because they have three genders you can string together pronouns for several different sets of things without it getting confusing.
(Now why someone would break their nouns up into different declensions is a mystery to me…)
Evolved? They’re like that by design, man. It’s their way of saying “screw you” to every student of the language..
(Yeah, I already posted this to the previous thread, but it bears repeating here for truth.) 
Hey, why have separate words to indicate additional information, when you can just modify the word being used? After all, your own language does not say “many dog”: it says “dogs”.
And if it wasn’t about the different items (accusative, genitive, etc.) but about “first declension, second…” - some languages with declensions have this, some don’t.
It’s funny that you would think that the term gender might not be appropriate, because that’s generally what the word was for originally–to refer to classification.
Only relatively recently have people been using “gender” as a euphemism for “sex,” as the word “sex” only relatively recently has been used to mean “intercourse.”
According to the OED, it was originally humorous to say “gender” instead of “sex.”
In terms of the romance languages (spanish, portugese, french, italian etc), isn’t the answer to the first question simply that latin had genders?
Yes, though–when it comes to familiar animals–in some languages (c.f. Spanish) the gender of the noun can refer to the sex of the animal in reference–which perhaps could make more sense, notwithstanding that it doesn’t make much sense at all, that Jose Luis Cerda was also referred to as “La Gata.” 